Nigel

We made our drive from the Milan Malpensa airport to Lake Como in our non-tiny European car, which I know is very dissappointing to my friend Mele, as she REALLY wanted a picture of my 6'5" husband driving those mini-me cars, but they gave us a free upgrade and we were very glad for the extra leg room. We had printed out mapquests of all of our trips and I was playing a very good navigator, when all of a sudden we stumbled onto the Italian version of Walmart advertising a GPS.

Well, we are very familiar with the joys of GPS, as Geoff has one in the jeep that he has affectionately named Betty (the GPS is named Betty, not the jeep). She getting on in years, and is not as sharp as she used to be, but she has repeatedly gotten us out of a jam, even if sometimes she gets confused when roads run parallel on top of one another. And my best friend Alison got in a fight with Betty when she borrowed Geoff's car to run a wedding errand for us between our rehearsal and rehearsal dinner, and Alison was super late to dinner because Betty was convinced that there was no such town as Woodbury, CT.

So we wandered into the Italian Walmart and had our first experience communicating with people who don't speak our language at all. It was so fun! We ended up buying the GPS (as it was highly reccommended for Tuscany, which was the bulk of our trip) and while GEoff set it up, I snagged a sandwich from the scary Italian Walmart canteen and it was REALLY good. Made me realize just how good the food will be in Italy.

I got to the car and investigated our new GPS. We gave him a male voice with a British accent and Geoff promptly named him Nigel. Rightly so. Nigel became the navigator and took us to Lake Como, while I put my mapquest notes away and breathed a sigh of relief that I no longer had to try and understand signs in Italian. We did soon come to learn that Nigel didn't always believe in highways, preferring instead to take us on roads that may well have not been driven since Biblical times. But that's a story for another day.