10:00 am, Rome - The Tigers are now in Italy! We land in the Rome airport after an approx. 9 hour flight and are more than ready to stretch our legs. However, upon meeting our two tour guides, Marta and Rebecca, we load up a bus and head out for our first destination, Lucca. As we drive up the Italian highway "A1", we get beautiful country-side views of the hills, mountains and lush terrain. It's much nicer to look out the side windows at the scenery than it is to look out the front windshield to the realization that apparently drivers here don't always stay within the white lane-lines. Our bus driver, Massimo, avoids a few wandering cars and trucks - sometimes even taking up two lanes himself for a good distance.
2:00 pm, somewhere between Rome and Lucca - After driving a little over 3 hours, the sounds of growling stomachs are easily heard at the front of the bus. We haven't eaten since the flat-blueberry muffin (?) on the flight, so Marta and Rebecca, find a place for us to pull off the highway to grab a bite to eat. The bus pulls into an Auto-Grill, which looks like a gas station attached to a two story convenient store. Upon walking in, we discover that the convenient store actually has a small market, a Burger King, and a second floor restaurant named "Caio Restaurante". We decide to head upstairs. It is our first experience with authentic italian food. With several food stations, we walk around and just point at dishes we would like to order - most getting a few types of pasta. Before pulling into the Auto-Grill, we had no idea what to expect, but after sitting in the window-lined restaurant, overlooking the highway, we realized that Italians take their food seriously...even at a quick-stop Auto-Grill.
5:00pm, Lucca - We arrive and check into our hotel, Ilaria, only to drop off our luggage in our rooms and meet our tour guide for Lucca. Apparently in Italy, tour guides must be licensed for the regions/cities they tour people, therefore at each of our destination tours, we will have a new tour guide specifically for that tour. We begin our walking tour of the City Center a block away from the hotel, entering the Piazzetta dell' Alba through a tall archway.
8:30 pm, Lucca - After the walking tour of Lucca's city center, and some much needed time to take showers, the group walked two blocks from our hotel to a restaurant named Gli Orti for our Welcome Dinner. We walked into what seemed like a small cafe, but were seated further back into the restaurant in a large seating area that was able to sit our entire group of 30 people. Once seated, we were treated like royalty. It was our first experience with a full course Italian meal. Each course was served with a good amount of time between each, which created a wonderful atmosphere for quality conversation. Of course, there was terrific wine with the meal and finished off with tiramisu. We were all stuffed by the end of the night and wandered back to the hotel for the night.
