Price of Diesel in Italy

Today we went off and did research for some purchases for the new apartment.  We stopped at a Home Depot like DIY store called Leroy Merlin.  It is located in a mall near Prato which is close to Florence.  After we checked out Leroy Merlin we also checked out the rest of the mall including the huge Media World (think Best Buy). 

Then it was off to IKEA for lunch and a look around.  We know we need some bedroom furniture so we looked at dressers and wardrobes.  However, one cannot go to IKEA without looking at everything and we did get a few ideas for other items. On our way home we stopped at the Conte of Florence outlet store but it was all golf clothese.  Both of us have found nice things there before but it did not take us long today to decide there was nothing we wanted.

We needed to fill up the car today.  Our little Renault Clio has about a 12 gallon tank and takes diesel fuel.  Dom paid Euros 66 to fill it up and it was darn near empty.  So that meant we are paying approximately $8 a gallon for fuel.  We are lucky to have a diesel car as gasoline is even more expensive.  It makes $4 per gallon gasoline seem pretty reasonable.  We are even luckier to probably get about 40 miles to the gallon although we have not calculated the exact figure yet for this car.  Given the price of fuel here and the better mileage we are actually paying about the same here as we do in the U.S. on a per mile basis. 

The weather has been great the past few days and when we got home at about 5 pm it was warm enough to open the doors and windows and try to get some heat into the house.  It is still very cold at night so the combination of that and the house we are staying in having been empty most of the winter means it is tough to keep it warm.  Still the heat works and it does not take long to warm it up when it is turned on.

I think I have figured out how to email posts to the blog.  If you are reading this it worked.  Given our current lack of an on demand internet connection being able to do that is a real help.  It would certainly make it easier to do daily posts.  Unfortunately I don't think pictures are in the cards for a while.