Jenson's Departure

March 16, 2012

We woke up at 5:45 and got the kids up and dressed as we were meeting Dave and Deanna at 6:15 at their hotel.

The kids were fantastic and got up and dressed with no problems.  We walked over to the hotel only to find that they couldn’t leave because the Hotel had taken Dave’s passport  the night before when they checked in (standard procedure in Europe as every hotel is required to report every guest to the local police), and no one was around in reception that early, so he couldn’t get it back.

When we visited the hotel to book the rooms  for Dave and Deanna it looked like the managers also lived in the hotel.  There were only two doors that weren’t guest rooms in the small hotel (11 rooms for guests), so we knocked on them several times.  We called the phone numbers for the hotel several times too, but that just rang the phone in the reception area.

Dave and Deanna were up early because they’d booked a train to Rome at 6:45 am.   When it became very clear that they’d miss the train, Deanna and Mary went over to our apartment, leaving Dave and I to sort things out.

At  7:00 am an old lady shuffled upstairs.  She could see Dave and Deanna’s luggage in the lobby, and she immediately seemed to get into a mood.  She did not say anything to Dave or me at all as she opened the reception door.  She carefully took out Dave’s passport, and wrote out a receipt for the two rooms for the one night.  She handed the passport and the bill to Dave.

I’d told Dave that they should really not have to pay full price for staying the night, since they had missed their train at 6:45 am, which had cost twice as much as the later trains because it gets into Rome at a really good time (8:45 am with no change of train…very nice with kids and luggage).  After making sure Dave had his passport in hand, I told the lady, in my pretty sketchy Italian, that Dave and Deanna needed to check out at 6:00 so they could make the 6:45 am train.  I then asked to pay less. 

The lady would not talk at all, merely grunting.  She vigorously shook her head, and stabbed at the bill where it said Euro 120.  She then took out a piece of paper, wrote Euro 120 on it, and circled it several times.  I said “no”, and then I wrote Euro 60 on the paper.   She furiously crossed that out, grunted several times, and then quickly moved over to Dave to grab his passport from him.  I had warned Dave before the lady even arrived to not let go of his passport once he had it in hand, so he was ready and was able to keep hold of his passport. Dave is quite tall you see…

The lady then wrote “polizia” on her paper and circled that several times whilst grunting.  I told her it was a good idea to call the police…”polizia…si, si…telefone polizia”.  That caught her really off guard.  I then said again that Dave and Deanna had booked the 6:45 am train to Rome, and they had missed that because the reception was closed.  The lady wrote on the piece of paper that there was a bus for Rome at 10:00 am.  It’s interesting that she would know the bus timetable to Rome.

I told her that we were not going to pay the full price since Dave and Deanna had missed their train.  At this point I noticed that not all of Dave and Deanna’s luggage was in the lobby. I asked Dave to go and get it, and he quickly came back telling me that it was locked in the room, and the lady had the key.  I happened to be standing right by the key, so I grabbed it, threw it to Dave who went and got the luggage.  In the meantime, I told the lady we’d be paying Euro 60.  She seemed to be getting the idea, so I asked Dave to get the Euro 60 out.  He only had a Euro 100 note and Euro 20 note in his wallet.  I had a Euro 50 note, so I grabbed that, Dave’s Euro 20 and put Euro 70 in the lady’s hand.  She grunted meanly at us and pretty much pushed us out of the hotel…locking the main wooden door behind us.

We called Deanna, who came back with the kids and Mary.  Dave, Deanna and Landon (the youngest) took a taxi down to the station so that they could sort out the train tickets to Rome, and me, Mary, Ashton, Savannah and Aubre walked down to the train station.  Danika and Jason stayed at the apartment.

At the train station, Deanna had been able to change the ticket to the 8:00 am train (which takes 2 hours 30 minutes and you have to change in Foligno), so things were falling into place again.

Needless to say, we were exhausted when we got back to the apartment.  It has been a whirlwind tour with our friends from Texas.   So, we did laundry and passed out on the deck.  Pictures courtesy of our darling daughter, Danika J

Ciao,
David