Okay, let’s pretend that it’s early September in Italy.  (I finally emailed myself a few more vacation photos, so it’s time for another step in the vacation saga.)  We’ve visited Switzerland briefly.  We’ve hiked through 4/5 of the Cinque Terre.  We’ve eaten a ton of good food.

Now it’s on to Modena.   We made it from the Cinque Terre to Modena with relatively few bumps along the way.  We were an hour early for our tour appointment.  An hour early!  Do you know how insanely early that is for us?  It’s like being a day early for most people.

Anyway, we were an hour early at the wrong location.  We had a big day planned, which included a tour at the Ferraro factory in Maranello, a visit to the Ferrari museum in Maranello, a test drive of a Ferrari in Maranello, and a visit to the other Ferrari museum in Modeno.  We knew that we went to the wrong museum first, but it’s a 20-minute drive from one museum to the other, so we figured we would go to the easy to find one, get directions for the hard to find location, and avoid getting lost and frustrated.

Except that we ended up getting lost and frustrated.  There were roads under construction and therefore not in use.  There were maps that were so fuzzy that I could only make out one word in 50.  There were lots and lots of roads with no signage.  It wasn’t pretty.  So much for that tour appointment.  We rescheduled it for the same time the next day (earliest option), tried to get over the intense feelings of frustration and sadness that happened as a result of our hour in the car trying madly to get to the right museum, and looked at some pretty cars in museums.

I’m not a car buff, but even I was awed by some of the cars.  Their designs were so beautiful, and the thought that went into each part to make it a stronger, faster vehicle is pretty impressive.

As usual, there was some good Italian food for dinner, followed by a walk around town.  Only this time, our walk around town ran us right into the outdoor rehearsal for an opera program that was taking place the next night.  It was some kind of program that included all Pavarotti music.

It was so much fun!  I think I might actually prefer the rehearsal to the formal program.  We got to hear the director stop songs to make changes and got to see the musicians goof around a teeny tiny bit (they were pretty professional).  It was definitely more relaxed that way, and it was beautiful music.  Beautiful and relaxed is just right in my book.  All in all, I highly recommend bumping into outdoor opera rehearsals whenever possible.

As you can tell, we survived the day of not going on our tour and woke up the next day all excited about fixing our mistake and enjoying some awesome cars.  We were so on time for that tour.

We also saved Scott’s super awesome birthday fun for the second day of cars.  He test drove a Ferrari, and he liked it a lot.  This is us pretending to be fancy before the test drive.  You know, just about to go for a drive on a sunny day in our ridiculously nice car:

Still with the Sunday drive pretending:

Then Scott got down to the business of almost driving:

Then he gained a co-pilot (also known as Alessandro, the guy who told him where to turn and when to slow down):

And moved towards an actual road:

Put on his best, most serious driving face:

And he proceeded to have a really fantastic time driving too fast through small towns in Italy.  We all lived happily ever after (or at least until our drive to Positano).  But that’s another adventure.