Day 1- Augsburg

Here is a blow by blow look at our trip to Italy. We found all of the redeeming qualities about Italy. You can have Rome, Florence and Venice, but give me Tuscany and Umbria.

Today I had a million things to do between 0600 and 1700 when Dave was to get off of work and we were to leave. I let Hadleigh sleep all morning while I piled my bed high with clothes and things that we needed to take with us. My big dilemma was what to take for her. She has a history of pooping through clothes, and on vaca you can’t really do laundry, so…I pretty much took every piece of clothing that she owned.

At noon my friend Jess drove Hadleigh and I down to Ramstein to pick up our rental car (since our BMW is having clutch problems). We had lunch at our fav little Mexican restaurant and then picked up the car. After that I headed to the commissary to pick up groceries, and was even able to find “Little Swimmers” diapers. At Baumholder the only size they carry is large. The smalls are even way too big for Hadleigh since the weight for smalls begins at 16 pounds, and she is just over 10. Anyway, I loaded up on swimmers, and headed to the PX to look for a map of Italy.

I got home right about 1600, and managed to catch Dave at the office so that he could fax his driver’s licence to the car place so that he could drive too.

We hit the road at 1730 and only had a 3 hour drive to Augsburg where we would spend the night and continue on to Venice the following day. Well, wouldn’t you know Hadleigh began to struggle in the car, so stopped at 1830 and I fed her. We arrived in Stuttgart at 2030, just in time to fill up the car and to grab a quick bite to eat. We were shocked to find out that Stuttgart is more ghetto than Baumholder and their shops close at 2000, instead of 2100. Dave bought two TV dinners at the gas station and that was our dinner. Onto to Augsburg, we got into the town at 2300, and drove around and around for 45 minutes trying to locate the hotel. All the while Hadleigh screamed in the backseat. We finally found it, ran upstairs, threw her into bed and tried to recover from our first HORIBBLE day on the road.