|
25 Oct 04: We arose
at 08:30 to pack for our 11:00 checkout. Afterwards, we
procured a
prepaid Wi-Fi access card for our laptop computer and spent about 30
minutes
fiddling around with the settings before achieving an Internet
connection. The
card cost us €5 for 5 hours of connect time, not too bad a deal IMHO,
and it is
supposed to work anywhere in Italy where there is an Italian Telecom
hot spot.
This would be the first time I had checked email since I left Philly on
Thursday afternoon (21 Oct). I believe that is the longest time I have
been
disconnected in the last several years. I had exactly two new messages,
and
both were junk mail. I don’t know why I expected people to miss me
while I was
gone, but I did. We likely will have a significant amount of unused
time left
on the wi-fi card by the time we leave, but what the heck, I am on
vacation. We took a
taxi to Roma Termini, purchased train tickets to Firenze (in Yankspeak,
that's Florence), and endured the 3-½+ hour journey, arriving
about 17:30.
The train made
over a dozen stops along the way and would have taken much less time
had it
been an express, as Firenze lies only some 150 kilometers north of
Rome. We
humped our luggage to our hotel, just 500 meters from the train
station,
checked in, and went into the center of town for dinner. We only had to
go a
couple of hundred meters to achieve that, as we are staying in a nice
little
hotel tucked into a cul-de-sac just one block from the Duomo and the
central square. After dinner, a stroll around the square while we ate
our
gelato rounded out the evening and led us back to the hotel to unpack
and
relax. We begin sightseeing in earnest in the morning. |