Summing Up - Part Two

Keep your eye on the tour guide totem to stay with the group and understand what you're hearing on your radio. Local expert Susanna's pink flag at St. Peter's Basilica.

Bus Touring - the good and the bad

Traveling on an organized bus tour has many benefits, some of which I've already mentioned: access to good hotels; travel itineraries that take you places you have no idea even exist. 

There are also nice logistical supports: the luggage is all taken care of; meals are either pre-arranged or recommendations are made for good places to eat. 

Rome's Local Expert Susanna, who took us through the Vatican, St. Peter's Basilica, the Colosseum and all the fountains and squares in the afternoon.

Our local expert in Pompeii, whose name, like Pompeii was for all those years, 
has been lost to history.

Patricia, our tour Director, explains the tattle slot in Verona.

The stars are the tour Director, the Driver and the "local experts" so called who help you appreciate what you're seeing.

Our tour Director, Patricia, and our driver, Salvatore, were wonderful. 

Salvatore was unendingly pleasant and kind. And, boy, could he drive that bus.

Patricia worked hard all day every day to make sure we knew what was going on, and that we were taken care of. One of the people on our tour had Parkinson's disease and travelled with a wheelchair. Every day, for every location, Patricia had an access route mapped out and a strategy to make sure he and his wife got the most out of their tour.

Patricia lives in Tuscany, just this side of Umbria, and her husband joined us for the final supper.

When I realized I'd forgotten our passports, Patricia did not hesitate; she called the hotel where I'd left them and helped me make arrangements to get the passports sent to our Florence hotel.

When I needed to find a doctor, Patricia made it happen. 

The "local experts" - who were for the most part named Anna, or Maria, or Anna Maria (only two of the guides - the ones in Pompeii and Capri - were men) - are people who answer the question "what do you do with a degree in art history?" But for Capri, where Stephano barely mailed it in, the guides were excellent: knowledgeable and passionate about their subject matter. Most of them were also funny.

The "best performance of a detailed local history" award goes to our guide in Milan. Using people in the group, she took us through an amazing 700 year chronology of the rulers of the region. Bruce was, very briefly, the King of France. It was hilarious with the added benefit of being accurate and true. 

The castle in Milan.

The less great side of being on a bus tour: 

• the schedule is unrelenting. We were up and out of bed every morning at five or five thirty. If we were moving on, we had our luggage out in the hallway by seven, had eaten breakfast and were ready to get on the bus by eight. 
• you spend a lot of time on the bus. Seeing sixteen cities in thirteen days means you have to travel the distance between those cities. Two whole days of the tour were taken almost entirely up in getting from point A to point B. 
• you're in a crowd no matter where you go. 
• you eat a lot of highway food.
• you live out of your suitcase for the duration.

Fellow travellers

Kim and I goofing around at the base of the "fat baby" statue in Pisa.

We were 50 of us on this trip, about half from the United States, eight from Australia, two from South Africa and the balance, 15, were Canadian, which is apparently a larger than normal contingent of frost backs for these tours.

Among the Canadians were the couple travelling with the wheelchair, three fun and loveable women from Ottawa celebrating 30 years of friendship, a nice couple from Nanaimo, and us, the Five Canadians, travelling together to celebrate a spate of 60th birthdays. 

Bruce and I are slow to get acquainted with people, and by the last day we were still struggling with names, but, I would say, overall, this was a lovely bunch.

I can say that because of how the group responded to the couple travelling with the wheelchair. One tour member, a fellow from San Fransisco who has had both of his hips and shoulders replaced, helped with the chair every day up and down cobblestone inclines, over giant curbs and even up and down short flights of stairs. 

We were all concerned and solicitous of the whereabouts and condition of the couple travelling with the wheelchair.  They were our group project, though Patricia and the man from San Francisco still did most of the heavy lifting, so to speak.

Included meals and food in general

I was hoping for great food in Italy. The highlights were, in no particular order:

• risotto with peas at the Hungaria Hotel in Venice, almost but not quite good enough to make me forgive them their sins
• caprese salad with farm fresh tomatoes and mozzarella made just before the meal and right before our eyes in Sorrento

• smoked fish antipasto at the "Be My Guest" dinner on Lake Maggiore
• pizza Margarita at the UNA hotel in Rome
• ravioli with pecorino and pear in butter sauce, Piazza Santa Croce, Florence
• ricotta and spinach crepes, San Gimignano

The tour package included breakfast every day, dinner at the hotel for about half of the evenings and the "Be My Guest" dinner. The "farewell dinner" outside of Rome was also included. 

Burano: like Venice but smaller, less crowded and more quaint.

There also were, at extra cost, special excursion meals - one at a farm house in Sorrento (where they made the mozzarella), one at a cafe in Burano (see above), and one in the hills outside of Florence. If I were to do this tour again, I would not choose the excursion meals: I don't need to eat that much food.

The bronze David overlooking Florence with a nice sky.

The included "eat at the hotel" meals were all fine. That said, after we tried the minestrone soup once, we never tried it again. I've already noted the fine risotto and peas in Venice. The lasagna for the pasta course at the Grand Hotel Dino was superior. The meat and potato courses at all the hotels were a lot like any meal prepared for a large group that you would get anywhere. 

For most of the tour, the breakfast buffets were perfectly OK. There was always lots of space in the dining room for us and any other groups visiting the hotel; there was lots of food and the table service was assiduous - staff kept the buffet stocked and the dining tables cleared and reset to keep up with the inflow and outflow of people eating breakfast.

Then we got to Florence. Everything that worked everywhere else did not work in Florence. There were too many people for the space available; the buffet was not restocked and the tables were piled with dirty dishes. 

This seemed very bad. 

Then we got to the Sheraton in Rome. A contingent of maybe a couple of hundred Chinese people all wearing blue windbreakers with the slogan "Lets Make History Together" on the back descended on the breakfast room. It was like Florence, only much, much worse. There appeared to be only one staff person working the entire room. At one point there was no food or even plates on the buffet, the "coffee" machine was completely depleted, not a single table had been cleared. 

Charter flight trans-Atlantic travel

If I were one of those rich people who ruin everything, I would only ever travel first class. Economy travel on flights over four hours is grim; it doesn't matter which airline you're on. 

The experience in the airports is just as bad. People travelling in the hundreds and thousands strain systems past capacity. It's wall to wall chaos.

As For Italy

The basilica in Milan

Until I travelled to Italy, I thought I lived in a country with pretty countryside, interesting geography and intriguing regional differences. With twice the population of Canada on a land mass about a quarter of the size of Ontario, Italy exists in a category of its own. 

The Italian landscape is spectacular, full of surprises, always beautiful. I rarely read on the bus because it was too much fun to look out the window. The many stops along the way and special tours were just as much fun.

All that marble needs to come from somewhere.

The view on the way to Positano on the Amalfi coast.

The creepy Madonna Grotto: Capri

We have abandoned saw mills in Ontario: they don't look like this.
Old saw mill in a river chasm, Sorrento.

Fishing boat on the lagoons outside of Venice.

Italian cities and towns are treasure troves of art and history. The artwork showed skills people don't have anymore. The fine craft has lost its patrons and will never find a mass market.
  

When the Vatican sends flowers: mosaic tabletop "thank you" from the Pope to the  Borromeo family.

I noted, without going along with, the spiritual content of a lot of the grandest artwork. I maintained my sceptical position, no matter how beautiful the art.

The holy spirit: St. Peter's.

The hand of god: Ravenna.

The hand of God / the Holy Spirit / a brisk wind at Assisi; chairs blown over at an ecumenical conference.

Most of all I was just taken with how pretty and old everything is in Italy. We have nothing to compare this with in Canada. 

A pleasing Venice prospect from the Grand Canal

"So we started digging and we found a whole other city": archeological excavation of an old city wall, including watch tower foundation in Verona.

"This is the stuff we put up high": far away artwork, Vatican Museum

A pretty sculpture inside St. Peter's: I observed to Bruce that humans just don't make this sort of thing anymore.

Recalling that the pretext for this trip was to do something for the three 60th birthdays - Bruce's, Kevan's, mine, in that order - happening between August 24 and September 23 2017, it's hard to imagine how we could have made a better choice for what to do.

Thanks for reading!

Karen