The following information was taken from e-mail that followed our return.

10/02/99
Hi to all. Arrived home Thursday evening after two weeks in Italy and two weeks in France
bouncing along in the rented Fiat "Punto", the little red "Start" as they call it there. Had some wonderful experiences and took 9 floppy discs of digital photos along the way, plus
six rolls of regular 35mm film. We're planning to do an e-mail travelogue of a few of the photos from each disc for our friends and family, with a sentence or two with each photo, over the next few weeks. If you don't want to be included in this, please let us know. Maybe your computer can't handle the large number of "bytes" that color photos use up! We won't be sending any to Europe because computer users there pay by the minute ! And photos, for them can take several minutes to download!

We started in Paris with the rental car and drove to Venice, Italy where we planned to meet two friends, one a born Venitian, whom we had met on Baja Calif. trip several years ago. They kindly spent two days showing us "their" Venice. Next, two days in Florence, a couple of days in other hill towns and a very special place: Civita di Bagno Reggio. Then two days in Rome and up thru Piza and Genoa,a hike in the Cinque Terre region, a very short side trip to Monaco for some stamps. and into France. A week on the back roads of Provence and the Auvergne regions ending up with our friends Ray and Anne in central France for our last week of cooking, eating, exploring and photographing in an area now quite familiar to us, as this was our seventh visit to Ray and Anne's French home, near the chateau country. We stayed mostly in the French and Italian equivalent of the "bed and breakfast" and never had anything "booked" ahead as we never knew where we'd find ourselves at evening or what might interest and delay us along the way. Gasoline in Europe runs close to $4.00 a gallon but is sold by the liter. It would cost about $40. to fill our tank! But the tiny Fiat got good mileage. We traveled 6199 Kilometers, which I believe is about 3500 miles. The US dollar is strong right now so the exchange rate was good in both Italy and France. In Italy, about 1800 Lira to the dollar and in France about 6 francs to the dollar. A cup of great coffee can be 50 cents to $3. depending on whether we stood or sat down!

Photos to follow, if you're interested.

Love, Tom and Nita