Exploring Italy North To South – 2019

We are finally planning another land based trip to Europe after having succumbed to the easy travel of too many cruises.  We have not done a completely land based trip to Europe since our France, Germany and Switzerland Trip in 2012….

Below is the Itinerary for our Trip to Italy.   We took considerable time to plan out where we wanted to visit, and for how long, trying to work around museum closings on Mondays, which is typical in Europe.  Also, we tried hard to avoid having to travel on a Sunday, due to the more limited train schedules on Sundays, but were not entirely able to accomplish that in moving…

We have included a basic map outlining the overall route for this trip.  The route is based on Google Maps car driving routes for clarity and to show the main cities we are visiting .  However, the actual route we will take will be based mostly on train routes, which can’t be used in Google Maps to show an overall route map between multiple cities.  We will only be driving…

We have provided a table showing all of the accommodations we will be staying in during this trip, listed in chronological order.  This table also includes a link to the property website that provides information and pictures of the accommodations.  The dates shown are the nights we will be staying at each property.  

Today’s post will be a discussion on the differences between a couple of navigation methodologies, specifically Garmin GPS and Google Maps.  We have owned a couple of different Garmin GPS units that have both North American and Europe Maps loaded on them from the factory.  Currently, we use a Garmin Nuvi 2559.  In addition, there is a navigation tool for the computer from Garmin called BaseCamp.  We utilized BaseCamp on…

We will be spending a total of three nights in the more rural area of Tuscany after leaving Florence on Saturday, September 28. Of course, Florence itself is considered part of the Tuscany region, but we have separated it for the purpose of planning the remainder of our time in the more rural areas of Tuscany. We have reservations at the Agriturismo Montaperti for those three nights, which is located…

We have spent the last couple of weeks finalizing our travel plans, specifically trying to determine train schedules for traveling between various destinations.  Several of the routes are on Regional Trains, and therefore, we do not need to purchase tickets in advance.  They do make it possible to purchase them online through the Trenitalia website, but there are four hour time restrictions on those online purchased tickets that may make…

We have been busy since the last update in July.  We depart for Italy in exactly three weeks from today, and are starting to get really excited. The trip is mostly planned except for a few minor details.  We spent the last several weeks finalizing our travel plans between stops on our itinerary.  We have purchased several train tickets in advance on high speed Trenitalia trains we will take.  These…