Love & Light and everything bright...

FROM FLORENCE, ITALY

(click on thumbnail images to enlarge)

Touring France and Northern & Central Italy

GENEVA-FLORENCE, Sep 14 - When we mapped out our tour of Switzerland and Italy, we only booked the hotels in three key cities - Zurich, Florence and Rome.  We decided to wing the rest of the trip, making up our daily plans as we felt like.  And so when we considered our options of going from Geneva to Italy, it became obvious that the most sensible route would be through southern France (see the above map).  Which happens to be one of that country's prettiest areas anyway.  So our tour of Switzerland and Italy became a visit to three neighboring countries.

France

We awoke in Geneva on Sep 14 on a beautiful, sunny morning (see below left).

The sunny skies prevailed we crossed the border from Switzerland to France (two middle shots).  And even as we approached Mont Blanc, the skies were mostly clear (right).  The tallest mountain in Europe (4,900 m or 16,000 ft), whose summit has been eluding me for decades, has always been enveloped in clouds on my prior visits.  So I told Elizabeth how lucky she was to be able to see it on her first try.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth kept taking pictures of cows, such as this herd in the foothills of Mont Blanc, not far from Chamonix, the French skiing center that has hosted two Winter Olympics.  The scenery was beautiful, as you can see from the above pictures of the French Alps.

And then, as we gained elevation, we found ourselves in the clouds (three left shots).  We entered the Mont Blanc tunnel at about a 4,400 ft elevation.  It peaked at 4,900 ft, just before we crossed the border into Italy.  It was the first time for Elizabeth to have experienced something like that (an underground border crossing).  The tunnel is just under 12km long (about 8 miles).  It must have been an engineering feet to build something like that under a giant 16,000 ft-mountain (right photo, taken from a postcard).

Italy

When we finally emerged from the tunnel in Italy, the scenery was still spectacular, and the skies were again clear.  That's where we saw again the backside of Mont Blanc (right), before descending eventually into the flat Po river valley.

That's where the first rain drops hit our windshield.  As it turned out, the rain continued on and off throughout the day.  We had originally tentatively planned to get to Bologna, stay there overnight, and then continued in the morning with an easy drive to Florence.  When we got to Bologna, it was raining cats and dogs.  After circling the city center for an hour or so in driving rain, vainly looking for an acceptable hotel, we decided to get back on the Autostrado (freeway) and head on to Florence.  At least we were sure we would find some good hotels there.

The drive from Bologna to Florence was absolutely horrific.  Not only were we on the busiest freeway in Italy, driving through some treacherous Apennine mountain ranges, surrounded by trucks and zigzagging between construction barriers, but the skies had opened up like never before.  It felt like an Arizona monsoon storm, replete with lightening and sheets of rain pouring down from the sky.  We have not seen any lightening ever since we left Arizona to move to Hawaii, so it was a relatively novel experience for us.

Well, eventually we did make it to the outskirts of Florence, where we found a decent hotel for our first night in that lovely city.  As we were settling down in our room, the rain had temporarily stopped, and a lovely sunset welcomed us to arguably Italy's most beautiful city.

And that's all she wrote from our fourth day on the road in Europe.

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