A stressful three hour drive today.
I wasn’t even driving, just navigating, but that was hard enough. We’ve got Google maps plus the in-car GPS, and they don’t always agree with each other. Sometimes you only have seconds to choose which to listen to. Google maps is kept constantly up to date but it has tried to send us the wrong way up one way streets a couple of times which is not restful.
Most of the drive was on big motorways with 130 kph speed limits, which is fine except we ended up paying around 25 euros in tolls. Even worse, each toll is charged a different way: sometimes you can pay by credit card, sometimes you have to take a ticket which you then feed into the machine at the next toll booth to work out your fee. Or, as in our case, panic thinking we’d stuffed up by not paying a fee the first time, then relief working out that we can pay it at the next stop, turning to dismay when Simon couldn’t feed the ticket back into the machine, and finally having to be rescued by a disembodied voice asking us the ticket number and then telling us how much we had to pay. Taking the option of paying an actual human being at the next toll booth further down the road was a no brainer, even if the queue was longer. At least now we now what we’re doing. The nice lady at Europcar had told us the toll system was a doddle, we just needed to make sure we always went through the white (cash) or blue (credit card) lanes, and never the yellow lanes, because our car wasn’t fitted with the correct equipment, so we would just accrue enormous fines that would follow us the rest of our lives. The problem was, all the lanes today were yellow.
The next challenge was finding our accommodation in Trento, and failing that (as we did), looking for somewhere to leave our car. It was a magical mystery tour through Trento’s tiny one way streets to find the underground parking garage, and then Simon had to spend 20 minutes casing the joint to find out how it worked. We really had our work cut out for us today. Once we’d liberated ourselves from the Citroën it was just a matter of trundling our luggage 800 metres through the streets to our apartment. Simple. Who needs five star hotels?
The apartment really is lovely, very chic and modern, retrofitted into a charming old building. And only two flights of stairs this time.
An exhausted nap and then it was time for an aperitivo and dinner. I accidentally took us to an expensive restaurant by reading the recommendations wrong – I didn’t even see the ‘casual options’ section underneath. Oh well. You don’t go on holiday to save money.
We’ve got two nights here so plenty of time to explore tomorrow.