The tickets booked, we have begun to plan the actual trip. We will be meeting our daughter after her study abroad program is complete for an almost two-week stay in Italy. Planned destinations are Umbria, Perugia and Assisi, Tuscany, Florence and Pisa, and Rome. I'm also hoping to make it to San Marino if we have time.
After booking the airline, the next article of business was were to stay.
I first started by reading journals from other people and looking at the map of Umbria and Tuscany. Since we will be there for almost two weeks, it soon began to make sense to find one place that was centrally located and then drive or take the train/bus on day trips to cities nearby.
I began by looking at hotel costs in major towns. Ugh. With the exchange rate, hotels for three people began to be a bit more expensive than I had planned in our meager budget. Isn't there anything out there besides hostels that could fit the bill?
Again, after an exhausting -- though certainly not exhaustive -- search, I began to figure out that it would be worth our while to rent a villa. I finally found a place that rents villas, and they had a local office for me.
Still skeptical and hoping that it wasn't a boiler room operation, I drove to the office and spoke with the people there. I was very pleasantly surprised.
The name of the place is called Doorways. They rent villas in Italy, Spain and France, though they focus primarily on Italy. We found a small villa in a southern Tuscan town called Cetona.
Cetona is one of the many small towns that dot the hill country of southern Toscana. If any one is interested, it's near Chiusi. Pictures of the villa we are renting are attached to this entry.
Using guidebooks for the rest of the trip, I booked a hotel for the last few days we will be in Italy for Rome.
It's amazing how much time researching airlines, fares, and schedules, making the actual reservations, and figuring out the basic scheduling takes. One of my givens is that I always want to make the most of our time in any new place, so that means for me that I spend quite a bit of time researching sights, opening and closing times, and alternatives like train schedules.