Orvieto

It wasn't even an hour after we met up with Fran and Mark that we started planning some adventures.  The first one was totally unexpected!  Fran's mom found out last week that she would be in Italy this week.  She sent a text message to Fran that she was with a group staying in Orvieto, and she invited us to join them for a cooking class that evening.  We don't know if her mom really expected us to show up, but we were sold!

We pulled up a map and found that Orvieto is just a short train ride from Rome!  The train station is just outside of Orvieto at the bottom of the plateau that the city sits atop.  As we learned later that night, there aren't a lot of ways to get up or down the plateau: either a funicular or a long winding road.  We opted to take the funicular up the hill.

The funicular ride up to Orvieto

The streets of Orvieto

Orvieto's gorgeous duomo

Orvieto is a quaint little town with a really big duomo!  After a bit of wandering, we got to cooking!

Fran and Sara making focaccia in Orvieto

Fran and her mom slicing peppers

David's favorite dish of the night (maybe even of the trip, he says!) was steak topped with black truffles.

Steak with truffles!

The cooking class and dinner were amazing!  We thought our adventure was coming to an end as we grabbed our bags to head back down the train station for the 11:30 train.  We hadn't given much thought to how we would get back to the train station or that the funicular may have stopped running.  Well it had, and with only 20 minutes to make the train, we were in a real pickle.  No taxis and no one who was looking to pick up four tourists.  We started getting pretty nervous as we realized that the next train was after 4:00 a.m.  With eight minutes to spare a local bus drove by and we hopped on.  With four minutes to spare we made it to the train station (thank you fast driver!).  With one minute to spare David and Mark bought our train tickets.  And with no time to spare David and Mark ran across the train tracks, we hopped on the train, and found our seats.

What a night!!!

The train back to Rome pulls into the station - lots of smiles because we made it!