Day3: Vinci and another airport trip

12/22: Today we had a lateish start, but it seems as though I have overcome jet lag, which is good. It had been rainy all night, so when we woke up most of the snow had been replaced with fog. It stayed foggy and rainy the whole day, which was not pleasant to drive in, especially with the Italian lunatic and their road systems. We decided to head out to Vinci, Leonardo's birthplace, to see the Leonardo Da Vinci machines museum. First, there was an accident on the road that delayed us about 30 min, then we found a nice restaurant to pop in for lunch. We ordered some appetizers and ended up with a cheese pizza, some weird meat paste that we suspect was boar (looked like chili/dog food), some bread, and some proscuitto. For the entry, I ordered a wild boar dish. It was really good.

After lunch we hit up the museum. What a neat place! There were models of his machines and video demonstrations of how they worked. I never realized how many of his machines were either designed to aid in the construction of cathedrals or were very military focused. After the museum we decided to swing by the Florence airport for a third time to see if Gregg's, Kyle's, and Emily's bags had arrived.

Getting to the airport was quite an ordeal. We hit rush hour traffic, especially where the toll booth goes from 13 or so lanes down to 2! We also had a rough time going through the round abouts trying to get to the airport because the other end of the round about spit people onto a major highway. It was a really dumb and poorly designed road system.

We finally got to the airport, and only had a 10 minute or so wait before a very nice man (unlike our previous encounters) told us that all the flights from Amsterdam during the day had been canceled, so our bags were still stuck there. He was nice enough to let us around and have a look, but we didn't find anything. Europe is in the middle of a blizzard that they are not prepared for, and bags (and hundreds of others) are taking the hit. Hopefully they will be there tomorrow.

Tomorrow our plan of attack is to call the big museum in Florence and see if we can schedule a tour. If yes, we'll head to Florence for the day and end with another airport run. If not, we'll drive a bit further and head out to Pisa, where we can be unique and hold up the tower...or push it over...

The weather is nasty for the next week, which is unfortunate. Mom is not very pleased, but it is supposed to rain through the rest of December. This is very odd weather for the region at this time of year, and we are just stuck with. Hopefully the bags come in soon and we can focus on actually spending our time touring instead of planning around airport runs.