Whirlwind Trip

Do you ever have those days when you everything starts to go wrong, but you press on and try to salvage the day anyway?

Sean and I had a day like that yesterday. We decided to go ahead and go to Torino for a couple of days. It looked interesting enough and we thought it would be neat to visit the city that hosted the 2006 Olympics.

Our first indicator that the day wasn't going to be that great was the fact we went to get a Telepass for the Autostrada from our bank. We were under the impression we could get it all done there. Wrong. We had to go to another location to turn in the paperwork and get the actual pass. We decided to forego that and just pay cash on the Autostrada. Sign two it wasn't going to go right, we went to go rent a GPS from the PX. They were all out. Ok...so we'll just use our trusty map and wing it.

The drive to Torino was pretty scenic. We saw some crazy things on the way there. A bride in a convertible VW Bug...complete with her veil blowing in the wind, a large number of Hell's Angels from Bremen, Germany. No idea what they were doing. I really wanted to take a picture of them, but quite frankly I was scared they'd be mad I was taking pictures, so I filed that sight into my memory banks.

A few hours later we get to Torino. It's crowded, streets are lined with trash and there are literally cars EVERYWHERE. We finally make our way to the center of town and attempt to find a parking garage to park so we can make our way to a hotel. There are literally none...I'm not joking. We could not even find a place to park on the street. An hour of searching and almost three wrecks later we do something we never do. We gave up. We decided to just turn around and get out of Torino.

As God as my witness I'll never go to that town again. Well...at least driving.

We thought about going back to Verona and just staying the night and then we thought about going to Innsbruck anyway. Then we hit Milan. And we waited in a huge traffic jam for at least an hour. I have to say thought that through this entire trip Boomer was excellently behaved. Even being stuck in traffic. He just took in the sites and napped.

Sean and I passed the time during the traffic jam listening to Elvis hits. You would not believe all the weird looks we got from the Italians. They probably thought we were crazy.

We got back home around 8:30 last night. We tossed around the idea of going somewhere today, but after 8 hours in the car yesterday I'm not sure I can hack that.

Guess we'll see!