Our ride to the airport

Go figure--in a town that encourages the use of public transportation, the city bus doesn't go to the airport. And parking a car at the airport would probably cost anywhere from $6 to $9 a day. Getting a taxi ride from where we live would cost at least $40. We are going to avoid the hassle by renting a car from the airport that we will use to drive ourselves to the airport and then return before our flight leaves. One day rental will come to about $35. And we won't have to tip anyone! Awesome!

More memory!

For the camera, that is. If I could buy more memory for myself, I would do that. I have a Sony digital camera that came with a 1 gb memory stick. I think it will hold around 300 photos, but that may not be enough! So I went to Circuit City yesterday and bought a package of two 2gb memory sticks for $30.00. I think it was a pretty good price, because Amazon was advertising a 1 gb for $15.00. I have a little card reader that looks like a thumb drive that makes it very easy to transfer photos onto the computer. You don't have to get the whole camera out while you are uploading pictures--just remove the memory stick, insert it into the card reader, and then into the usb port on the computer and you are ready to upload.

Florence reservations!

This is a picture of people waiting in line to get into the Uffizi Gallery!

I am ecstatic this morning, because we now have reservations for the Accademia and Uffizi galleries in Florence. These are two very popular places and everyone recommends getting advance reservations. The lines are reported to be very very long. So now we have confirmation numbers and a designated time for each of them. All we have to do is find them and have 28 Euros cash in hand to pay. (The tickets were 10 Euros each plus 4 Euros handling.) You may be interested in how to make international calls. Here's how it works:

011 gets you outside of the United States

39 is the country code for Italy

055 is the city code for Florence

294 883 is the local number for Florence Museums reservations

Because we don't have long distance service on our home phone I used a calling card I bought at Sam's Club, which had to be accessed before calling 011 39 etc. The good news is it worked! Yay!

Welcome to our travel blog

Hey everyone! Garold and I will be posting news and hopefully some photos too while we are in Italy. You can check up on us anytime you want to. We are so excited, we are making lists and checking them twice! It feels like Christmas eve times 10. We are trying very hard not to forget anything.