What we will attempt to do in this book is to tell you the story of our trip. Hopefully, if I do my job, it will be told in such a way that you will be crying with us as we are going through our first Near-Death experience up in the mountains in Tuscany, and you will feel some of the same jaw-dropping, OMG emotions that we had when we got our first glimpse of The Sistine Chapel in Rome or Michelangelo's David in the Galleria dell' Accademia in Florence or The Leaning Tower in Pisa. We also hope that you pick up on some of the little details and nuances that we did not know about, so with this knowledge, you will be able to overcome some of the little hiccups and road-bumps that we encountered along our journey. And while this is not necessarily a travel guide, but more of an adventure story, we still will be giving some travel tips up front because we feel that seeing how we prepared for our trip was all a part of the total adventure, in addition to the actual recounting of our various trials, tribulations, and triumphs.