Monday 19th September

 

We had an relatively late departure from Newark to Rome and all went well other than a short delay of about 46 minutes to let a heavy thunderstorm pass over the airport. The flight was slightly re-routed south to avoid getting into rough weather en-route. The flight was otherwise uneventful and the landing and passage through formalities at Rome FCO very smooth. We picked up the car without too much delay but were somewhat surprised to have been ‘upgraded’ to a Jeep Compass which is rather larger than we expected and much more complicated as it was a sort of hybrid car with both a gas cap and a charging point. As you will see going forward this caused us some issues and trying to find out how to do things with a booklet written in Italian was an adventure in itself.

Nevertheless we were soon on the road heading south.