Tivoli to ???

Wednesday, May 26
Tivoli
Yesterday was another busy day! We left our hotel and headed to what we
thought was a grocery store to pick up some water. It turned out to be
a "card only" store, much like Sam's or Costco. Couldn't shop there, so
headed on to Tivoli to check out Villa Adriana (Hadrian's Villa). I
made the mistake of wearing my sandals again, so my feet hurt
terribly! Not a good idea when going to a place that has 300 acres.
Between the heat and my feet, I made it through about a third of the
Villa. What a magnificent place! All ruins of course, but very
impressive! They had libraries, theaters, baths. And Hadrian even had
a retreat built for himself in the complex where he could go, close the
doors, go across a drawbridge over a moat, then pull the drawbridge up
so no one else could follow! Then, with the drawbridges up, he could
swim around his small island sanctuary in the moat. Now I could
definitely go for that!!

Last night I had a rather odd experience. We stopped at a motel just
off of the highway. The price was decent, and the room was okay, so we
went ahead and stayed there. They told us that the Restaurant would
open at 7PM, so we went down shortly after that to eat. When we walked
into the restaurant, there were at least 20-30 men all sitting at there
own tables, all facing the same way (toward the door that we came in).
All of them looked up at us as we came in, then went back to what they
were doing. I realized after we got in there, that they were all
facing the TV that was near the door, watching "Who Wants to be a
Millionaire" in Italian. It felt a little strange because I was the
only woman in there except for the waitresses. And, of course, the
waitresses did not speak English. They simply came up and asked us what
we wanted in Italian. We asked for a menu, and they had to go hunt for
one, because they never use them there. They just simply rattle off
the menu to the customer . Eventually another two couples came in, so
I was not alone! Apparently, most of the men were truckers who stopped
there for their meal all of the time!

Then we hit the road, and have been there ever since. We had planned
to go to Venice, Trieste, Bled then into Eastern Europe. Considering
that they were having to take things out of Auschwitz because of
flooding, we decided to reverse our route and give them a couple of
weeks to dry out. It meant having to give up some things since we were
already headed in that direction. It also meant adding a couple of days
of sheer driving to get to the Western side of Europe. We got started
early today (miracles never cease), but now we are behind again. I
asked Lonnie if he knew where we were heading, or if I needed to get out
the GPS, and he told me that we were headed toward Padua. Since it was
north of where we were, I took his word for it. Needless to say, we
were not supposed to go toward Padua at all. We were really supposed
to be heading toward Verona. We had gone quite aways South before it
was discovered that we were going in the wrong direction. Lonnie just
had me check the GPS again, and it says that we are 3 hours behind.
Not sure how we managed that, but we did stop to eat lunch. I have to
say, it is pretty frustrating to always be behind - especially since we
re-did the schedule last night and got started earlier today!