Italy and Vicinity
For
our 2009 vacation, we decided to visit Italy. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with
the country would understand why this seemed like a good idea – Italy is
crammed full of history, culture, spectacular scenery and excellent food. It was also a destination our entire family
would appreciate – Philip and Connie would both be travelling with us this
time. We’d all visited Italy several
years earlier, and the kids seemed to have a good time, despite not knowing a
lot about most of what they were seeing.
They’ve since been fortified with California
public school educations, so it was possible they might know a little more than
they did then. On the minus side, Italy makes for a relatively
expensive vacation, particularly in the larger cities we planned to visit. And there’s this language they speak there –
it’s lovely but incomprehensible. It
also seems ideally suited to the “Italian attitude”, familiar to anyone who has
seen movies or TV shows featuring stereotypical Italians. We were looking forward to seeing it in
person, as there isn’t a whole lot of it to be found in Southern
California. As it turned
out, we found the movies and TV shows to be somewhat exaggerated. But only somewhat, and not always.
We
began our preparations early in the year.
We formulated an itinerary of three cities (Naples,
Rome and Florence)
over a period of 16 days, with train travel between the cities. Nella began a painstaking Internet search for
airfares and accommodations that would approach affordability. Bob started studying the language, using
books and CDs. At one point he attended
a beginning Italian class offered by the city.
Part way into Nella’s search, she discovered a cheap airfare from Naples to Venice. Venice
had been excluded from the itinerary because of its distance and expense. Nella also found some credit card points that
would help with the accommodations, and Venice
shortly found itself shoehorned into the itinerary. Bob looked into train tickets between the cities
(at the Trenitalia web site) and ordered tickets for all the necessary routes
(a la carte came out cheaper than any of the rail passes). Passports were all checked, and one
(Connie’s) was found to need renewal; this was applied for early enough to make
the expedite fee unnecessary. Visas were
found to be unneeded for Americans who would be taking a trip such as
ours. Nella was eventually successful
with her search for airfare and places to stay and made the necessary
reservations.
As
the departure date approached, last-minute preparations were taking place. The EasyJet commuter flight from Naples to Venice was found
to have a lower baggage allowance than our international flights (through Air Canada, as it
turned out), so we packed with this smaller allowance in mind. We thought it would be good to have some
Euros on arrival, so we purchased a small amount through the Auto Club (handy,
but a not-so-great exchange rate). We’d
heard about pickpockets in tourist areas throughout Italy
(Naples in
particular), so we took measures to make things more difficult for them. Connie found herself unable to locate her
camera, so we bought her a new one (a relatively inexpensive Canon A480), along
with enough SD storage for the trip. The
train tickets finally arrived in the mail shortly before the departure date,
but tickets for the arrival-date trip from Rome
to Naples were
not among them, leading to a certain amount of anxiety. But it was felt that tickets could probably
be bought on arrival, and that this might even be a better way to do things, as
exact arrival time of the flight would be difficult to predict.
In
the pre-dawn hours of June 16, people and luggage were loaded into the car and
transported to LAX. Part way there it
was discovered that Nella had forgotten her digital camera. But it was too late to turn around, so three
cameras would have to do. Plus a
high-def video camera and a Flip video camera (which Nella had not
forgotten). Well, maybe that is kind of
a lot of cameras.
Waiting at LAX | 
Waiting at LAX (SD Video, 7.6 MB) |
At
the airport, check-in and eventual boarding were accomplished without incident,
and an Air Canada jet took us to our one layover point – Toronto, Canada. We spent a number of hours in Terminal 1 of
the Toronto Pearson Airport, and spent the time eating lunch at Coyote Jack’s,
poking on the laptop (in Philip’s case) or Nintendo DS (in Connie’s case),
doing crossword puzzles (in Nella’s case), reading a book (in Bob’s case), or
looking at the origami creations on display (in everybody’s case).
Eventually
we boarded another Air Canada jet, and were taken through a shortened night and
across an ocean to the Leonardo da Vinci (or Fiumicino) Airport outside Rome.
Waiting for Takeoff | 
Aboard the Plane |
Downtown Toronto | 
Welcome to Italy |
