Made it to ferrari country

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No rest for the wicked... After a long day partying at the track I had to get on the road to Maranello for a tour of the Ferrari factory. 10am the next day. I packed up the unidentified turbo diesel rental, a GPS of pure evil, and a liter of coca cola, and headed for the open road. More on the evil GPS later.

My rental car had plenty of pep, handled well at high speed (unless there were bumps) and it barely sipped gas. The big problem was that the headlights were terribly out of adjustment. At anything over 50km you were basically flying blind unless you had high beams on. The Autostrada was fun. For the first couple hours Ferraris, Lambos, and Porsches were flying by me, while I hovered mostly around a pedestrian 160-175kpm.

After a while I got hungry. Wow, my friend Ed was completely right about the Italians having delicious food at gas stations. I stopped around 2am at a highway stop. A tall beautiful italian woman, who always repeated herself twice to make up for an extremely thick accent served me some kind of combination pastry/pizza/bread hybrid which was warmed in a GeorgeForman grill type contraption. "You want toasted - You want toasted?". "Si! Graci!". It was delicious and probably 2000 calories per bite.

Without realizing it my GPS was set to shortest distance, which meant I soon was taken off the highway straight into the alps, complete with death defying hairpins and cliffs. Those who watch the Tour de France, can picture it. A grin came over my face as I pushed the rental car as hard as I dared. Really fun... for an hour... and then... not so fun.

Long story short, what I thought would be a 4 hour drive turned into 7. Average speed through the alps approximated average speed of some bicycle races I've been in. I grew tired of the turns and then I just grew TIRED, VERY VERY TIRED. For a little while I sped back up to my hard-as-I-dare pace, just to keep me awake. That worked for another 15 minutes, but then I caught myself in the very bad combination of dozing off at the apex of corners at hard-as-I-dare pace. NOT GOOD AT ALL!

I arrived at Hotel Planet just as the sun was coming up. The JSuite (with a view of Ferrari's testing track), is a beautiful 2-floor room, with a huge balcony right above the entrance to the factory and Cavallino restaurant.

They were expecting me (hours earlier actually). The man at the desk simply asked my last name and immediately put me on the elevator with a keycard without any of the usual paperwork, confirmation numbers, or hunting-n-pecking on the computer that we've all become accustom to (tolerant of?). Very nice, I wish more hotels would de-automate to save time!

The room has some kind of smart-power thing that confused the crap out of me at first. The lights automatically shut off unless you put your card in a slot (and sometimes they do anyway).

Off to bed for a few hours and back up for the tour.

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