3) Fiumicino, Italy

Fiumicino, Italy 41° 44.832 N 012° 15.496 E

Before I arrived in Italy Alan and his wife Danielle arrived and spent time with John and Nancy.  Somewhere in that time they were out and Alan was driving the car.  The driving here is difficult and you must be very aggressive.  John is quite good at it.  Alan failed to run a stop sign on the freeway turn-off to the marina and got rear-ended.  Yes, he failed to run a stop sign and got rear-ended.  You must be very cautious if you plan to stop or slow down at stop signs and red lights.

During the last few days of preparing the boat for the Saturday departure I was going to do an epoxy repair to the bumper.  John has a long history of fixing rental cars before he returns them, as he has been almost everywhere there is.  When cars get damaged in these places the rules don’t apply about whose fault it is and he has learned to fix them himself.  Not only was the bumper cracked in two places someone tried to break in through the passenger keyhole and destroyed that, too.  I tried to take the inside panel off to remove the lock and bend the door metal out but gave up halfway in.  I applied some epoxy from the boat to the bumper and let it sit overnight.  John spent most of Thursday looking for paint to match the car and he actually found it!

Cute, huh?  It looks fast sitting still in the parking garage at the Panorama grocery store.

We planned to go food shopping for provisioning today and now it is tonight.  John and I headed off to the Panorama and several hundred dollars later and a huge overflowing basket we were on our way back.  We bought some great stuff.  It was fun shopping for food with John.  He says, “buy it” for just about anything you see or want and even the stuff you don’t want just to see if you really don’t want it.  We were a spectacle in that store.  It was so obvious that we were American and on a shopping spree.  The people were really good to us.