Our journey to Italy

Note that there we are posting two entries at once. Dont forget to read the one below, about Munich. It originally failed to upload and we havnet had internet in a few days, and wont for a few more so sorry if we are overloading you! 

A stretch of what seems like incredible luck has carried us safely to Maurizio and Barbara's olive grove in the hills of Tuscany overlooking the mediterranean. 

Our journey began on Sunday morning, when, after a minor mishap involving a failure to switch trains on the subway in Munich, we managed to arrive at the correct train station exactly in time to meet our driver, Fabrice, with whom I had arranged a carpool using some rideshare website. Backstory: Last week, when trying to figure out how to get to Tuscany, and being unable to find a logical and affordable train, it popped into my head to look for a rideshare site. On my first search on the first website I found, there just so happened to be someone traveling in the right direction on the right day who could take us as far as Genoa (from where we could take a quite convenient train).! Mummy said, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is," so with that mentality, we hoped for the best, but were prepared for less, and prayed it wouldn't be a disaster. However, It turned out that Fabrice was perfect. A 40-something frenchman who does freelance marketing for american companies in Germany, he travels to Nice to visit his three kids about once a month, and enjoys road biking, mountain biking, mountain hiking, and good cheese. His car was roomy, climate controlled, and had a big sunroof and plenty of space in the back for our bags and those of two other (extremely quiet female) passengers. Fabrice was on time, cheerful, speed-limit-abiding, fluent in English, and in possession of a sharp sense of humor. We took the San Bernardino through the spectacular Swiss alps and made it to Genoa with plenty of time to catch our 16:11 train to Sestri Levante, where we planned to camp at a campground. 

("the spectacular swiss alps")

(waterfall)

Communication with the campground up to that point had been a bit sketchy due to language difficulties and the uncertainty of our arrival time due to the uncertainty of which train we would be able to catch due to the uncertainty of how reliable our carpool was going to be. Consequently, we were uncertain as to how we were going to traverse the 6 kilometers between the station and the campground. However, we were relieved when we texted the campground's cell number with our arrival time and received a reply, "ok we see out of the station in front of." 

We easily found a seat on the train and relaxed a bit (however, remaining vigilant after Fabrice's warnings about pickpockets and such, who frequent trains and stations in the south). Things began to look grim again though, as the rain started to fall harder and more persistently, and the sun began to go down an hour before we had expected, because, "oh yeah, the time change was last night!" 

When got off of our train an hour and a half later and headed into the station, we were greeted by a voice: "camping?" and upon turning to face it, we beheld the next wonderful character of our story, Nino. He drove us the six kilometers the the dark and rain to the campground's front desk, where we checked in with his wife. When we asked whether we could keep our bags in the office, as they wouldn't fit in our small tent, they said, "hey why don't you just take a camper. There's one available and we'll give it to you for the same price as a tent site." (They didn't actually say it like that, but that's what they meant.) So instead of setting up a tent in the dark and rain, we had electricity, a table and chairs under a tent extension of the camper, two comfortable beds, and were completely dry. Like I think the deal with this campground is that people live in these trailers all summer, and that's camping. Here is a view of the campground, although we didn't get a picture of our own tent/ camper.

In the morning, Nino gave us a ride all the way back to Sestri Levante, and a tour! Despite speaking practically no english he explained to us that these towns were on a peninsula and there were bays on either side, and he took us to where one can look one way and see a beach, and turn 180 degrees to see another beach, looking out at a different bay, and then we all got out of the car to gaze out at the sea and the hillside towns that overlook it all along the shore.

Three coffees and an extremely comfortable 3 hour train ride later, we found ourselves in Grosseto, from whence we caught a bus up some mountains to Montorgiali and were scooped up by Barbara and brought the rest of the way to their house just in time for the Tuscan sunset. 

Turns out they only just started the olive harvest this morning (a week later than they thought, due to rain), so there's lots for us to do. I've written so much already, so I'll spare you description of the few events that have occurred since we arrived. (It's now 10 pm on Monday) By the time I post this, we will have spent a day harvesting olives. There's no internet here, so we'll have to travel to town to post.