5.8 Sunday: Adventures in Driving

We picked up the car at the airport and told the nice English lady in the gps to get us to Civitavecchia. For reasons I do not now remember, Elise and I started riffing on Counting Crows song names. Actually now that I say that, I do remember: when the gps comes on, it says “Acquiring Satellites.” This reminded us of Recovering the Satellites. Thus the riff on the names, and as the gps began to give us directions, we said clearly its name was Anna, since it was beginning to do stuff. (cf August and Everything After, “Anna Begins.”) Aided by Anna, we drove up the A15 freeway to Civitavecchia and mirabile dictu, found the hotel in one try. Anna becomes irritable if you go more than 20 kph under or 1 kph over the speed limit, so 130 was the order of the day! (Just so you know, I’m not a fan of 130. 115 is about my personal speed sweet spot. And of course at 130 everyone was still whizzing by me. Plus, I failed to study up on European road signs, so I was needing to process AND interpret everything I saw to try not to do anything stupid. So it was a bit stressful.) Fortunately it was freeway virtually the entire way, so I didn't have to deal with real Italian traffic or medieval streets yet.

The hotel had both a saltwater and a chlorinated pool; we swam in the salt one first, since that’s been so good for Elise’s skin. Salt pools really do leave your skin feeling icky though.

The restaurant in the hotel didn’t open till 7:30, so we went for a walk and stopped at the first pizzeria we found. The pizza turned out to be both expensive AND mediocre, but we were hungry, and the leftovers were enough to provide snacks for the next 2 days. After dinner we watched Italian MTV for a while. We became somewhat addicted in Rome, as it was the only channel we could find that routinely had English language programming on it. Not sure whether I love or hate “Payphone” by Maroon 5 since I’ve heard it so often at this point.