Car rental idea

There's lots written about car rentals, here's what I found as a good comparison site, saved us several hundred dollars.  www.autoeurope.com

Early trip planning

We've bought the tickets, the plan is coming together.  As our 25th wedding anniversary nears (March) we're taking an adventure of a lifetime, a 6.5 week trip through Italy.  We've been a couple times, stationed there a long time ago in the Army, and we just love to travel.

So here's the plan:
Fly into Palermo, hit the town and then Stromboli to hike the volcano, after which we spend about 2 weeks exploring the rest of Sicily.  We take the car north, hitting Puglia, Amalfi Coast, Umbria, Bologna and Bolzano to name a few destinations, then out of Milan about 4 weeks after leaving Sicily.

We've employed a pretty cool web tool, www.planapple.com to store and mark our trip, and its free.  I give it a 4/5.  We're using www.booking.com to make our reservations, the prices are comparable to www.venere.com and other sites.  We're planning on staying in places less than $100/night, also trying to stay most places a minimum of 3 nights, the back and forth with moving hampers enjoyment of the trip.

I've purchased a new camera bag from www.peakdesign.com, if this thing is as nice as all the hype and videos show then I'll be stoked.

All for now,

Mike