Goodbye to Rome & Some Last Minute Entertainment
We awoke this morning and got ready for our train ride to Florence. Ilise has been looking forward to visiting Florence again since the trip began. She loves museums and the Uffizi Museum is one of the best in the world. Our experience in Rome was really great. We enjoyed the food, the Vatican, the Colosseum as well as getting a lot of exercise walking the city. We ate lots of gelato and enjoyed every last drop of that!
Early this morning I called a taxi service to get a car to take us to the train station. I told the dispatcher that we needed a large taxi and that we had 4 people and 6 suitcases. The dispatcher said that she understood and I accepted that she did. When the car arrived we were bringing bags down from the 2nd floor apartment and we started to drag the bags to the curb as I looked for some type of van with a taxi sign on the top. All I was a typical station wagon taxi, not what I expected.
I immediately told the taxi driver, who didn’t speak much English, and he started to get mad at me. I said that we needed a bigger car and he said, no, they will all fit. By the time he put the third bag in and realized that we wouldn’t fit, he took all the bags out and seemed like he wanted to drive away. I told him that we should order a second taxi and that’s when the fireworks went off.
There we are few Italians on the street watching this happen and the taxi driver was not excited about the situation in front of him. I believe he wanted to get all the bags in (they get 1 Euro per bag additional) and us so he could make his fare. I don’t understand Italian so what he was saying went by me, but not the locals standing on the street. One of them started talking to the taxi driver and then it escalated. Our whole family was just standing there watching this show in a foreign language that we didn’t understand. I will never know exactly what was said, but I believe that the gentleman on the street wanted to taxi driver to treat us better.
In the end they brought a second taxi and we had to pay for two taxi’s to take us to the train station. At this point a second taxi is not a big issue, but there was a moment during the argument that I thought we would be without any taxi at all. In the end Ilise and Noah got in the taxi with the crazy driver and I went with Drew in the car that came next. Our driver was very calm and nice and we enjoyed our ride to the station.
The funniest part for me was Drew standing on the street laughing at the whole thing saying she wished she caught the conversation on video. It was an experience that we won’t forget from the trip and we easily made our train to Florence. I’m looking forward to Florence and doing some more sightseeing.
To a life well lived!
Larry Kesslin 