Atherton Family Notes

Here’s an observation I really wasn’t expecting:

The major difference between driving on the A1 in northern Italy and on I-65 in southern Indiana was that the dilapidated farmhouses along the road in Italy looked like they might have been commissioned by Emperor Nero—or perhaps one of his predecessors. Beyond that, both locations are flat and full of cornfields.

Of course, as we progressed further south, the landscape changed significantly, and at times reminded us of other places we have been to, but the change to corn fields was the most striking.

The similarity is really eerie. If it wasn’t for the occasional road sign written in Italian, I could have almost convinced myself that I had driven to the United States. I’m pretty sure I even saw a billboard that said the Italian equivalent of “Eat Here, Get Gas.”

[The photos that accompanied this post have been lost. Don't worry, though, we swiped them from a couple of websites.]

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Our main hard drive in our laptop crashed on Saturday night while we were online chatting with my parents. This wasn’t a complete surprise– the computer had trouble booting at least one other time earlier in the week. I had been very careful since then to make sure that we copied all of the important files off the computer onto a different hard drive.

On the plus side, the computer is still covered under a warranty, and the warranty is valid internationally. Besides making sure that the laptop could run on 220 volts, the warranty was one of my major criteria for selecting that particular computer in the first place.

The downside is how to get service. Toshiba alledgedly has a number that you can call to coordinate an international warranty issue, including pick-up and delivery of the computer. The number seems to be missing a digit– the area code only has 2 numbers and the main US help line is clueless about what the real number is. Instead, they tell me that I should call the local service center, which is located about 4.5 hours away. And of course, the people who answer the line on the other end when I call only speak German.

Clearly, this is going to be a lot of fun to fix. We were really counting on having the laptop with us when we left for vacation two weeks from now. We were going to use it to entertain the kids and provide emergency map assistance. That’s going to be hard to do now.

We will have internet access while the laptop is down, though. I have set up my work laptop to connect to our DSL modem (it’s how I’m writing this message). So we haven’t gone back to the stone age yet. I don’t know how we would survive!

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