| The countryside of Lecce is filled with wildflowers in the springtime |
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| Glenn's Lecce Journals 4-27-02 Saturday morning and how time flies when you are having fun!!! We were ready to leave the big cities behind and find a nice and quiet place to relax for a few days. Our friends Andres and Sylvia had just come back from Lecce and highly recommended it, so off we were. We caught an early train to Lecce as the train ride (even on Eurostar) was over 5 hours. (We were going from the west coast to to the East coast and south.) The train ride was uneventful and actually somewhat realxing as we enjoyed the landscapes and read a little while we traveled. We arrived into Lecce around 2:30 pm and headed out to find information about accomodations. It is a small town so the closest information booth was in the town center, not at the train station. We asked some of the locals working at the train station about accomodations but they just pointed us in the direction of the nearest hotel, which you could literally see from the train station. We stopped by the Grand Hotel, which was the closest hotel and checked prices (50 Euro for a double room/no bath). We then proceeded into town, with full backpacks, to find the information booth. As we were walking into town the town seemed dead quiet. Of course it was!!! It was after 1:00 pm and not quite 4:00 pm yet, and it was a Saturday. What did we expect??? As we walked through town, with no map, we stopped into any hotels that we ran into to check prices. We did not realize how small Lecce was, as some hotels were not even open for the season yet and the ones that remained were few and far between. After more than an hour we finally found the information booth, which amazingly enough, was closed for the weekend and did not re-open until Monday. Imagine that!!! We finally walked back to the Grand Hotel, after we had worn out Erin (remember we were carrying our backpacks the whole time), and got a room for the night there. We finally settled into our room around 5:00 pm, relaxed for a little while, and instead of wondering if restaurants were open back in town we just had dinner at the nice restaurant attached to the hotel. Dinner was good and reasonably priced. We enjoyed the meal with some wine and off to bed we went. |