Ton has been looking forward to Bologna since we decided to re-route to Italy. She has a long list of places she wants to see and foods she wants to try while we are here. When we checked the weather last night the weather was supposed to be ok today for our visit.
It’s a good thing that we have visited Italy multiple times because the last week has been disappointing. If this was our first trip to Italy I think by now we would be wondering what we have gotten ourselves in for. Everyday the weather is supposed to be better tomorrow and when tomorrow comes it is raining again. (Some of the blame belongs to weather.com for not being able to predict the weather accurately even 24 hours out.) So as you can gather by my rant when we arrived at Bologna today it was raining steadily.
After we checked in we decided to put on our rain gear and grab our umbrella and head into town to check things out. Our campground is a little remote from the city but it has a bus that comes by every 2 hours.
So a little before its scheduled arrival at 1 pm we joined 3 German couples at the bus stop. When 1 came there was no bus, but busses run late. At 1:05 still no bus, but with bad weather maybe it had run into some traffic. At 1:15 no bus, but I thought oh well this is Italy. It was raining hard so by 1:15 we were all huddled under the awning in front of the reception. At 1:20 one of the receptionists came out and asked what we were doing. I told her we were waiting for the bus to which she replied it should of come at 1! We all agreed, but informed her it had not. At 1:30 the receptionist came out and informed us that the bus drivers were on strike so some of the busses were not running.
She offered to call a taxi to take us downtown and suggested that we group up in fours. The two older German couples immediately pared up. We asked the younger German couple if they wanted to pair up, but they hesitated and had a long conversation in German so we waited for them to make a decision. The campground has a system with the cab company where they call the cab on line and get a paper response, kind of like the paper from a credit card machine. The first request for a cab was denied, but the receptionist said this is normal. The second request was confirmed and she gave the paper to the two couples. The younger couple finally said they would go with us, so another request for a taxi was submitted but denied. The second request was also denied, which led the younger couple to decide to take their scooter into town. Now it was just Ton and me for a €20 taxi but we decided to go ahead. While we were waiting for the response to the third request Ton said if it was denied we would just head back to François for the day. The third request was denied probably due to high demand for taxis because of the bus strike. So we called it a day and trudged back to François in the rain.
This completed a rather lackluster first week in Italy. Good thing we really like Italy or we might be looking to head over to France for good weather and functioning transit systems.