Travels across Italy from Venice to San Marino to Perugia - Wednesday October 16, 2014

On a beautiful morning we left the Venice area to travel to San Marino, a state republic with a democratic voting system for the last 1300 years.  It is a small neutral state in Italy high up in the mountains and on a good day, one can see the Adriatic Sea.  The very clean, neat and tidy state in its old town has one police officer who regulates the traffic on the entrance to the old city.

The city state is clean and upscale with notably, no crumbling structures like we have seen elsewhere in Italy.  Everything is very nice and fixed and painted and there is some reconstruction going on.  At the city top, there are three towers and on a good day the Adriatic can be viewed.  It was a warm day until the cloud cover arrived and then the town was covered in cloud.   Here there are many stores selling sunglasses, perfumes, purses and guns.  According to the guide, Sara, who took us around, these guns are plastic guns which sounds even more dangerous to own than real guns. 

We toured around the town and then had a picnic lunch.  Watched the school kids come out of school and the office workers emerge also.  It is a lovely city and in the summer one can imagine seeing the sea from the top of the hill.  Instead it was foggy cloud  We were back on the bus at 4:00 pm and did not get into our next hotel until after 8:00 pm in Perugia.  I think we drove every switchback road in Italy to get here and my stomach felt it.

Once we got into the hotel, everyone got the hotel people to turn on the air conditioning.  And then we went for supper.  We got into a little Pizzeria and waited and waited and did not even get our drinks order so we decided to get take out.  We did and the fellow gave us the Pizza in four big pizza boxes.  We were returning to eat it in one of our two rooms but instead we decided to stop at a well lit bench outside our hotel.  There we are four ladies sitting down at the stylistically lit up lamps and bench area, each of us with our huge open Pizza box munching away and we find that we are outside the main doors of the upscale restaurant in our hotel that was too expensive for us to eat at (plus we didn't find anything we wanted to eat there).  It was hilarious, people were coming to dine and looking at us four sitting there talking and eating our Pizza from our individual big Pizza boxes.  I saw some quizzical looks towards us.  We did not look poor with the big Pizza boxes, we were dressed and yet we were dining outside on a beautiful night at the door of the fancy restaurant.  We started laughing once some people who looked at us went in.  We must have been quite a sight.  We laughed hard.

Now it is time for bed and tomorrow we are on the road the again.  This is one of the few nights on the tour that we only spend one night at this hotel.  It is Assisi tomorrow.

Barb & Debbie