It’s nice to know Italy can do something besides Baroque. Something like . . . oh . . . Gothic:
Or maybe it’s only Siena that can do Gothic: the Lonely Planet guidebook says the city’s economic decline in the 1500s meant that nobody could be bothered to tear down its medieval buildings and replace them with up-to-date ones. And a couple centuries earlier, because of a plague, they had never gotten around to enlarging the cathedral. So it has stayed like this. Beautifully so.
We left Assisi, planning to spend a couple of days in Perugia before then driving to the route of Saturday’s stage of the Giro d’Italia bike race. But after navigating the steepest city streets so far, we found the gates of the campground closed. “Next month open,” said the workmen. “Now open,” we muttered, quoting the camping book. When we asked if there was another camppground, he pointed further up the hill, but then looked at Rover and shook his head and said he wouldn’t try it. We scraped bottom turning around in their camping entrance and headed for Siena instead, where the GPS sent us up more unnecessarily steep urban hills to a campground terraced on a hillside, complete with its own hairpin curves.
We caught a bus into Siena and spent a few hours visiting their great city square
and incredible cathedral, via twisting streets lined with shops selling souvenirs, pastries, and expensive shoes. And no graffiti. (Susan certainly wishes she needed shoes.)
On Friday we drove 20 miles to get close to Saturday’s race route. We’re at a resort campground on top of another Tuscan hill: more terraced camper pitches, a big open-air swimming pool (very cold), an enclosed spa (tepid), a restaurant with linen tablecloths, and a wifi that won’t assign us an IP address. We’ve run into that problem before but don’t remember how to fix it. The view from up here is wonderful, but it started to rain last night around 10 pm and hasn’t quit yet. So we really can’t see anything and it is going to be a miserable day to wait for a bike race.
So we have two questions: is there anything we can do when a campground’s wifi won’t recognize our Mac’s network settings? and can we convince our Garmin Nuvi GPS to keep us on less challenging city streets instead of directing us to steep, narrow ones in order to save us a few drops of gas or 30 seconds of driving time? Anybody? (Oh, and a third one: how are the Twins doing against the YankeeScum? The BBC shortwave won’t say. It seems to think oil spills and Falling €s are the only things worth mentioning.)