Our Trip to Italy: Florence Part II

Here are the last few pictures of our visit to Florence. Florence was one of my all time favorite cities. The food was fantastic, the scenery was breath taking, the musuems were intellectually stimulating...I really couldn't complain about anything in Florence...except maybe the driving.

When we first got to Florence, we took a cab to the airport to pick up our rental car. The drive there was very unsettling. The driver sped through tiny hidden street ways packed with parked cars, flew through red lights and barely missed hitting a few vehicles during his haste to take us to the airport. Matt and I began to panic at thought that we would soon be driving through this choas. But we took comfort in knowing that we had upgraded our vacation package to include a GPS navigation system with our rental car. That is, until we found out that the company we booked our rental car, Caesar Hotels Airway Vacations or Sceptre Tours, did not actually reserve a GPS for us. We started to get desperate. We told the guy at the car rental depot that we would pay for a GPS whatever the cost may be. But no, they did not have any more in stock because they were all booked. Our panic escalated. We had no idea how we were going to get to our bed and breakfast. We thought we were going to die. Two extremely stressful hours later, we finally found our bed and breakfast. This of course was after wandering around aimlessly and stopping at various gas stations to ask for directions. We were relieved to finally be able to park the car for 2 days. But I still had a creeping fear of having to drive cross country in a foreign country without a GPS system. In the end things worked out as we got our directions from MapQuest and we eventually got the hand of things. But I will definitely never drive in Europe again, especially when you could use the rail system which is so much better.

*Later we found out that our representative from Caesar Hotels Airway Vacations or Sceptre Tours, had misinformed us. The GPS upgrade is only an option for people booking a package to Ireland. I thought, “Hello! You just sold me an upgrade under false pretenses!” Obviously I was very upset. The representative specifically told me that the advantage of upgrading would be that we would receive a GPS as well as an automatic car. We had lost valuable time, not to mention the undue stress it caused us during our trip and the surprise bill charged on our card from the rental car company when we got home. Needless to say, I very much enjoyed the trip, but if I had to do it again, I would NOT book with Caesar Hotels Airway Vacations again and I would strongly suggest others to avoid them.