Ok, so I’ll be the first one to admit that over the past couple of years I’ve tried my best to shy away from fast food if I can avoid it.

I’ve got nothing personal against McDonald’s (love their fries and sweet tea) but it’s just not normally my thing. However, when you get in really, really late into an Italian city and you’re ready to eat your luggage if you don’t get something before you make the long drive home from the airport a cheeseburger and some fries sounds pretty darn good. Especially considering how many other restaurant options are open that time of night (I’ll give you a hint, it’s a non-number lower than “1”). The problem is the fact that the only McDonald’s we could find that was open 24 hours (thank you Google) was kinda hard to punch into the GPS. As I’ve mentioned before a lot of directions around here are relative, as in, they’ll get you relatively close….maybe.  So as not to overshoot the right road as we try and figure this out I pull over to the side of the street and put on my flashers while we tried to get it plugged into the GPS. Low and behold if not a minute or so later a car flashes its lights and begins to pull up next to us. I look into the rear-view and it’s a Carabinieri patrol car. Uh….fantastic.

Now let me be honest here, as I understand it the Carabinieri are the Italian Military Police but they police both military and civilian alike (there are two other kinds of police here too, one is municipal and the other I’m not sure) so my first though was, “oh crap, I’m a car pulled over near an airport being looked at by the Military Police…I’m not hungry anymore.”  As you can imagine I figured they’d be a little honked off that we were where we were so when they pulled up I put on my best “guy who really doesn’t know where he is just trying to find some food before I drive for an hour” face, which incidentally comes pretty darn naturally in this particular pickle I found us in. As they rolled down the window they asked us something in Italian at the speed to which we’ve become accustomed, which is unfortunately the speed at which I can only pick up a word or two more or less…mostly less. I wasn’t about to ask the guy to repeat it slower so I offered what little Italian my brain could muster at the moment and told them “I’m sorry, I’m not Italian, do you speak English?” ( I can guarantee you that in Italian it didn’t sound nearly that eloquent. Think more caveman and less Pierce Brosnan). Sadly, the answer was no. This is where the lowest common denominator comes in. Charades from inside a car is just about useless, so we had to stick to words. Words like “eat” (in Italian of course), GPS (I know, not a word, don’t go all grammar Nazi on me), and McDonald’s….BINGO! That’s all they needed to hear. “Oh, McDonald’s! Follow!”   As they pulled ahead I turned to Amy and asked, “did we just get a police escort to McDonald’s?” Sure enough, it wasn’t far away. After pulling into the parking lot we said thank you and they tried to tell us something else. He got out of the car to play charades to explain when I handed him my phone with Google translate up. He typed in what he had said and it was a warning about thieves. “Keep an eye on your car”, then he pointed at the luggage in the back. We thanked them again and they headed off back to their beat I guess. Three cheers to these two Carabinieri, good on you guys, you made my evening.

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