… ok, Chris keeps insisting that I’m being unfair to Google Maps here because it is (probably) not its fault. But my phone’s entire GPS system is dead to me, at any rate.

The good things from today:
-We had a great play date with our friends/sponsors! Owen and Fiona had a blast playing with their kids, and I had a great time hanging with Natalie and her mother. A friend of hers also brought over cioccolata calda, so I got to try that for the first time. It is Italian hot chocolate, but it is so thick that it is almost more like a warm, thin pudding. We ate it with a spoon and damn, this is going to have to be a regular thing.

-Continuing on the food theme, we followed up our dinner tonight by (finally) stopping at one of the many local pastry places near our hotel. I ran in with the intention of just picking up some of whatever looked good, but since everything looked good we ended up with a full plate. Almost everything was awesome, especially those little tarts.

Funny story, as they were starting to wrap these up in a kind of nice-looking box I suddenly started panicking because I only had 20 euro on me, and wouldn’t it be embarrassing if it rang up more than that? It ended up being 4.5 euros. I should have known better — all the food we’ve had so far here has been quite reasonably priced.

-The kids were mostly sweet to each other and well-behaved today. Though Owen, for some weird reason, did suggest that I change my name to Margaret. Or name our next baby Margaret. Random?

So onto the bad — I’m not going to go into it too much because it was truly stressful, but basically I spent more than an hour trying to get to our friend’s house, approximately six miles away. My GPS just well and truly will not work at the moment. I kept thinking it would suddenly kick in like it did last time but no dice. I tried resetting it a few times, but nope. (This evening Chris also messed with it, and nothing.) Anyway, so after driving around for an eternity I somehow magically ended up at the mall I went to last time, and at that point I was about to call it because my concern had shifted from “how will I get to Natalie’s?” to “how am I going to get us home?” and I at least knew I could make it home from the mall. I called her to cancel, and she was like — “ok, I understand, but you should know that you are only like seven minutes away so…” That pissed me off enough to not want to be defeated, so with her assistance we eventually made it.

Obviously, I also got lost on the way home. But less disastrously.

I suppose the silver lining, however, is that I did realize later that the actual driving hadn’t scared me much at all during the debacle. Except for the one time when the road suddenly became a one-way and I was facing oncoming traffic unexpectedly. And the time when my car couldn’t gain traction on the wet cobblestone street going up a hill, which resulted in it skidding and sliding while I begged it (out loud) not to give up. But anyway, people told me that within a few weeks I’d be feeling more confident about driving. They may not be wrong =-)

But I’m buying a fucking GPS tomorrow.