April 8 -- getting the rental car....

... or, O lorrrrrrd, woncha rent me a Mercedes Benz.......  (channeling my inner Janis)



We were told to leave the apartment's keys on our kitchen table.  So that's what we did.  We trundled everything over to the train station, and caught the bus to the airport.

It was a quick ride.

Here we are at the airport.  This is the same fine-food company we visited multiple times in downtown Bologna -- the one we got pasta and tomato sauce and pickled artichokes from.  The food in Italian airports is orders of magnitude better than the food in American airports!

Now here is an excellent idea!!!  What a great public service!

A scale, with a chart which I believe shows the size and weight limits for different airlines, and tables so you can put your bags on the table and rearrange contents to meet the weight requirements!

What a super plan -- having a place to do this, other than the floor in front of the counter where you check your bags!

A vending machine in the same area.....

I surely wish we had this sort of thing in our airports!  I'd never seen anything like this before, and I hope facilities like this become more common everywhere!



(Once again, I am glad I happen to know the language that is the [nearly] universal second language!)



I did not take pics of the "get the car" process, which was more confused than necessary.

We found the right rental car counter, and my daughter (who had reserved a Smart Car) identified herself.  The agent told her he didn't have any Smart Cars.  Hmmm.  He asked my daughter if she could drive a manual transmission.  Um.  No.  She's never even tried to drive one.

It turned out that the only vehicle they had with an automatic transmission was a 9-seat Mercedes Benz van.

!!!

We came to the conclusion that though driving such a big thing (especially on roads that are smaller than we are used to) was not appealing, we didn't really have a choice if we wanted to proceed with our plans for the next few days.

Having checked to make sure she'd only be charged the Smart Car's rate, she got the full insurance on the BIG one, and signed the papers.

We were sent out to a parking garage, where, we were told, one of the agent's colleagues would help us.

So we walked out there and wandered around.  We didn't see anyone who looked like they worked for the right outfit, and we didn't see any place that looked like we should wait, or anything.

We asked a bunch of Italian men, who had returned their car, what the process usually was.  One of their group understood and spoke English well enough to ask us if we had a key for the car.  Um, no.  They offered to straighten things out for us, so we walked back over the the airport building with them.  When we got there, the agent told us the guy who was bringing us the van wondered where we were........

Well, if the agent had told us to get off the elevator and wait right there for the guy to bring us the van, we'd have done that..............

So we thanked the guys who were going to help us, said goodbye to them, and went back out to the parking garage, and this time our van was right outside the elevator doors.

Luckily the guy who brought us the van spoke plenty of English (he was maybe Filipino?).  He told us how to work the lights, and wipers, and all that stuff, and showed us where the diesel went in.  He noted all the places the van was damaged (even though we had full insurance), and there were a lot of them.  The van was a mess.  In addition to damage on both sides and both ends, it had clearly been used to transport people who get dirty -- there were muddy footprints in the back.........



It was far too dark in the parking structure to take pics.

These were taken after lunch.

Meet Ugo -- my daughter's post about him is here.  She is right -- he is perfect.

The driver's side.........

The passenger side...........

I'm sure we were much safer in this vehicle than we would have been in a Smart Car.  We never saw one (1) Smart Car on the big roads.  I can well imagine that the vacuum created by a semi truck barreling along at 80 mph could suck anything the size of a Smart Car right under its wheels......

We'd wondered if we'd have room for our luggage in the Smart Car -- we could almost have fit a Smart Car in the back of the van!  We could have brought our pony!  If we had a pony......



Leaving Bologna behind.

We used my daughter's smart phone for navigation.  If Google is hooked up to the internet, it will navigate for you, and it does a pretty good job.

The phone displays a map, which moves as you move (just like a GPS unit), and it also has written directions on the screen, as well as the spoken directions.

Once in a while Google's voice would tell us "In 600 meters...  ... ... ... ..." and would never say anything else.  A few times the voice told us to do something contrary to what the picture and the written directions both showed.  The voice would often say "In 200 meters, at the roundabout, take the second exit," but you had no idea if "the second exit" was a right turn, a left turn, going straight, or what.....  And sometimes the roads leading to/from the roundabout were so small it wasn't clear if they counted (and sometimes some of them didn't, apparently).

And, of course, there was the usual issue of Google calling a country road one thing (Strada Provinciale 241, perhaps), when the road signs called it something else.  Not to mention that the phone had no Italian accent.  "Via," which is "VEE-ah," in Italian, was always "VIE-ah"....  Deciphering its mangling of Italian sometimes took a moment.  "Via Lenin Vladimir Ilic" sounded like "violin ... what did she say?".....

It was really a good thing to have someone to watch the phone's screen, and say "'the second exit' is 'going straight'" or "'the second exit' is 'a left turn'" or whatever.  Not to mention saying "no, don't turn!  go straight!" (as the printed words and picture both indicate).....

Driving in an unfamiliar country really requires a driver *and* a navigator..............


Using the phone this way is a big battery suck.  Advice from here is, get a car charger for the phone, if you need the phone for navigation.  We had seen two Apple stores in Venice, and it never occurred to me to get a car charger.  The phone never *quite* ran out of juice, but there were times when we turned off the navigation and used the road signs, to spare the battery.  It's something we needn't have given a thought to, if we had had a car charger for it.



Spring was late in northern Italy, as it was late in Michigan.  The fruit trees are usually in full bloom in Emilia in the beginning of April.  They were starting, when we were there.

These are espaliered fruit trees.....

Grape vines, showing no signs of life, yet.

In order to facilitate chronological traversal of these posts, here is a link to the next post.

.