Monday, June 8, 2009

High Society (2009)


Jeanette and I recently (early May of 2009) vacationed for the first time in New Mexico. It was just about five weeks after I had rotator cuff surgery so I couldn’t drive and was still a tad weak. On Monday (thanks Dennis M. for the airport drop-off), we flew into Albuquerque at around noon and rented a car to drive up to Santa Fe. The drive was uneventful but the distant mountain scenery was majestic … peppered by nearer-by American Indian casino after Indian casino. Our destination was Bishop’s Lodge, a classy resort and spa a little north of the city. This turned out to be an ideal choice as it was quiet and solicitous … although I couldn’t avail myself of its many amenities. We were famished since no palatable food was offered on Northwest Air so, after unpacking, we set off to the nearby Tesuque (a local Indian tribe) restaurant, it having been recommended to us by our daughter, Rebecca (who was at this same locale one week prior, in fact staying in the same room at the Bishop’s Lodge.) This was also a good choice for its ambiance, margaritas and enchiladas … all putting us into a Southwest mood. It’s a little like a neighborhood bodega, bar, pizza place, restaurant rolled into one with a funky wait staff and lots of locals. Of course, it became an instant favorite that we returned to several times during our trip.

The next morning we “did” Santa Fe … starting out at its farmer’s market near the train station where we had a bite of breakfast … good coffee and day-old pastries. The market was a little sparse at this time of year, mostly notions, potions and long strings of chilies. Jeanette bought a few designer soaps for her office mates. There were also many (expensive) mescaline lettuce mixes which seemed surprising to me until I realized a few days later that salads were the food of choice in this burg. In fact, I think Santa Fe should be re-christened the “Salad City.” We next found our way to the International Folk Art museum where we had to wait for its 10:00 AM opening. The highlight of this museum is the Girard collection (in a separate wing), a mass of over 10,000 folk art items (one might even say tchotchkes) from around the world. Even though not all of these items might be considered great art, together the incredible numbers of them are overwhelming … there are dioramas with literally hundreds, if not thousands, of individual hand-made items. We took a docent tour of this wing which is highly recommended since none of the exhibits have any textual accompaniment. We next went downtown Santa Fe and viewed the magical spiral staircase at the Loretto Chapel – supposedly built without external supports by an iterant carpenter. It is basically a beautiful wooden spring that has, since its construction, been augmented for safety’s sake by internal steel supports. We next visited the Georgia O’Keefe museum to view a fairly complete synopsis of her love affair with the photographer, Edward Steichen, and Santa Fe. There were her famous labial flowers, her bleached-out desert skulls, her New York street scenes, and her Southwestern landscapes. I think I liked her generally unheralded landscapes best of all (see above). That night we ate again at Tesuque.

The next day we took the compulsory trip up to Taos – the art and skiing mecca of New Mexico. I say “up to” even though my researching on the internet says that Taos’s altitude is below that of Santa Fe’s. I didn’t realize that the altitude of Santa Fe was so high – 7,000 feet … which is much higher than that of Denver. Even Albuquerque, into which we flew, is at 4,958 feet high … slightly above Denver. Taos, where we traveled that day is listed at 6,952 feet above sea level … although; I think it is actually much higher, since it was there that I got a touch of altitude sickness … a cold sweat and shakiness. (And Los Alamos is the highest at 7,300 feet, but I didn’t get ill when we went there since it was a day later and I was more acclimated to these higher altitudes). We took the “high road” (Rtes 78, 518, etc.) to Taos (more head scratching here) and along the way we stopped at Chimavo where there is a church that is supposed to offer a healing dirt. This is a very interesting locale as it is festooned with literally thousands of makeshift crosses attached to trees, fences, and altars. Apparently the dirt must work … at least in the minds of the supplicants … since there are so many of these testaments to its healing powers and even many crutches left behind by those cured. Jeanette thought that this rustic church was one of the most beautiful she had ever seen … and she has seen quite a few. It was rough-hewn and decorated with much religious folk art (assumedly American Indian). I must admit its decor was charming. Even though I write cynically about this healing dirt – found at the bottom of a small pit in a church anteroom – we nevertheless brought back a small container (anyone want some?) Considering the amount of dirt that is carried away (one Mexican couple took about a peck of it), it must be replenished nightly from some less sacred source. There was also a raging river that runs nearby this church which is very impressive given the very arid nature of the surroundings.

I must confess that Taos itself was a bit of a disappointment. My expectation was for a tree-lined, well-manicured hamlet, much like Monterey, California. Instead we entered Taos on a four-lane highway flanked by Arby’s, Home Depot, McDonalds, and the like. The downtown itself is a little more charming … its air filled with many white puffs of cottonwood seeds … but still not up to my expectations. We ate a respectable lunch at the Taos Inn and then did some souvenir hunting at the many small shops in town. There is a lot of bad art in Taos … including in the museums. We did go to one of the better museums, The Harwood, and saw a few good pieces and lots of schlock. The upstairs exhibit featured not Edward Hopper but Dennis Hopper (think “Easy Rider”) whose art and photos were just a cut above the typical street art. It was about this time that I started to get woozy from altitude sickness so Jeanette drove me down to Santa Fe via the “low road” (Rte 68). Along the way we stopped at Buffalo Thunder, an Indian casino where Jeanette won $30 and I lost about $23 playing the nickel poker slots. Then we ate dinner at Gabriel’s, right north of Santa Fe on Rte. 84, where they served delicious margarita’s and made guacamole right at your table (hint: if you are just two people, ask for a half order). It was here and then that we heard, via cell phone from his brother, of the death of our dear friend, Russ Seymour. We drank a toast to him with our already-ordered margaritas. I don’t think we will every drink another one without thinking of Russ.

The next day we went to Los Alamos with a side trip to the Nambe pueblo (on its own reservation). Jeanette had an obsession about seeing pueblos until we realized that many were not ruins but actual small Indian living-and-breathing villages. This was the case with the Nambe pueblo. It was like driving into an adobe condo parking lot with signs warning “No Photos”. We quickly left there and drove on toward the Nambe waterfalls (same river that flowed by Chimavo). Noticing many 25 MPH speed limit signs, I urged Jeanette to be careful as I suspected that this was a source of revenue on this American Indian reservation. We eventually got to a toll gate before the water falls where we were notified that to proceed would cost $10 per person plus $5 for the privilege of taking photos. We quickly U-turned and slowly crept back to the main road. We then were finally on our way to Los Alamos. It’s a long drive up to this town with some nice scenic overlooks. Los Alamos itself is, I believe, prettier than Taos. We first went to another farmer’s market with many of the same sparse offerings. Then we ate at the Blue Window Bistro, a nice pick with lots of healthy menu choices.

Almost across the street we then visited the Bradbury Science Museum. (It is not named after Ray Bradbury but an early director of the Los Alamos Laboratory.) This is a must-see (and free) tourist destination that is worth a number of hours of reflective browsing … and don’t forget to watch the many short movies about the history of the town, the development of the Atomic bomb, and what the Laboratories have been doing since the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty – fascinating. They even have life-sized models of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima (Fat Man – uranium 238) and Nagasaki (Little Boy -- plutonium). But also take time to view the dozens of other informative science exhibits. Before leaving Los Alamos, we visited, on the advice of our son, George, the Black Hole, a bizarre shop with thousands of government surplus items from the Labs. (It is a little hard to locate, but certainly unique.) If you are electronically inclined you could also spend hours here. When we entered I asked if they had a surplus thermo-nuclear device. They didn’t find me funny. Interesting side bar – if you look up to the mountains surrounding this area you’ll see thousands of tree trunk spikes … the result of a controlled burn about 20 years ago that got out of hand destroying this forest and much of this section of town. Back in Santa Fe we enjoyed another cocktail hour of margaritas (we had previously bought the tequila and mix) and salsa chips. For dinner we went once again to Tesuque.

The next day, Friday morning, we went to a local flea market which was mostly devoted to Indian crafts – rugs, turquoise jewelry, woven baskets, etc. Jeanette did the circuit while I did a more leisurely stroll through a much smaller set of those booths being set up for the weekend. While visiting one booth I witnessed the following exchange – a bleached-blond woman of a certain age was inspecting some rugs when she asked an Indian up on a ladder (“Native American” to my PC friends), “Is this rug Indian … I don’t mean Indian, but (gently slapping her open mouth with her palm) woo-woo Indian.” The man on the ladder suffered this insult in stoic silence. We then went to Bandelier National Monument as Jeanette wanted to see a real ancient Indian pueblo. The road to Bandelier duplicates much of the way to Los Alamos, but eventually gets even more scenic and breathtaking. Again feeling a tinge of altitude sickness, I stayed behind watching an informative movie while Jeanette hiked up to the ruins. She said it was quite dramatic although she declined to climb the 18 ladders to the very top of the pueblos. On the way back we stopped again at Buffalo Thunder and donated a few more dollars to the tribe. Again to our room for our cocktail hour and then we went back downtown so that Jeanette could light some votive candles at the St. Francis Cathedral to our grandson, Stanley; Jeanette’s brother, Leo; our recently departed friend, Russ; and his son, Daniel. We ate a sumptuous dinner at the nearby restaurant, The Shed. Recommendation: make reservations first and also ask for any sauces on the side … they are very spicy.

Our last full day there, Saturday, we went to the Pecos National Monument, another pueblo that had been abandoned in the early part of the last century. It was recommended to us by someone we had met at the Tesuque restaurant (another salad eater). This pueblo had been donated to the U.S. government by that old actress Greer Garson and her husband. They must have also left an endowment because it was sumptuously maintained. I must confess it was not a highlight of our trip although I did enjoy a guidebook description of the early days of a dude ranch in the Pecos canyon. And on our last night there, after our in-room cocktail hour we ate a most delicious prime-rib dinner in the Bishop’s Lodge dining room. It was quite reasonable … they even comped us on our wine. We went to bed early since we had to get up early for our 8:30 AM flight out of Albuquerque. Unfortunately the Inn dropped the ball on our wake-up call so we were rushing all the way to catch our plane. (Fortunately, Jeanette had heard the birds singing and realized we had been forsaken.) Daughter Rebecca picked us up in Boston and deposited us back in Natick. Thank you again Rebecca.

Northern Exposure (2008)


Recently Jeanette and I had the good fortune to travel to Canada (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Cape Breton Island) with our old friends, Barbara and Terry Higgins. We went there to view the fall foliage and partake of the Cape Breton festival of fiddling, bag-piping, and step dancing called "Celtic Colours" (graphic is for this coming year). The reasons we agreed to this sojourn was that the Higgins had made this circuit three other times and know all the hidden jewels … and, most importantly, we had journeyed with them before (to Spain in 1975) and know that we are simpatico travelers. Our trip took twelve days and covered over seventeen hundred miles. Here follows a synopsis of the high points of our trip. Each grade [in brackets] is my opinion of the merit of each venue:

WEDNESDAY (October 8th, 2008)
We met the Higgins at the Starbuck's in Wellesley and took off north up Route 95. We saw the trees gradually progress from green to full autumn splendor as we crossed into New Brunswick, Canada at Calais, Maine. The ride up was smooth and punctuated with a litany of jovial recollections from our Spanish trip. We then progressed to St. Andrews, New Brunswick and checked into the St. Andrews Motor Inn [C+]. Later we ate at The Gables [C], a restaurant close by … nothing special. Try the fried clams … not the mussels.

THURSDAY (October 9th, 2008)
The next morning we took the Princess of Acadia car-ferry [C] over to Digby, Nova Scotia from St. John's. We had to take this ferry because the Cat ferry from Bar Harbor, Maine had ceased running early due to high fuel costs. We checked into the Harbour View Inn [B+], a charming B&B (run by Vince and Darren), a little off the beaten path in nearby Smith Cove. This was to be our base of operations for the next two days. It has comfortable rooms, tasty breakfasts, and a convivial atmosphere. After settling down, we took an afternoon car trip to Church Point wherein stands a huge stone church and, further on, an even bigger wooden church (both mind boggling). Each had been built circa 1900 in an apparent contest between neighborhood boat-building communities. Unfortunately, staggering maintenance cost may doom their futures. We stopped at the local Café Chez Christophe [A+] to make reservations for dinner but found that they were fully-booked due to a planned evening of live music. We cajoled our way into a 4:30 sitting which was a bit of luck. It was fantastic. Try the lobster Thermidor (if available). Another hint (which we later used to our advantage) … look for one or more "Best of Canada" stickers on the front door of restaurants you are contemplating.

FRIDAY (October 10th, 2008)
We spent the morning in Annapolis Royal visiting its Fort Anne [B+], (worth a visit) which had been held alternatively by the British and the French since the 1600's, and also did some souvenir shopping. We ate our lunch at the local Café Compose [A], run by an Austrian couple that offers wonderful seafood bisque and delightful Viennese pastries (a must with a cup of java). Next, off to Bear River, a community, because of extreme tides, that was built almost entirely on stilts. Our primary objective was the Flight of Fancy gallery run by Bob Buckland-Nicles, an engaging British ex-pat. (Bob is a post-graduate hippy who convincingly espouses all the sixties' love-not-war mantras. Later, I found out why -- the IRA had blown up a building near him in England. He was on the next plane to Canada.) This store features a wide variety of local arts & crafts … many of which we later saw at their source. If you get friendly with Bob (hard not to do), ask him to show you his landscape sandstones upstairs. We ate our dinner at a small café up the street, The Changing Tides [B]. It was a very good value with basic diner-food choices (try the coconut cream pie).

SATURDAY (October 11th, 2008)
After another tasty breakfast we departed Smith Cove for Mahone Bay. But first we went to the farmers market in Annapolis Royal to buy some of the local produce (apples, cider, cheese, etc.) Further on we stopped at Halls Harbor Lobster Pound [B] in Kentville for lunch … well worth a visit. Next, a pleasant drive brought us to Mahone Bay, a charming seaside village which was in the middle of its annual scare-crow festival. All over town were hand-made manikins dressed in all sorts of unusual clothes and posed in a wide variety of comical stances. We stayed at the Mahone Bay Bed and Breakfast [A] hosted by the glib John McHugh, a very entertaining and well rehearsed story teller. Hint: pay your bill in cash and save the Canadian hotel tax. At John's suggestion, we ate dinner at Cheesecake Gallery [B], a small café up the street. The food is good (better mussels) but the ambiance here suffers from an attempt to display a wide variety of brightly colored art on red-painted walls … a rather garish combination.

SUNDAY (October 12th, 2008)
After John's most stylish breakfast and some more of his entertaining stories, we took a short trip to Blue Rock, a nearby peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic. It has a unique geology comprised of a flint-like rock that has a blue cast and is all very rustic yet scenic. Don't miss it. Then we continued on to Lunenburg, a charming nearby seaside town with numerous craft shops and fine restaurants (many, unfortunately, not open on Sunday). As a result, we stopped at a nearby delicatessen for many tasty victuals which we took across the harbor for a scenic picnic lunch and some seagull feeding. When we returned to Mahone Bay there was a flea market in progress right across the street from our B&B. Barbara and Jeanette shopped while Terry and I lounged on the B&B's front porch. Later we took a short trip up a hill to the home and studio of Kate Church, a local artist. Kate is a rara avis. She is quite soft spoken yet very creative. Her commercial artistic thrust consists of small Ichabod-Crane-like "sculptural puppetry", a.k.a., "playful finery" that follow Kate's flights of fancy. By contrast, we were lucky enough to also be shown some of her upstairs paintings of lusty female nudes that are 180 degrees apart from her figurines. The contrast between Kate's two muses seems to me quite revealing. For dinner we ate at the Old Black Forest Café [A] outside Lunenburg, a German-American restaurant with all the German classics (except for potato pancakes and red cabbage). It is highly recommended both for the quality and quantity of its fare.

MONDAY (October 13th, 2008)
This morning we made the long drive to Cape Breton Island and stayed at a rustic B&B, Creignish Craftworks [C+], run by Sandra Kuzminski Buker … just a few miles beyond the causeway onto the island. Sandra, a free-spirit, artist, and sculptor, had fixed a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner of roast chicken with all the fixings for us and her other guests … also including her friend John Beardman, a New York artist and Cape Breton summer resident. He paints in the style of DeKooning and entertained us with many revealing stories of the vicissitudes of the New York art scene. That evening we enjoyed our (Jeanette's and my) first "Celtic Colours" performance. It was called "Generations" and was performed at the Community Centre in Judique, Cape Breton. It featured the Beatons (Kinnon, Andrea, Betty Lou); the Grants (Aonghas and Angus, fiddlers from Scotland); the Dewers (Marion, Allan, Joan); the MacMillans (Seonaldh Beag, Calum Alex, Gaelic singers from Scotland); and Doug MacPhee (a florid-faced piano player)

There is something mesmerizing about Cape Breton fiddle music, particularly when two or more players go at it. They play a jig refrain. Then they play this same refrain with a few variations. Then they play another permutation. Then another. Then, at some point, they repeat the whole sequence with, seemingly more changes and in an up tempo … changing from a jig to a reel. Then more hypnotic sequences even faster … till one's eyes begin to roll back in one's head. This goes on and on until, magically, they stop on a dime. How they all know when things are to cease simultaneously is beyond my observational skills. Even if step dancers are following this fiddled rondo, they also stop on some invisible cue. And they always do … and often with a little flourish … all very mesmerizing and entertaining.

TUESDAY (October 14th, 2008)
The next day we drove north to Inverness. On the way there we stopped at Mabou Mines. This is a little off the beaten path consisting of impressive gypsum cliffs and a small fishing harbor. We went fossil hunting on the beach and I found an ancient geode-like rock -- a brown stone shell containing a sand-like core (see my comments later under Parrsboro). We also stopped at a nearby sheep farm (Bellemeade) whose owner was very informative about sheep husbandry (including how to fend off coyotes). We then continued on our way and stopped for lunch at The Mull [B+] in Mabou. (It also had a "Best of Canada" sticker on the door.) We also stopped at the Glenora Distillery, a very pleasant building and tasting room. However, we just missed the distillery tour (on the hour) and decided not to stick around after asking the price for a bottle of its single malt whiskey -- $80. Even in Canadian dollars, this seemed a stretch.

We continued on and checked in at the Inverness Lodge [C], really a motel … a little on the skids. We ate dinner at the Coal Miner's Café [F], the very worst meal we ate on the trip. It's not even worth describing the gruel we were served. But, the evening was resurrected when we saw our next Celtic Colours performance, "Tribute to Mary Janet MacDonald," at the Strathspey Place in Mabou, Cape Breton. This performance featured lots of step dancing and honored Mary Janet MacDonald. Six of her seven children (one, a finalist in Canadian Idol competition) sang a number of songs to her (including "To Margaret's Eyes", a tribute to her mother and step-mother) … it was all very touching.

WEDNESDAY (October 15th, 2008)
The next morning we motored on to Baddeck, about half way up Cape Breton on the opposite coast. On the way we stopped at the Herring Choker [B] for a pleasant lunch and bought bread and cold cuts for dinner. We stayed the night at the Dunlop Inn [A], in Baddeck. The Dunlop Inn is a very comfortable B&B right on the water. Although there is no resident manager (it is owned by the Telegraph House) it is still well attended to. If one has some extra time in Baddeck, may I heartily recommend the Alexander Graham Bell Museum [A] where we went that PM. This is the locus of much memorabilia from this inventive Scot who dabbled in many technologies beyond the telephone -- the hydroplane, teaching of the deaf, animal husbandry, light wave communications, kites, and airplane controls. Its exhibits also bring video-taped insights into the Bell's summer home life and his devotion to his wife, family and scientific assistants, such as McCready who headed his hydroplane work. We next had our cold-cut dinner picnic before we went on to our final "Celtic Colours" performance, "Cellidh in the Glen" at the Glendale Parish Hall … featuring Calum & Seonardh MacMillan again, Colin Watson (with "jigging" or mouth music), Brandi MacCarthy, Dave MacIsaac, Brian Doyle (the MC and guitar player), and Ashley MacIsaac (piano player and fiddler extraordinaire … also known as "Cape Breton's bad boy") substituting for an ill Maybelle McQueen,

THURSDAY (October 16th, 2008)
The next morning we set off to do the Cabot Trail [A] (through the Cape Breton Highlands National Park). Normally, it is suggested to do this trip in a counterclockwise direction so you don't have to view things through oncoming traffic. However, due to a slight cases of acrophobia (the cliffs are often quite high) in our group, we did the reverse. On our way there we stopped at Larch Wood Enterprises [B+] in East Margaree to see (and buy) its beautiful larch wood cutting boards therein manufactured. We again picnicked as we entered the park, finishing up the remainder of the previous night's victuals.

The Cabot Trail itself is spectacular with numerous scenic overlooks interspersed with dense forests. That night we stayed at the Keltic Lodge [A], at Ingonish Beach, Nova Scotia. This is a grandiose luxurious resort hotel with manicured grounds and a massive main hotel (and a golf course for those who like to "take a good walk spoiled"). We stayed in one of the myriad of out-lodges with an anteroom complete with a fireplace (ask at the front desk to deliver your fireplace supplies). Our room was very comfortable if a little in need of a plumbing update. That night we ate in the large grill room with live Irish music, good drink/food, and a solicitous staff.

FRIDAY (October 17th, 2008)
The Keltic Lodge offers a sumptuous breakfast buffet with all the fixings. We asked our waitress if they offered Nova Scotia salmon. She said "yes" but it was extra. Somehow she managed to get us three orders without any further charge … about half of which we wrapped up with some bagels and cream cheese for a later lunch. As we exited the Park we stopped at "Sew Inclined" [B], a hat shop crammed full of finery hand-made by Barbara Longua (a touch expensive). You should give it a view. On the way back to Baddeck we stopped at the Gaelic College [B], in St. Ann's, Nova Scotia for a little souvenir shopping. Then we took a very circuitous route back to Baddeck through and near North Sydney and the Bras d'Or Lakes … culminating with a short ferry ride. We ate dinner the Telegraph House [B], Baddeck … to live piano music. W enjoyed an honest meal with coconut cream pie (again) for dessert. Our lodging for the night was at the Broadwater Inn [B] on the outskirts of Baddeck. It was the original home of McCready, the previously-mentioned Bell lab associate.

SATURDAY (October 18th, 2008)
We left that morning after an extended breakfast listening to the patter of John Pino, the owner of the Broadwater Inn. He told us numerous intimate anecdotes about the Bell family and the Grosvenors (of National Geographic fame). You should start him talking while you sip your coffee and enjoy details you never would hear at the Bell museum. It is clear that the Baddeckians loved the extended Bell families while at the same time sniggering at their numerous eccentricities. We started our long trip back from Cape Breton by traveling to Parrsboro, New Brunswick (on the Bay of Fundy and the home of the world's highest tides) where we stayed at The Maple Inn [A]. (Ask for the room with the steam shower.) This B&B is run by another Austrian couple with Teutonic efficiency and attention to details. On the way we stopped for lunch at Masstown Market (on Rte 104 near Truro) for fantastic seafood chowder and other sundry grocery shopping. In Parrsboro, our first stop was the Parrsboro Rock & Mineral Shoppe (Eldon George, proprietor). There I gave Mr. George, in exchange for identifying it, the "sandstone concretion" I had picked up in Mabou Mines. We then spent some time combing the nearby beach looking for agate, amethyst and other semiprecious stones. (We found none.) That evening we ate dinner at the nearby Trinity United church which was having a corn beef and cabbage communal dinner. The meal was cheap and delicious and the church folks were very warm and solicitous.

SUNDAY (October 19th, 2008)
We left Parrsboro early after a nice breakfast for the remainder of our long trek back home. Terry and I alternated driving the required 700 or so miles. We stopped at the Ganong Bros. [A]. a candy store in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, right before the border crossing back into the U.S. (don't forget your passports and driver's license) where we loaded up on caloric gifts for our friends (and a bit of self-indulgence). The rest of the trip was very tiring but we did find time to shop at the state liquor store in New Hampshire. Finally, we ended where we had started … at the Starbucks in Wellesley.

Thank you Barbara and Terry

Addenda
Four things occurred during our Canadian trip that made things even more palatable:
1) The U.S. dollar kept strengthening relative to the Canadian dollar … by about 10%!
2) The price of gasoline kept falling … by over 10%!
3) The U.S. stock market hit bottom (hopefully) and began its long climb back up!
4) The Canadian national elections took place and the liberals got trounced … go figure!

Vienna Sausages (2007)


Jeanette and I had been planning a three week trip through Austria and Hungary to celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary … a trip destined to be shortened by a week by bad weather and a punitive monetary exchange rate ($1.44+ per Euro.) Our 10/16/07 flight to Vienna was uneventful other than the traditional torturous terminal transfer at London's Heathrow misty airport. When we finally soddenly settled in our hotel in Vienna, I took a nap while Jeanette reconnoitered the neighborhood … returning with some semi-sweet Tokay wine, delicious local grapes, crackers, and good Austrian cheese. We eventually went out to dinner in the rain to a lovely Viennese restaurant which Jeanette said had “the best profiteroles (cream puffs made from small, round baked choux pastry filled with a sweet filling) since her father had baked them.” I managed to stop up their toilet (pushing the small button instead of the large one) causing much travail by the staff. As a consequence, much as Jeanette wanted later to go back there again, we were precluded by my embarrassment.

The next morning I went out to get some delicious Viennese pastries to enjoy with our awful self-brewed hotel coffee. (We eschewed the hotel breakfast costing 15 Euros, or about $22 apiece.) On our first full day in Vienna, we took a bus/boat tour of the city. It was still raining and quite dismal … as it was for virtually our entire trip. Both Jeanette and I were jet-lagged and so tended to doze off when our guide was speaking in Austrian or French or Spanish or Italian or German. Vienna is lauded as one of the top ten beautiful cities in Europe, but you couldn't count on us to support this ranking. It suffers from a surfeit of graffiti … to the point of distraction. Even though, individually, some of this graffiti is quite artistic, overall it comes across like flies on a wedding cake. We saw the opera house, Einstein's house, Beethoven's house, Mozart’s house, the Vienna Woods, St. Stephens’s Church and took a boring cruise on the Danube River. At the end of this tour we were taken to a post-war urban housing project designed by a local socialist artist. Each apartment unit in this project had the right to decorate its façade to its owner's taste. The result was a wide variety of colors and architectural styles. Although, our guide and the city fathers were proud of the result (a diversity celebration), to me it looked more like a dog's breakfast. I mistakenly said so and thus created another set of Europeans who hate Americans.

The following day (raining again) we took the train to Salzburg. (The difference between first and second class Austrian train accommodations is de minimis so don't be tempted to spend the extra Euros.) Salzburg itself was quite beautiful, even in the rain, and it is rated very highly in European travel guides. But it seems to have suffered from this popularity since the old city is a bit like Rodeo Drive, one expensive (and empty) boutique after another. One night we ate at a small bar across from our hotel. Two things you can't get easily in Austria are real German sausages (bratwurst, weisswurst, etc.) and cooked red cabbage. When you ask for sausage, you get two hot dogs sans buns with a big dollop of mustard, some finely grated fresh horse radish and maybe a roll. Natives eat theses frankfurters with their fingers and, when I cut my roll in two and inserted the dog, everyone immediately knew I was an American.

We saw the city Citadel and Jeanette visited the local castle (while I slept) but our best viewing was the Salzburg museum. It had a very clever exhibit of preening photos of many of the early residents ("All in the ground." was my comment) with an antique chair where you could take your own photo and then e-mail it (free) with a short message to friends anywhere in the world. (This was an excellent use of available internet technology … replacing that old boardwalk photo booth. I wonder how many other such entrepreneurial innovations could arise out of what internet technology today offers?) It was after two days of sightseeing, shopping, and unrelenting snow and rain in Salzburg that we decided to cut our trip short by a week.

Our last morning in Salzburg we took the first trip with our new rental car to the salt mine (Salz Welten) after which Salzburg is named and which funded the boom in this region hundreds of years ago … with an interim stop at the palace of the archbishop who plundered the benefit from this mine. His palace was located in Hallein (the Celtic word for salt and a town about 15 kilometers south of Salzburg.) It was a fashionable mustard colored mansion with impressive two and a half foot wide floor boards, but no remaining furniture. This mine itself is located in the Bavarian Alps above Hallein. As we drove there it started to snow again and as we climbed up to the mine entrance the weather worsened. Fortunately, we found the mine without incident and signed up for the tour amid a group of Indian software engineers working in nearby Germany. First, the tour required that we wear, over our street clothes, a full covering of white overalls and tunic. Next, about 30 of us straddled benches on a series of thin tram cars which then whisked us deep inside the mountain. Our guide spoke in Austrian, German, and English so there was quite a bit of standing around waiting your language's turn. (She was surprised when I told her that "halide", like the name of the nearby town, was another English word for rock salt.) The mine itself was fascinating. It had wooden slides that we sat astride and slid down to lower levels and a shallow lake across which we rode on a big barge. (We even briefly crossed the border into Germany many meters underground.) For centuries the salt (mixed with various impurities) was dug out and transported out whole. Later on it was dissolved in water and piped down to Hallein in wooden pipes where it was then boiled back down to rock salt. This was economical due to the plentiful supply of wood from the nearby forests.

One of our real joys at our Salzburg hotel was its hot chocolate. Every afternoon (and some breakfasts) we would enjoy a delicious frothy cup of this deep, rich treat. And our last meal in Salzburg was our best … in a family-owned Greek restaurant. I had tender, moist grilled octopus and Jeanette, souvlaki, and we both had Greek salads. We finished with baklava. The next day we started back toward Vienna in the snow with the intent to spend a few days doing some interim sightseeing and getting to know Austria.

Our first soggy stop was Bad Ischi where the summer palace of Kaiser Franz Joseph and his wife Elisabeth ("Sissi," actually his first cousin) was visited. It was named Villa Schratt for the Kaiser's actress mistress. There was no English language tour so we tagged along on a German tour with the help of some English text. The Kaiser was an avid hunter as witnessed by thousands of chamois horns mounted all over the walls. A chamois is about the size of a large dog and resembles a goat. I know this only because the Kaiser's 5,000th chamois was stuffed and stands in his gun room. The palace itself was quite palatial (again painted in what was apparently a very popular color once -- mustard yellow.) It was two stories of many large rooms filled with gorgeous furniture, museum-quality paintings and sculptures, many family mementos, and of course, mounted chamois horns. It also contains the death mask of Elisabeth who was killed by an Italian anarchist (stabbed) when she was in her late fifties. The Kaiser outlived Sissi by 18 years to the chagrin of the local chamois clan.

Then, on our way back to the autobahn, we went to Ghunden to see its famous pottery manufacturer. This was a mistake. (Barbara and Terry, think Alba de Tormes.) After parking and climbing (on foot and in the rain) a very long hill, we finally found the pottery outlet. The pottery itself was rather pedestrian but compensated for this by being very expensive (over $40 for a dinner plate). We busted out of this burg and fled to Melk where Jeanette wanted to stay the night. Our best meal by a country mile was at a small restaurant (Tom's Restaurant) in our hotel (Sadt Melk) … literally in the shadow of the famous (and enormous) Melk Abbey. We started with a complimentary pate and broiled goose liver. We each had a cold glass of local dry white wine (never available in the U.S.) Next Jeanette had duck comfit (slowly simmered deep in its own fat) with tasty potatoes croquettes and the best sauerkraut I've ever tasted. I had broiled veal cheeks (yes, you read me correctly) and a delicious mushroom risotto. The veal was far tenderer than even the best filet mignon and it had a nice contrasting broiled crust. We finished this glorious repast with a creamy chocolate mousse. The next (rainy again) morning we visited the Abbey. It was very well maintained and most impressive … full of jewel-encrusted relics and tens of thousands of illuminated manuscripts. Then we briefly visited the boyhood home of the artist, Oscar Kokoschka, in nearby Pochlarn. There was only one original O.K. painting there and a number of mediocre lithographs … not really worth this side trip.

Jeanette had decided that Bunderland, south of Vienna, would be a good chance for us to warm up and dry out. Not a chance. Our first destination there was Rust (pronounced Roost), a town on the Neusiedl See, a big lake near the Hungarian border. I don't know how I talked Jeanette into it, but we spent two nights there in a hostel. At 44 Euros a night it was less than half the cost of most of the other hotels we had stayed at up to then. The accommodations were in fact equivalent to a hotel and the breakfast was scrumptious. Since we were the only guests, the owners were very solicitous. The next day we drove around the lake to Ilimitz intending to stop for some wine tasting along the way. We were too optimistic. For whatever reason … the weather or the season … we found only one tasting room open, Wein Werk in the town, Neusiedl am See. I got a gratis cup of espresso and Jeanette bought only one small bottle of ice wine.

The next drizzly day we drove back to Vienna, dropped off our car (with great gnashing of teeth), took the train to Budapest, and settled into our very nice hotel, Zara. When we had changed our reservations there we lost the great room rate that Jeanette had previously negotiated. Fortunately the desk clerk was very accommodating (excuse the pun) and, instead of 120 euros a night for three nights, we ended up paying only 70 euros … quite a savings. On our walk-around that evening we found that we were quite close to the Central Market, a huge steel building containing a remarkable conglomeration of private booths that sold all sorts of foodstuffs, paprika, flowers, and Hungarian crafts.

Budapest was originally created by a merger of two ancient towns on opposing banks of the Danube River, Buda (the hilly area) and Pest (the flat area). (Natives pronounce this city's name is a very idiosyncratic way buda-pescht.) The medium of exchange in Hungary is the forint (we called them Floridas) and the rate is roughly 185 to the dollar … although they had recently strengthened against the dollar (of course). This caused confusion since everything was priced in thousands of Floridas and shifting decimal points is not an easy exercise for a calcifying brain. The high point of our Budapest visit for Jeanette was the Gellert baths (a huge Romanesque spa and hotel across the Liberty Bridge from our hotel). There we spent a relaxing morning (bathing suited) in a series of warmer and even warmer therapeutic pools and a finally a steam room. Jeanette concluded our visit with an herbal message which she said was the best she ever had. While I waited for her to finish this indulgence, I soaked in the medium-hot pool. Across this pool, an attractive middle aged woman kept eying me. She then paddled across the pool to about ten feet away, and finally sidled up next to where I was sitting. When I had made no move on her after a few minutes she got up and left. But I did conclude that, despite my advancing age and receding hairline, I still got it! (Either that or she was a working woman.)

The next day we were to take a bus tour of Budapest but there were demonstrations in the city celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising … which precluded this jaunt. So instead we took a boat ride on the Danube River. This was, to me, the highpoint of our Budapest experience … far better than the equivalent one in Vienna. There was less graffiti, the guides were more gracious, the sights (particularly the Parliament building) were more impressive, and we were even served complimentary beverages and fruit cups. The following overcast (no rain at last!!) day we did get in the bus tour which was very intense -- Elisabeth Square (the very same wife of Austria's Kaiser Franz Joseph who was simultaneously the King of Hungary), the Royal Palace Hill, Heroes' Square, the Citadel, Castle Tunnel, etc. Our guide on this bus tour spoke very fast in order to describe everything in English, Hungarian, French and German so invariably her English description of a landmark was not coincident with the place itself. This was disconcerting and there was also a bitter undertone to her travel log -- to wit, that Hungarians were getting the short end of the European Economic Community stick (in the opinion of the London Financial Times because Hungary was too slow to shake off its socialist shackles.) We chose to tour the Parliament Building on our own (despite our tour guide's admonishment that we had only a 1% chance of getting in.) This building was, to my mind, a cathedral to secularity. It was spectacularly beautiful and very well maintained!

Sunday morning we returned to Vienna by train. (We probably should have gotten creative and taken the boat back to Vienna … on the Danube.) It was again raining … hard. But Jeanette insisted that we visited St. Stephen's Church and do a once again around the city's opera district. (She lit a candle at St. Stephen’s like she had in every other church and cathedral we had visited … this time, I think, to our former dog, Maggie.) The next day, Monday, we left to return to the U.S. in a Vienna cab driven by a Polish ex-patriot. He and Jeanette conversed in Polish for most of the damp trip to the airport. She said it was all about his family and his experiences in Austria, but I suspected it was more about what a complainer I had been on our trip. When we got to hellish (but sunny) Heathrow, there was a bit of a festive atmosphere as the New York Giants football team was roaming around the terminal in logo-ed Giants gray sweat suits … having trounced the Miami Dolphins the day before in London in a regular-season NFL game. They were graciously signing autographs and posing for pictures with American fans and Limey gawkers. I was able to learn how the Patriots and Colts had done the previous day since neither CNN nor the BBC deemed to supply such info. We finally arrived back in the U.S., grabbed our luggage, went through customs, and were whisked back to Natick. Unfortunately in my haste, I grabbed the wrong suitcase for Jeanette and had to return to Logan Airport the next day to rectify things. I guess I know now why people put all kinds of odd colored belts around their baggage.

And so to bed-a-pest.

SLO Motion (2006)


For those of you who are not West-coast hip, SLO stands for San Luis Opisbo, a town on the central California coast about sixty miles north of Santa Barbara and twenty miles south of Hearst Castle. Jeanette and I recently visited there for a brief holiday with our kind friends, Liz and Russ Seymour. (Actually, the Seymour's new home is in Arroyo Grande, about eight miles south of SLO.) Here follows a long … and possibly boring synopsis of our trip:

FRIDAY
Jeanette has never seen Los Angeles, so we started our tour with a very pleasant Midwest Airlines flight to Lala Land. (Rebecca had driven us to Logan airport.) I convinced Jeanette that our sightseeing tour of LA should not occur on a weekday (freeway shootings, traffic jams, and all that) but rather upon our return, the following Sunday. So, in our Budget compact, we scooted up Rte 101. Along the way we passed the town that was devastated by mudslides this spring, past Vandenberg Air Force Base (Liz and Russ can see nighttime rocket launches at Vandenberg from their back deck), and, near Santa Barbara, lots of off-shore oil derricks. In about four hours, we found the Seymour abode easily with the help of Mapquest.

The Seymour's home is quite large and fancy. It is of the hacienda style located in a gated golfing development overlooking the Pacific Ocean in the distance. Pizzazz! After settling in at the Seymour’s we ordered out for pizza delivery. The pies were just OK but they made up for it by being extremely expensive. When I asked the delivery boy for an explanation, he said "gourmet ingredients." I took this to mean that the sausage was made of chopped up gourmets.

SATURDAY
This morning Liz had scheduled a yard sale of much of the Seymour detritus accumulated during and since their move from Seattle. Jeanette and I helped out with the pricing, arranging, and sales. I exhibited a little too much hucksterism and was relegated to helping load buyers' cars with various and sundry purchases. Liz did net almost $300 though. We then went out for a Liz-treated lunch at an earthy-crunchy deli in an old corrugated tin warehouse out in the nearby country -- very good victuals. We also stopped briefly at a tiny town called Harmony, famous for its ceramics and blown glass. Both these stops were steeped in the ambience of neo-hippydom.

We spent the rest of the afternoon at the Farmer's Market in Arroyo Grande. This was a unique experience with plenty of free samples -- juicy orange slices, fresh strawberries, homemade salsa, guacamole, and taco chips, olives, artichokes, etc. There was a very large Mexican presence at this market. They seem quite an energetic group. We came home laded with farm goodies to add to a delicious homemade meal also courtesy of Liz.

SUNDAY
This day was devoted to a trip up to Santa Cruz to see Danny (the Seymour's son) and his new bride, Angelina. (Does anyone remember that old ditty "Home Again Angelina”? Everyone looks at me cross-eyed when I claim there is such a song … even Danny … who is a disc jockey in his spare time.) On the way up Route 1 we stopped at Cayucos to do some antiquing and a nice lunch at Schooner's Wharf. We next stopped to see the elephant seals just north of the Hearst Castle. As we wound our way past Big Sur we stopped at a gas station for some bottled water. The price of gasoline there was $4.00 a gallon! It soon will be cheaper to fill your tank with cheap vodka. Then the severe geography flattened out as you pass Monterey. Danny and Angelina have a cute apartment overlooking the ocean in Capitola, a Venice-like village near Santa Cruz. Angelina made a lovely dinner for us. The trip up Route 1 took over four hours. The return trip, back down Route 101, took about half that.

MONDAY
This day Russ took us on a wine tasting tour to the Edna valley. In his spare time, Russ gives such tours for $100 per head (Back Roads Tasting). Most of the vineyards we visited were around Paso Robles and Cambria. One was run by an old B-movie star and his ex-Miss America wife. In general the wines were expensive ($20 to $30 per bottle) and nothing to do hand stands for. We had lunch at Panolivo, a nice little French bistro in Paso Robles. Russ ended this tour with a car ride on the beach at Oceano (next to Pismo Beach). Pismo was once thought to be the furthest north beach in California where one could swim (before the age of wet suits). This was a real experience. This beach is wide, long, and beautiful … where visitors drive the RVs right on the beach and park overnight (or longer). There are also vendors there renting Hummers, dune buggies, motorcycles, etc. right on the beach. Some groups go there with convoys of RVs and park them in a circle around a bonfire -- just like Conestoga wagons. Oh to be young and carefree again! We had dinner at Adriano's, a neighbor of the Seymour’s across the street. He was the one who had previously lent us his condo in Portugal -- a real sweet guy.

TUESDAY
Earlier, Jeanette and I decided that we should give Liz and Russ a few days respite from our house invasion. When I ask Russ for a suggestion for a side trip and he suggested Yosemite. Bingo! Neither of us had seen this ecological icon, so we left this AM to travel there. Yosemite (as a kid, I pronounced it yos-MITE) is about 200 miles ENE of SLO so we had a long trip through California's central valley. This seems to be mostly raisins, walnuts, cattle and almonds country -- with miles and miles of vineyards, pastures and orchards. The geology of this region is also curious. You first traverse rocky hill country just East of the coast. (Paso Robles, the town there, is Spanish for "Pass through the Rocks.") Then there is a very large pancake-flat plain before the hills start again around Fresno, which then soon graduate to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The reason for the curious character of this geology is that we know that the Pacific tectonic plate diving under California is creating these mountains. But then how and why the big central plain?

On the way to Yosemite we ate at In-and-Out Burgers (which Russ had touted to us). It is clearly superior to our East coast fast food with everything cooked to order. (Try the grilled onions on your burger). Anyhow we arrived at the Wawona lodge, a turn-of-the-century hotel built for Teddy Roosevelt, inside the National Park around 2:00 PM and got settled. We then started out to go to the Yosemite Valley -- about 25 sinuous miles over the first mountain range. On our way down into the valley, we hit a snowstorm that seemed to grow increasingly dangerous. So we turned around and crept back to our hotel. There we had a few Manhattans, a delicious meal, and went back to our bathroom-less room for a fitful sleep.

WEDNESDAY
Jeanette and I spent this day in Yosemite Valley. By the time we got there (around 11 AM) there was no more snow to be seen. We took a bus tour of the valley to see the famous Ansel Adams stops (El Capitan, Yosemite Falls, etc.) One impressive fact: El Capitan is about three times the height of the Empire State Building … and hundreds of times more massive. Our tour guide said that it was the largest granite structure in the world, but my recollection is that this honor goes to Ayer Rock in Australia. Moreover, our tour guide's delivery was so soporific that Jeanette and I wasted the last hour of the tour snoozing away sandwiched between two Japanese couples taking pictures. Yosemite Valley is quite awe-inspiring, but, to me, it was far smaller than I expected. From the Ansel Adams photos, I had gotten the impression that its area was quite vast. But, it is only one and a half miles wide and about six miles long (only about 1% of the entire Yosemite Park). So one is sightseeing straight up most of the time as opposed to being able to digest the entire vista from afar.

Another thing struck me. Our government is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars (perhaps millions) restoring the meadows in Yosemite Valley to their original swampy condition. Our guide told us that such swampy meadows purify the water that eventually ends up in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Excuse me! If these meadows represent less than 1% of Yosemite and Yosemite itself is but a small fraction of the total wilderness area of the Sierra Nevada range, then the water filtered in these meadows must be but a few drops of the millions of gallons of potable water drunk in coastal California. This is clearly tree hugging gone berserk.

We lunched at the Ahwahnee Hotel (Cobb salads with bay shrimp … yum!). We would have tried to stay there except it was about four times as expensive as the Wawona. However, it would have been worth it. It is an exquisite, massive stone structure built in an Indian motif with lots of theme textiles, leaded glass, and paintings. That evening we had another Mexican dinner in Gold Course, a town a few miles outside the park, and gambled in an Indian casino nearby. I won $100 on the nickel slots (four duces). I keep kicking myself that I wasn't playing the quarter or dollar slots.

THURSDAY
The next morning, after a hearty breakfast at the hotel, we got an early start back to Arroyo Grande. We stopped for lunch at the famous Madonna Inn, a few miles north of SLO. It is the epitome of kitsch. Pink dining room, a waterfall urinal in the Men's room, and waitresses dressed like Heidi at Hooters. On the way out we saw a notice that the Madonna Inn was being sold … so bad taste DOES have a half-life. That afternoon we went to the farmer's market in SLO. It was a bigger version of the Arroyo Grande one. We had drinks and bar nibbles at Mother's tavern then meandered among the sundry booths of goodies. I bought fresh morel mushrooms for son George and Mission figs for his wife Anne. And Russ bought another flat of delicious fresh strawberries that had been picked in the fields below the Seymour house. (We had seen these very same berries being picked a few days before. The Mexican workers are paid on a piece basis so you saw them running back to the truck with their pickings and then back with empty flats. On that evening, I think it was Monday, we could hear them singing in Spanish and laughing in their transient quarters -- kinda like a scene from "Gone with the Gringos.") Later that farmers-market evening we had tri-point roast beef sandwiches, BBQ, and home-brewed beer at Firestone's, a real funky college hangout in SLO. Delicious!

FRIDAY
We spent most of this day in Santa Barbara with the Seymours. It is a very lovely town but, to me, somewhat overrated. (The median home price there is over a million dollars.) We stopped at the Santa Barbara mission and the Biltmore hotel (a little hard to find but quite fancy). Before we returned home we had dinner at Jockos, about 10 miles inland from Arroyo Grande. This is a sight to see --- two-inch high pork chops and spectacular steaks, all cooked on a huge charcoal grill taking up an entire back room. It is crowded with cowboys and bikers (kinda archetypal Americans). We sat at the bar and downed many Jack Daniels sours and local wine. We then pigged out (of course) on most everything they offered ... including sweetbreads!

SATURDAY
In the morning Russ took me to see his hobby -- large-gage model railroading. There is about a two-acre layout of these trains only a few miles from his home. We stopped to see this landscape with tunnels, trestles, roundhouses, etc. All the informal club members here must work on the components. Russ has helped with some of the landscaping and restored the roof of a water tower. Next I saw something quite remarkable. A friend of Russ builds these trains from scratch. Russ took me to his modest home where, in the living room, were a hand-made boxcar and a locomotive tender -- both the size of a large coffee table. But in the garage was the piece de resistance, a steam locomotive the size of two coffee tables. Everything on this engine worked and was to scale. Even the sand dome on the roof had miniscule glass beads (small sand) that were fed through copper plumbing to give traction to the drive wheels. This engine has taken three years to get to this stage and may take another year before it's done. The client is the former CEO of Continental Airlines and its price tag will be about $250,000. This builder friend was given a bonus of a month's trip to England with his wife when he first agreed to take on this commission.

Then Russ took us all to the See valley for a little more wine tasting. At the Kelsey vineyard we tasted the best wines of the trip -- a sparkling Syrah and a port -- both of which are experiments (not even labeled). I hope to buy a case of the sparkling Syrah when it is ready. Next Russ took us on a "Sideways" tour (from the recent movie of the same name). We went to Los Olivos (near Santa Maria) where the women shopped and the men sat in the shade. We had lunch at the Side Street Café. (Try the endless bowl of chili soup.) Then came San Ynes (where Michael Jackson pursues his passions at Neverland). We visited the San Ynes Mission there and copped a free tour. (California's 28 missions occur about every 25-30 miles -- a day's trip on a horse -- all the way from San Diego to above San Francisco.) We then drove through Sovang -- a community dressed up as a Danish village -- weird! While driving back to Route 101 we passed the Hitching Post (from the movie) but chose not to stop and gawk.

SUNDAY
We started out for Los Angeles around ten o'clock in the AM. We stopped on the other side of Santa Barbara at a small surfing town called Carpinteria for lunch. We chose the restaurant with a line standing outside (Esau's Café). The food turned out to be sophisticated and quite good. I had lox with capers and red onion on a toasted bagel with cream cheese. And Jeanette had delicious BLT with avocado. There clearly is a California style of eating -- herb tea, pita bread, apple-smoked bacon, avocado, sprouts, tomato, and lots of other fresh ingredients.

We exited route 101 in Woodland Hills at Mulholland Drive. We then followed Mulholland Drive south toward LA, hoping to get into Beverly Hills. However, there seems to be two Mulholland Drives because this one petered out in a dirt fire road high in the hills overlooking Los Angeles. We retraced and got back on 101 South and after about ten miles got back on the other Mulholland Drive … in Beverly Hills. As we wound our way through Beverly Hills we saw the stately decay of what once was the playground of Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Carol Lombard, and their ilk. Seeing a yard-sale sign we stopped to find out that Beverly Hills junk is just the same as Natick junk. Groping our way toward Hollywood, we turned down Sunset Boulevard. When we got to Grauman's Chinese Theater, I don’t think I have ever experienced a more depressing place. It looked like the exercise yard at San Quentin mixed with the bar scene from the original Star Wars. I truly believe Hell can't possibly be any worse. Santa Monica followed and then we did Venice Beach. This latter "tourist" spot looked a lot like Grauman's, only with sand, exercise equipment, and more (visible) tattoos. This was followed with Marina Del Rey where we fittingly ended our trip with another Mexican meal avec Margaritas. After we dropped off the rent-a-car, we stayed the night at the Airport Hilton -- a better deal you won't find anywhere ($50 a night through Priceline). It was, believe it or not, quiet and quite plush.

MONDAY
We had another pleasant but daylong Midwest Air flight back to chilly Boston where son George picked us up in Jeanette’s wagon. After dropping him off, we returned to Natick … and so to bed.


Thank you Liz and Russ!

The Rain in Portugal (2004)


Believe it or not, this trip account is being written at the request of a reader of my last year's tome on our travel to Tuscany. (I’ll try to shorten it this year though.) As is becoming our custom, Jeanette and I did another sojourn this year -- this time to Portugal. We were offered (and gratefully took) the opportunity to accompany our good friends from California, Liz and Russ Seymour, to Portugal. The Seymours live near SLO (San Luis Obispo to the illiterati) and one of their neighbors had offered his condo in Viana do Castelo, Portugal to them for the donut. It fortunately had two bedrooms so we were given the extra one. So free housing combined with free air travel (frequent-flyer miles) was too much for us to resist. Our trip there only lasted ten days (including air travel) but we managed to "do" a great deal of north and central Portugal as well as a bit of Northwest Spain. My expectation going-in was that Portugal would be somewhat behind Tuscany in terms of sophistication and amenities. As we shall see, this was an erroneous assumption.

The flights to and from Portugal via American Airlines and British Airways were reasonably uneventful and much more enjoyable than last year's odyssey. The only complaint I have is that the transfers in London's Heathrow airport seem unnecessarily time-consuming and nerve-racking. Going over, we had to transfer from terminal #3 to terminal #1 and the reverse on the way back. This involved a long walk, a long bus ride and then another long walk. Since these are all international flights, it would seem that such London connections could be located closer together. Also, on the way over, after much travail, we assembled in terminal #1 waiting for British Airways to get the gate number for our flight to Lisbon. Posted all around were signs warning that it might take twenty minutes to reach your gate. When, twenty minutes before our flight was to leave and our flight’s gate was still not posted, I had a mini panic attack. Going to the information booth, I got the royal run-around. Needless to say, I did little to promote the U.S.'s image among the Brits. (A Canadian man about my age also had a hissy fit over this same issue.)

Tuesday, Oct. 21: When we arrived at the Lisbon (Lisboa) airport we had to wait for our friends coming in on a later flight from London. We had a brutal lunch at a cafeteria in a haze of cigarette smoke (as it was all over Portugal). I grabbed the International Herald Tribune to do the X-word puzzle and see what the Euro-peons were saying about the U.S. (It wasn't good.) When our friends arrived, we rented an Avis car (an Audi) and Russ drove us up to Viana do Castelo on what appeared to be a new 4-lane super highway. I couldn't drive since I was jet-lagged to the point of stupor. Russ had been in England with Liz for a few days so he wasn't similarly afflicted. It took about four hours to make this trip so our first day in Portugal was pretty much shot. We settled into our condo (hint: don't start to raise outside shutters until you unlatch them first), and then went out to dinner at a nearby restaurant. The menu consisted mostly of spit-roasted meats (mostly beef and goat) that generally defied recognition. When I told Liz that one offering was probably goat testicles, she lost most of her enthusiasm for this repast. Needless to say Jeanette had flan for desert (which she had most meals in Portugal.) Portuguese flan turned out to be different from Spanish flan in that it is much firmer and not as sweet.

The next day (Wednesday, Oct. 22), after I went shopping for provender at a nearby mega-market (think Wal-Mart), we enjoyed a very yellow-yoked egg and lean bacon breakfast before setting out in intermittent rain for northwestern Spain, (Vigo) only about 40 miles away. We got a late start (jet lag again), but on the way we stopped at the Portuguese equivalent of a flea market at Vila Prale de Ancora, a little north of our home base. There we bought some ceramics and then wound our way up into Spain. I say "up" since the terrain rises from coastal plain to piedmont. The actual country boundary is the river Rio Minho that runs between the high foothills. Then it is superhighway all the way to Vigo. Vigo is a medium sized city located above a large harbor on the Atlantic. We parked the car underground and proceeded down a long hill toward the docks. After much window shopping and picture taking we stopped for a pleasant coffee. The walk back up the hill was a little daunting since I am woefully out of shape and Russ has serious heart problems. Being too early for dinner (Spain is an hour behind Portugal) we started back toward Viana. We passed trucks loaded with cork bark from cork oak trees, a product whose use may be on its way out. But hunger finally overcame us, and we stopped in Tui, Spain for dinner. It was a charming town overlooking the Rio Minho and reminded me a bit of Salamanca, Spain (as much as I can remember). We explored the downtown area as much as we could before dark. Liz bought a beautiful Spanish doll dressed in a costume of the region and then we retired to a local bistro (El Molino, the mill) recommended by a shopkeeper (I suspect a cousin of the bistro owner.) Actually the food was quite good and reasonably cheap (60 euros for four of us). I, being the designated driver, suffered the same fate I did over and over on this trip -- I had to refrain from too much wine so we wouldn't end up in a ditch. The other three had no such inhibitions. But I must say that despite our boisterous behavior, we were treated quite well by the Spanish service people. It seemed to me as though they genuinely liked Americans.

The next day (Thursday, Oct. 23) was overcast when we set out for Barcelos and its huge weekly open-air market. Unfortunately we had a little incident along the way. We stopped to gas up and I, thinking it was a gasoline car (which I had asked for from Avis), filled it up with the wrong fuel ... it was a diesel. Now, all the clues were missing: it didn’t have a smaller fill tube (like in the U.S.); it ran just like a gasoline car (good pickup, no “dieseling” when you turned it off, etc.). And I didn’t notice the small sticker on the “gas” cap. So, this bonehead move on my part cost us about three hours of down time (and me, considerable euros). I must say however that the people at the nearby Mercedes dealership were extremely helpful during this ordeal and I wasn’t too badly ragged on by my traveling companions. Anyway we got a replacement vehicle (a station wagon whose make we never did figure out) and shortly arrived at the outdoor market in Barcelos. It was a sight to behold --- acres of booths selling everything from overshoes to olives. One of the more interesting sights were groups of four or five live chickens tied together by their legs laying on the ground awaiting the stewpot. They seemed quite quiet, rather Zen-like in their contemplation of their fate. I bought Jeanette a few dozen beautiful coral roses and a verity of olives, both for a pittance. We had some snacks for lunch and I got another Herald Tribune. While doing its puzzle by a fountain, Russ explored a nearby church and found a corpse lain out by the altar with no one around. We did see a gathering of men outside the church in animated conversation so we assumed that this was the style of a Portuguese wake. After spending a few hours here, we went onto Braga, a larger nearby city. We first visited a very old and famous church (the Se). It is a mixture of many architectural styles including quite a bit of rubble saved from various renovations over the ages. Russ posed prone in an abandoned stone sarcophagus (we naively think that burial is forever) and he asked that Liz use the pictures we took at his funeral. We wandered out the side door of this church into a very fashionable shopping arcade with at least one beautiful garden and its centered fountain. Finally we ate dinner at a restaurant again recommended by a local shopkeeper. I had octopus salad for which Russ developed an instant liking. After dinner we headed home and, after meandering all over northern Portugal, for a few hours, finally found Viana.

Friday, Oct. 24: This day we traveled to Porto (Oporto in Portuguese), the seat of the port (a fortified wine) traffic to England for the last few hundred years and, seemingly the reason for the name Portugal. This was a most interesting city and perhaps my favorite. As was becoming the norm, it rained on and off all day. (The weather in northern Portugal mimics that of our own northwest, rainy in the fall and winter with some drying in the spring.) Porto is a city built on two steep hills that sweep down to a large harbor that is really the Douro river that has had breakwaters constructed at its mouth. Much of the grape-growing region (which supplies the many port-making operations or lodges that dot this city) is located up this “river of gold.” While shortening the life of our car’s clutch traveling up and down the hill on the south side of the river, we, by chance, happened on one of the best port lodges, the one where Taylor’s port is made. (Please note that this is not the Taylor’s of upstate New York, but an English firm with a lot more class.) We took the tour of their lodge given by a very knowledgeable English woman who burdened with many facts about port wine ... most of which I have forgotten. However, there is one I didn’t forget -- vintage port needs to be drunk within a few hours of its opening whereas Late Bottled Vintage (LBV) Port can stay good for a few months after being uncorked. We traveled back down the hill with an attractive German girl who had attached herself to us even though she hated President Bush. (Hating Bush seems to be very fashionable over there even though the rational for this animus is rather fuzzy.) When we jettisoned her by the harbor she stood and followed us with her eyes like an abandoned puppy. We had lunch at a harborside cafe that was one of our better meals on this trip. Jeanette had a plate of boiled meats and the rest of us had kale and fava bean soup. We cut up some of the boiled meats and put them in our soup to make a savory repast when accompanied by crusty rolls. (Much of the bread in Portugal is a soft sweet bread which I don’t particularly relish.) The bill for the four of us, including drinks, was something like 17 euros. We then took a boat tour of the harbor crowding in with a Japanese tour group. It was crick, crick, crick every time the tour guide mentioned any harbor sight. Then, getting off the boat, many Japanese pushed ahead of us like they were crowding off a Tokyo subway ... very annoying. We returned to Viana and had dinner at the Bardello restaurant where Jeanette, Russ and Liz had the time of their lives while I, having to stay sober, sulked at the outrageous cost (200 euros) of what I considered a mediocre meal and drink, some of which was forced on us at the end. I guess everyone everywhere has his little con game.

Saturday, Oct. 25 was a “down” day. We hung around Viana do Castelo visiting its shops and a small museum dedicated to linen making and the local jewelry trade. There was valuable jewelry on some mannequins tucked away in the recesses of this museum with no one around to notice if it was stolen. (I’m afraid they’ll have to learn the hard way as this town becomes more touristy.) It rained heavily most of the day. We also went up another steep hill above the town to the basilica on Monte de Santa Luzia. It is of rather recent vintage (the 1920’s) but looked much older with lichens and other vegetation covering most of its exterior. (It must be the regional dampness). The views were impressive even though the valley was covered with mist. A quite mediocre painting that was mostly baby-blue sky and an awkward likeness of what I took to be Jesus covered the ceiling of the basilica. It looked like a velvet painting of Elvis when compared to the art we saw in many of the older cathedrals on this trip. We then had lunch at the nearby pousada, named for the basilica. Although it wasn’t cheap, the meal was quite good and the service was impeccable. After some more innocuous sightseeing and shopping, we went back to the condo and cleaned out the refrigerator making omelets, salads, etc. for dinner. Then we drank some port and tried to unravel the vagaries of the condo’s satellite TV.

On Sunday, Oct. 26, we went to Santiago de Compostelo in northwestern Spain. (It is a fair distance above Vigo.) This is the southern terminus of a traditional pilgrimage that draws Catholics from around the world. They traipse across the Pyrenees stopping at many shrines and receiving the hospitality of many locals. When they finish, they wear a scallop shell as a symbol of their sacrifice. On our way into Spain, Russ had an urgent call of nature due to his heart medications. Since we were many kilometers from a rest stop, I pulled over on the side of the highway to let him go. Just then a car also pulled over about 200 yards in front of us. When we re-entered the highway, it did too. Then, after we went through the last toll booth in Portugal, it was waiting for us with blue light flashing. The first cop didn’t speak English so he got his partner who asked what we were doing pulled over on the side of the road. Russ and I tried to explain about his medical situation. The cop finally relented but left us with the admonition, “We don’t do that in Portugal!” (After we were on our way Russ wondered aloud whether Portuguese dogs are allowed to piss on the side of the road.) When we got to Santiago de Compostelo, we parked below the cathedral and hiked up to the main square just as a mini marathon was dissipating. (I got a brochure for Rebecca in case she ever wants to participate in this annual event.) One of the more interesting sights here were the pilgrims themselves. They usually sported backpacks, walking shorts, long staffs, and expressions of rapture. The cathedral itself was built in the 9th century to feature the remains of St. James (the apostle) but also to attract pilgrims (and the economic boost they would provide to the locals). It was very impressive structure, but, to my taste, unkempt ... with small trees growing all over its facade. On the road back to Portugal I took a wrong turn and ended up on the Spanish seacoast just above Portugal. This seems a beautiful and fascinating summer locale, undiscovered by international tourists. (Something to look into further.) Liz, feeling under the weather, went back to the condo and Jeanette, Russ and I had dinner at a small cafe Jeanette had spotted the previous afternoon. It was filled with day laborers, many from the Portuguese colonies, watching a soccer game. No one spoke any English whatsoever. The owner got his very shy daughter to come downstairs and do some translating of the menu and thus we had a very satisfying meal of pork chops with the typical Portuguese rice AND french fries. Jeanette had flan again for dessert. The bill was very reasonable but, I think, about twice what the workmen paid for the same fare. But then, as I said before, everyone has his little con.

Monday, Oct. 27, we started back to Lisbon, taking a good part of the morning. Our first stop was in Obidos, a quaint hill town just north of Lisbon, topped by an old battlement. (More rain dogged us throughout which made the cobblestone streets there quite slick.) We chose to stay at a small bed and breakfast (Casa De Sao Tiago Castelo -- quite near the castle) that was recommended by Rick Steves in his book on Portugal. There was a small bar around the corner from our B&B that Russ and I settled into ... later to be joined by Jeanette and, still later, Liz. It served mostly a cherry wine (for which the town is famous) and sausages that looked a lot like hot dogs but much tastier. These sausages were cooked in front of you on a ceramic brazier into which was poured a white brandy that soon seared them into a delicious snack. Then small cubes of a cheddar-like cheese were added as an accompaniment. It was all quite pleasant. We were then treated to about two hours of exposition, in English, by the bartender (son of the owners) about the history of Obidos and Portugal. One of his more interesting stories was how Portugal lost its position as the premier trading center of the world. Portugal had gained this lofty perch after DaGama had discovered a route to the orient around Cape Horn. As a result Venice, Italy declined and Portugal ascended. However, the Spanish inquisition eventually changed things. The king of Portugal declined to follow Spain’s lead in suppressing his country’s Jewish population since they had a great deal to do with Portugal’s trading successes ... and paid their taxes religiously (pun intended). However, this king died … as did his young son on the field of battle shortly thereafter. Of his other two sons, one was a drunk and the other, slow-witted. His daughter was unfortunately married to the king of Spain (Ferdnand?) who then declared himself king of Portugal too. He quickly imposed the inquisition on Portugal too (with the able assistance of the Jesuits). The Jews had no choice. Most of them fled to the Netherlands taking all their knowledge and trading skills with them. (They had kept many trading ports secret.) Thus Portugal declined and Holland ascended to trading center stage. We had dinner at A Ilustre Casa De Ramiro, supposedly the best restaurant in town. Although the service was impeccable, the food wasn’t the best we had on this trip. We then retired to our charming rooms.

The next morning, Tuesday, Oct. 28, after a nice continental breakfast, I subtracted about another six months from the life of our car’s clutch trying to back up out of a steep dead end street I had entered by mistake trying to leave the town (very reminiscent of my conundrum in San Giminioano the year before). Smoke came out from under the hood for about the next twenty kilometers. Our intent was to visit Sintra before we went on to Lisbon. Following the signs we first decided to visit Cascais, a port in the Sintra region. There, we had a most delicious lunch at a nice restaurant situated atop the Inferno (steep cliffs with huge waves crashing below). We started with sangria made with a sparkling white wine and lots of fresh fruit. I had a dozen very succulent fresh raw oysters and the others, broiled fresh sole (brought to the table live for us to inspect). We then proceeded up to coast and then inland to the town of Sintra. While the girls did some sightseeing and shopping (and meeting again our Bush-hating German friend from Porto), Russ and I drove up a steep mountain (more clutch burn) and then climbed a fair pace further to the top of the Palacio National. This is a monstrous fortification built by the Moors and expanded by the Portugese after they had driven out the Arabs. It is a unique structure (in a fair state of disrepair) built among and atop boulders the size of large trucks and with a fair number of old trees filling in the openings. It was very dank, dark and otherworldly. It took me a few hours but I finally came up with the word “saturnine” to describe this mega-monument to man’s industry and belligerence. I was very concerned that the rigor of our climb to the top would be too much for Russ and that Liz would blame me for his demise. But he survived and it was I who was panting most. We left Sintra and proceeded to Lisbon, getting there just as it was getting dark. Parking near our hotel, the Lisboa Tejo (again recommended by Rick Steves) was expedited by a street hustler who gave us (for 5 euros) a parking space he was saving with traffic cones. We unloaded our growing parcel of parcels and settled into our rooms. (Russ was propositioned twice while unloading his luggage. We later learned that a pimp worked out of the hotel lobby watching his meal tickets through its large picture window. He was there most of the time we were in the hotel.) We ate that night (and the next also) at the Baleal restaurant only a few yards up the street from the hotel. It was quite delicious with standouts being the octopus salad, veal with mushrooms, hard crusty bread, and tournedos (filet mignon for only 12 euros!) … and, of course, french fries AND rice. The waiters were quite avuncular and efficient.

Wednesday, Oct. 29 was spent entirely in Lisbon. The bases of our tour of Lisbon were all-day passes on the city’s streetcars and a circuit on the double-decker Carris Tour bus (with earphones). I vastly preferred the streetcars. They were old-fashioned, small and charming and we could follow our progress on a local map and watch the local population going about their daily routine. When we saw something of interest (like the coach museum -- filled with extravagantly guilded coaches from Portugal’s heyday), we could get off and, when finished, catch the next one. (We also did this with the sightseeing bus that highlighted mostly statues and churches.) As you can tell by the shortness of this section, Lisbon was not the zenith of my trip. However, Russ, Liz and Jeanette thought much more highly of Lisbon and want to go back. I'll spend my time and euros in Porto.

The next day, Thursday, Oct. 30, we flew back to the good ole U.S.A.

Our Trip Out West (1999)

Jeanette found Las Vegas crowded, noisy, and somewhat vulgar (in the old sense of the word), but she was glad she saw it. There are two miniature cities cast as hotel/casinos -- New York, New York and Paris. Each are composed of many city landmarks all squished together in one building. (NY, NY has the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, Coney Island, etc.) The MGM/Grand is a casino the size of the pentagon. Our hotel, The Mirage, was passable but they make it hard to get anywhere. You even have to squeeze by the slot players to go to the john. Caesar’s Palace is over-the-hill ... still big and glitzy but getting a little seedy. Harrah’s is supposed to be for the big-money players, but it also appeared a little tacky. The Balagio was elegant with its own fine art gallery, but charges $16 @ to see a few third-rate Degas, etc. We both liked the Luxor best. We lost money of course, but not enough to worry much about. We spent one morning at the Hoover Dam. It was awesome. We took the hard-hat tour through the guts of the dam with a good guide. We saw things that I was surprised we could see ... stairways down to nowhere (Jeanette got vertigo) ... huge spinning dynamos ... service tunnels exiting onto the canyon walls and one that you had to crouch in to reach a grate on the face of the dam. ... all well worth the price. We stopped in Boulder City on the way back to Vegas. It’s where the workers on the dam lived during its construction. There is no gambling allowed there which is vestigial from its founding. It still has the feel of the nineteen-thirties.

We left Las Vegas one day early to begin seeing the beauty of the wild west. First, we drove to Zion National Park in Utah. We snaked through one enormous canyon and a smaller red-rock feature ... then up and over a series of large tors (including car tunnels). The unprotected drop-offs at roadside were a little unnerving. Then we continued onto Bryce Canyon National Park (also in Utah) where we had rented a cabin with a fireplace. It just seemed like a large pine forest until we walked about twenty yards from our cabin and discovered a very dramatic deep canyon filled with many multi-colored hoodoos (rock spires) and natural arches ... one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen. We saw it at sunset and then again at sunrise ... all very dramatic.

While driving the next morning from Bryce Canyon to the Grand Canyon we were humming along a road in the Kaibab National Forest pretty fast. A few hundred yards ahead on the left roadside was a golden eagle eating carrion. When he saw us he took off and I started breaking because his route was taking him across the path of our car. I was surprised how slowly he was gaining altitude so I braked even harder, but he still clipped the top passenger side windshield. Jeanette was looking right at him when he struck and said he was huge and that his eyes were big as saucers. It was a thwacking sound but nothing happened to the car and, I hope, nothing to the eagle. I felt terrible but kept going as I wasn’t about to minister to that big a bird in the high back country. When I later looked at the car, I could find no evidence of any blood or markings where he had hit and, the windshield having a very pronounced aerodynamic slope to it, I assume the eagle caromed off with a bit of a fright and possibly a footache.

The Grand Canyon was just that ... grand! The first morning we took a geological tour with a Native-American park ranger. She was very sweet, but I’m sorry to say, not very bright. She answered every question with a comment the canyon was very wide, very long, and very deep. She always accompanied these comments with spread-arm gestures in the appropriate direction. Jeanette and I quickly left this tour to go out on our own ... the rim walk to and from the El Tovar Hotel (where we also ate dinner that night ... very classic and very good). We saw (and took a picture of) one guy standing, backwards, right at the edge of a precipice. Each year as many as eight people fall off the rim to their deaths but they still keep coming. (Perhaps we should ask our government to close down this canyon to “protect the children” ... or require licenses for those who want to hike there?) We also went down the Bright Angel trail into the canyon for a little bit (trying to overcome our fear of heights) and saw a man coming back who appeared close to death ... barely able to put one foot in front of the other. So we decided that we would go shopping instead. We also watched the sunset from Hopi Point with about a thousand other romantics (mostly Germans and Japanese ... a homage to WW II). I’m sorry to say it may be beyond my verbal skills to describe the sights in the Grand Canyon ... but I truly believe everyone should see this dazzler before they take the big dirt nap.

We then decided to visit Sedona, Arizona before going back to Vegas. It was a beautiful drive down to Sedona from Route 40, but the town itself is a little too earthy-crunchy. It’s full of new-age stuff -- vortexes (or vortices), aura-reading, and crystals. When we were eating a nice lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Sedona, sitting at the next table was a tall geeky scientist (probably from Los Alamos) and a bleached-blond floozy with a Eastern European accent (something like Lotte Lenya in “Goldfinger”). Their conversation drifted onto what he was doing in his lab and he started waxing eloquent on subatomic particle behavior and how certain particles spin backwards in time and how this is matched by others going forward in a mirrored fashion. As he started getting even more esoteric and up-to-date on his research activities, Jeanette told me to notice that his mini-skirted squeeze had pulled out a small tape recorder and was holding it across the table capturing his every word. I couldn’t believe that someone so bright could be so stupid and contemplated taking his picture and sending it to the FBI. But my civility overtook my patriotism and we left them to their perfidy to pay our tab and see more of the red-rock sights. Later, Jeanette did cajole me to clamber up on a vortex near the Sedona airport. It was a rock outcropping about sixty feet high. Far from giving me a promised burst of mystic energy, I had to sit panting at the summit for ten minutes before I could muster the energy to descend back to our car.

We returned to Vegas for one more night (in a cheap motel) before catching our plane back to Boston. On the drive back to Vegas from Sedona we took a couple of side trips along the old Route 66. We didn’t get any kicks there however. We also managed to give the Vegas pinkie-ring set a couple hundred more before we left. Jeanette tried her hand at roulette and we even managed to loose about a sawbuck or so at the nickel poker slots. The flight back to Boston was uneventful except we were again stalked by a gap-toothed, wen-covered guy whom we had met (and were stalked by) on our trip out. We first ran into him in Philadelphia when we changed planes there. He works in a titanium recycling plant outside Philadelphia and he looked like he had a terminal case of metallic poisoning. Whenever we changed our seat, he did too. It was eerie. We expected to see him again in our stopover in Charlotte too, but to our relief he never reappeared. I guess we’ll learn not to be nice to strangers. We cabbed it back to Wellesley about 11:30 at night ... and then to bed.

A Taste of Italy in October (2003)

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To celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary year, Jeanette had set her sights on a romantic trip to Italy. My enthusiasm for such a sojourn was luke cool ...  having spent a few days in Milan about six years ago ... and finding it overrated and expensive. And I must confess that I left most of the planning for this trip to my distaff side, expecting to be able to blame her if the trip was a bust. Nevertheless, we left for Rome on October 19th , 2003 at noon by flying to Chicago and then back, nonstop, to Rome on American Airlines. Traveling to Italy by going first a thousand miles in the wrong direction seemed like a real downer. But this was topped by the Rome leg itself which was sardinesville ... the economy class amenities rivaled McDonald’s at closing time ... and the cabin attendants were as surly as the token clerks in the New York subway. If this typifies our country’s airline industry, then God help us. 


And knowing that we taxpayers are lending (read “giving”) these doofuses billions of dollars makes it even more galling. (See my comments on SwissAir’s service on our return trip.) We landed in Roma about 8 AM stiff, bleary-eyed and anxious to get settled in our hotel, the Albergo Alexandra, on the Via Veneto (which turned out to be a beautiful sycamore-tree-lined street). I had asked a helpful Italian man on the plane what the cab fare to downtown Rome would be and he said about 40 or 50 euros. So, I decided to spring for this luxury instead of a long ride on public transit. Our cab ride was a little breathtaking as we literally flew by all those scenes from our Latin I textbooks. Jeanette commented that the stop lights in Rome where apparently just a suggestion. This death-defying ride was highlighted by the patriotic enthusiasm of our cabby, Juan Fangio, who loved his hometown to death and proudly extolled its beauty and virtues. When we exited our cab in front of our hotel, the meter read 85 euros ... plus 5 euros for our bags. I knew we were being ripped off (he had apparently pulled the jump seat up over the meter ... hiding the previous un-zeroed fare when we first got in the cab) but I didn’t have the stomach for a fight, so our first Roman experience was a sour one. I still wonder if this babinzo realized how he was sullying the city he claimed to love so much. 


Since our hotel room wasn’t then ready, we couldn’t get our badly needed nap. Instead we immediately took a bus tour of some of the better-known Roman sights -- the Vatican, Trevi Fountain, Piazza del Popolo, etc. Most of these first-day scenes went by me in a soporific daze (without the help of the adrenaline supplied by a hurtling taxicab), so I can’t recall them all. Moreover, our guide (the woman with the silk scarf tied on top of her telescoping pointer) was tri-lingual. So we heard about each of these venues in English, German, and Italian. That is, two thirds of our tour’s expository was totally useless to us. I do remember however that she warned us about the gypsy pickpockets and to order an espresso standing up because it costs three times as much sitting down at an outdoor table. Another thing that stuck with me was that she explained that there are over two thousand fountains in Rome (most simple single-stream waterspouts arising from some animal’s mouth) and that the Romans are proud that all this water is cold and potable (coming, I assume, by aqueduct from some tarn high in the Italian Alps.). 


I took advantage of this fact several times while traipsing around Rome by filling up my empty agua bottle with the spittle of these fauna. Later, after a refreshing three hour nap in our room we ventured out to see Rome by night. I think Jeanette was determined to test my coronary fortitude as she began what was to become a series of forced marches up and down most of the seven hills of Rome. Eventually we rested at a table at an outdoor cafe on the Via Veneto where we started what was to become our evening habit in Italy -- she drank a red wine and I , a Campari and soda. Invariably, at such spots they also brought you a doll-sized bowl of peanuts and, for reasons that still escape me, a doll-sized spoon. What this spoon was for was not really clear since it barely held one peanut ... one couldn’t eat from it and there was nothing to spoon these goobers into. I guess it’s just one of those customs that, once started, can’t be discarded. 


Then, at about 7:30 local time, we proceeded to the Trattoria Trifone nearby. It had been recommended by our hotel and turned out to be a real find. (We ate there both nights.) Their veal and pasta dishes were delicious and their tiramisu was to die for (made with real zabaglione). 


Our second day in Rome was a little more rememorable, but no less aerobic. We first bought one-day subway passes. Apparently we had studied the instructions for them too long and were accosted by a gypsy woman with a swaddled child and her hand out. These beggars are ubiquitous in Rome and either sport a baby/small child or, lacking that resource, sit on the ground with one foot twisted under them to mimic deformity. One wonders why such ingenuity and extreme discomfort is wasted on begging (and stealing) instead of more productive endeavors. And one also wonders why the Policze permit such unnerving distractions in a city that thrives on tourists. Perhaps these constabulary were trained in San Francisco? Anyway, after telling this gypsy to please get away (or words to that effect), we took the subway first to Vatican City ... since St. Peters Basilica and the Sistine Chapel were closed the previous day due to the beatification of four new saints and the declaring of two others as martyrs. (On our first visit, I was somewhat taken aback by how few people were in St. Peter’s Square for this Pope-hosted-ceremony ... maybe as few as twenty thousand. Jesse Jackson can produce a bigger crowd protesting pink Band-Aids.) 


St. Peter’s Basilica was truly awesome (Jeanette lit some candles) but the recently-restored Sistine Chapel ceiling was disappointing to us. The refreshed colors, reflecting what Michaelangelo had originally used, were garish to the point of being cartoony. And some later modesty alterations (particularly to Adam’s private parts) had not been removed by the restorers which, frankly, made things look a little weird. I discovered another national trait whilst waiting in line at the Sistine Chapel: queues mean nothing to native Italians, they are only for tourists. God and the Pope give Romans the inalienable right to go to the front of any line and turn their ears deaf to any objections. 


Our next stop in Rome was the Colosseum ... for what must be the high point in any tourist’s gawking (ours included). The paradox is that this monument is simultaneously both ordinary and extraordinary. It has had minimal restoration and looks a little like a dilapidated building in the south Bronx ... yet substantial portions and many interesting details of it have survived for almost two millennia. If everyone who visited it over this time span took but one small stone, it would have long ago disappeared! To compare, the wooden bridge in Chappaquidick (that Ted Kennedy made famous) has had to be replaced a few times over the last thirty years due to tourists each taking but a few splinters. Another thing I found interesting was that three (or more) feral terriers seemed to be living among the ruins, easily slipping in and out of small passageways. I suspect that this is the breed that thrives there due to its taste for rodents. 


We then went looking for the Roman Forum which turned out to be up another hill. Jeanette took pity on me and we decided to take a few pictures and pretend we had “done” it. 


That night we had our usual aperitifs at a cafe on a busier thoroughfare. Jeanette’s red wine was undrinkable so we sent it back. She got back the same wine in a different glass with a splash of soda water it. Just how stupid are we Americans thought to be? Don’t answer that. (We did get the peanuts and the little spoon though.) After another fine dinner we returned to our room to relax and watch a little local television. A few quick notes on Italian television. Invariably Italian TV (other than the BBC and CNN) carries dubbed old American movies and inane Italian variety shows. The formula for these variety shows is simple -- fat, old Italian men and buxom, scantily-clad young blond females. Why these women are always blond is a little hard to figure since about 90% of Italian women have black hair ... and the rest are brunettes. I never saw one blond Italian male on these shows (or on the streets for that matter), except when they were wearing fright wigs. In fact, the roll for men on these shows was primarily Milton Berle redux -- dressing up as trollopy women, ogling the cleavage of the genuine females, and hitting each other with cream pies ... all very entertaining ... not. There were also live lottery drawings on TV. Instead of the pop-up numbered ping-pong balls as in American lotteries, the Italian procedure was very elaborate. First, an oblong clear-plastic drum full of gray plastic balls was rotated on an eccentric axis four times clockwise, then four times counter-clockwise. Then a (young, buxom and blond) female with a full-face blindfold reached into the drum with the help of two (young, buxom and blond) assistants, one on either side. She retrieved one gray plastic ball which one assistant passed to a fourth (young, buxom and blond) woman sitting at a nearby table. This woman then opened up the gray plastic ball with a fifth (young, buxom and blond) woman looking over her shoulder to verify things by nodding her head convincingly. She then announced what this number was and it was flashed on the screen. This process was repeated five more times until the full lottery results were revealed. It made for a rather monotonous ten minutes of TV viewing; but was to me a window into the Italian psyche. 


The following morning, as we were checking out of our hotel, down the stairs came Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, and his young honey-haired honey who I took to be Wetlapper (as Imus calls her), the former editor of the Harvard Business Review ... and the schism in Neutron Jack’s marriage. (If it turns out that this man wasn’t Jack Welch, then it was his twin.) We then took the train to Florence (Firenze) using prepaid Eurail tickets. About half way through our journey we were informed that the train would not go all the way to central Florence due to “technical difficulties”. Shortly, the conductor came to look at our tickets and said that we owed him an additional 22 euros. We asked why, since we had paid more than other Americans across the aisle (ironically from GE) who didn’t owe a surcharge. He, and the chief conductor whom he then summoned, both said it had something to do with the fact that we were on the “Eurostar” instead of the “intercity” train. We politely refused to pay this surcharge saying that such premium service would, at the very least, take us to the central station in Florence. After much arguing, they finally gave up and went away muttering something in Italian about Osama Bin Laden. 


When we got off the train in the Florence suburbs in the pouring rain, we found the line for the taxi about 20 deep and cabs coming about every 10 minutes. We started walking and eventually caught a crowded city bus (standing, with all our wet luggage between our legs). We didn’t have a bus ticket (which we were told we should have bought at the local bakery), but the driver was kind enough to let us ride for free. I did spend a lurching half hour telling everyone around me that Italy should dig up Mussolini (he made the trains run ...)! Luckily, the city bus did take us to the train station where we eventually caught a cab for another circuitous ride to the Avis Rent-a-Car outlet on the other side of the river Arno. At this point, because of the rain, the crowds, and the impossible intracity navigation, I had crossed Florence off my wish list. We finally got our blue Renault station wagon rental and, with detailed but encrypted directions, were on our way to the Tuscan hills, stopping briefly on the outskirts of the city for a fine lunch. 


After a relatively short but perplexing ride we found what was supposed to be our hotel for six nights, the Villa Belvedere, in a small town east of Siena. Jeanette had discovered it on the Internet. This hotel was a beautiful villa with fine antique furniture which, unfortunately, had seen better days. What were once open fields around it now contained an industrial park and the cobwebs and lack of an elevator (we were on the third floor) did not add to the ambiance of its interior. After settling down we decided to go to a nearby town, San Gimignano, for dinner. Now, in Italy, you apparently find your way by following road signs to the nearest big city with the hope that your ultimate destination will be revealed. If you are going west from Florence you follow signs to Siena. If you want to find the main highway, you follow signs to Siena and Florence (Firenze), unfortunately usually abbreviated as SI-FI. (For days I thought that this argot meant that there was some Star Trek convention nearby.) However, there is a diabolical Italian twist to auto navigation, there are instances when, upon reaching a crossroads, your destination, in this case San Gimignano, is indicated as reachable by both roads, one the direct route and the other, a long arduous journey over hill and dale. You are left to guess which is which. I have a humble suggestion for the Italians: put route numbers on all your inter-town/city roads at reasonable intervals and reference them on your maps ... please!! 


We finally found San Gimignano and it was worth the hassle. It is a charming town high on a Tuscan hill with narrow cobblestone streets, beautiful old stone buildings, and surrounded by a stone fortification wall. It also features 14 tall stone towers which gives its distant profile the look of a guided missile farm. We first stopped at a hotel near the city gates, the Hotel Bel Soggiorno, to see if they had a room with a view. They did, and for much less than at the Belvedere. We reserved the room for the next night (turned out we stayed there five nights), very pleased with ourselves, and went on to see the sights. Now, like most Tuscan towns, San Gimignano is a bit of a physical challenge. You must climb winding streets to get anywhere. If you think you have reached the top of things, there is yet another path up. We rested at an outdoor cafe with our usual libations and salted peanuts (with the little spoon) and, talking to nearby tourists, found a restaurant for dinner, the Tratoria Chirbiri. This was one of the best deals in Italy. The food was great and the prices, quite reasonable (turned out to be the first one listed in our guidebook). We ate there every night we were in San Gimignano except one (it’s closed Wednesday night). It specialized in Tuscan soups, rabbit, wild boar, Portabella mushrooms, and the blood-rare Tuscan beef. The two of us feasted there some nights for as little as $30 including house wine and Jeanette’s dessert compulsion, pena cotta. The bread however was something else. Throughout Tuscany the bread was usually dry and tasteless. 


When we returned to the Villa Belvedere, I, patting my chest, fibbed that my physical condition would not permit me to continually climb up to the third floor and that we would therefore be checking out the next morning. To our relief this was apparently no problem ... so we slept, breakfasted, and raced back to San Gimignano the next morning. When we checked into the hotel there, the view from the room was truly breathtaking. We looked out over miles of pastel Tuscan scenery with rolling hills, large forests and small farms. In the early morning many of these comely dales were filled with a soft fog which made things almost too beautiful to comprehend. At night there was no light pollution to compete with the stars and the waxing moon ... except for one glen which seemed to contain a perpetually brightly lit hamlet. We later found (on one of our inadvertent side trips caused by the diabolical Italian road signs) that this hamlet was, in fact, a major razor-wired penitentiary. This discovery did take a bit of the blush off our scenic rose. 


Once settled in our new hotel, we set out to explore San Gimignano by day. We visited the municipal museum (filled with a potpourri of quite nice religious artworks), listened to a harpist in one of the courtyards, and climbed the highest tower in town, the Torre Grosse. Jeanette found this ascent a little bit of a challenge due to her acrophobia and I, due to my avoirdupois. But, once up there, we both greatly enjoyed the view. One could savor the entire broad scene yet still note the hanging laundry, the evolving architectural details on many buildings, the narrow lanes that wove through the town, and, in the courtyards and through open windows, even view some of the daily living patterns of these hard working people. 


There is something Germanic about the people of Tuscany. They build with stone, they are continually sweeping in front of their homes and shops, they serve hard rolls, coldcuts and cheese for breakfast, and they feature wild game at their evening meals. There are also many German tourists, so they too must sense a connection. I wonder what it is? 


Over the next four days we made auto trips throughout Tuscany, usually leaving after our croissants and cafe latte, and returning after dark. The first day we set off for Cortona but, misreading some more Italian road signs, ended up first at a charming small hilltop hamlet called Rocco Strada and then, realizing we were then too far afield, continued west toward the Mediterranean coast. We had a notion that we might go to Elba (“Able was I Ere I saw ... “) but, when we reached Piombino Porto where the ferries leave for this Napoleonic exile isle, we concluded that it was then too late in the morning to make a go of it. So instead we ventured about twenty kilometers up the coast, opened some wine, cheese, and Parma ham I had bought earlier in San Gimignano and had ourselves a picnic on a beach of the Mediterranean. It was the first time either of us had actually dipped our tootsies in the Mediterranean so the day was not a total bust. We then proceeded further up the coast to Pisa where we eventually found our way to the Campo de Miracoli to see the leaning tower. Jeanette found it much smaller than she had imagined and I, amongst the throng of Japanese and British tourists, took the obligatory photo of Jeanette holding the tower up. We then split for home since Pisa itself had little else to recommend it. 


When we got back to San Gimignano, it was dark and we came into town from the opposite direction from which what we were accustomed. Trying to find our way to the hotel parking lot, I entered the town proper (not normally done by tourists) and ended up in a narrow cul de sac at the bottom of a steep hill. The was no turning around and backing up was almost impossible in a gear shift car. However, by holding up the emergency brake, popping the clutch while juicing the gas, and slowly releasing the emergency brake; I was able to carefully mend my way back up between stone stairways and a parked police car. When we finally got out of this mess I mopped the flop sweat off my brow and checked my underwear. The car smelled of hot brake linings and cooked motor oil, but ... what the hell ... it was a rental! 


The second day we did make it to Cortona, the town made famous in the book, “Under the Tuscan Sun.” In the central square of town an American motion picture company was preparing to shoot some Christmas scenes from its production of a movie based on this book. They had distributed white magnesium sulfate on white tarps spread all over the square. This created a quite believable appearance of a snow. They had also set up a Christmas tree in central square with a large crèche off to the side. (I guess there is no I.C.L.U. active there.) On the way back we stopped at Montepulciano, another coronary stress test. After climbing to the main square in town, the Piazza Granda, I, sitting on the steps of the cathedral, eavesdropped on a tour guide’s exposition to his tour group. Apparently this same square was use a few weeks earlier to shoot other scenes for this same movie, centered around the festival Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte, normally held in August but recreated for Hollywood. Other than these two Hollywood diversions, these towns were pretty much clones of San Gimigniano. Not that there is anything wrong with that. 


The next day we decided to do a wine and olive oil tour of the area surrounding Montalcino, yet another hilltop Tuscan town ... made famous by its excellent red wine, Brunello. Montalcino is surrounded by literally hundreds of vineyards fronted with big fancy signs. We picked one of these vineyards at random and drove in past a grove of olive trees. Near the manor there was a grizzled man up on a ladder picking olives. He turned out to be the owner of this estate and graciously took us into his wine-making room. When I told him that I heard Brunello was the best wine in Italy, he said, “No, no ... in the world!” We bought two bottles of 1997’s for less than a third what they sell for in this country. When I then asked him where he learned to speak English so well, he replied that he had worked for Chase Manhattan Bank for twenty-five years. We continued on to another winery where the non-English-speaking wine master proudly let us taste his wines while he downed glass after glass of grappa, an Italian brandy made from the wine-making dross. Even though he seemed more interested in the grappa than in us, we still bought some wine from him (no grappa though). 


Finally, on the way back into San Gimignano, we bought some olive oil and another bottle of wine from an old woman watching an Italian variety show on the TV in her wine shed. The tourist sights in Montalcino itself have blended themselves in my memory into just another Tuscan town with much hill climbing, pretty squares, and lots of tourist shops. 


On the last of our Tuscan day trips we went to Siena. We left early in the AM in order to find a parking spot, a major problem in Siena. We found one easily near a large fortress on the edge of the tourist area and started out on foot toward the Piazza Il Campo, the large central square (really a convex oval) where a frenzied horse race is held twice a year (in July and August). Every hundred feet or so on our jaunt there was something impressive to see, either a beautiful scenic view (Siena is also built on a number of hills), or a beautiful church (such as the Duomo, made of alternatively green and white marble cross-sections, creating an unique look ... where Jeanette lit some more candles), or myriad’s of narrow city alleys and intriguing side streets. One pleasant surprise was that the ration of tourist gewgaw shops to meaningful sights is relatively low ... not the case in most other Tuscan stops. We ate a very pleasant lunch at the Trattoria Papel, behind the Palazzo Publico. I think we were the only tourists there. The rest were mostly festive Italian families on their Sunday outings. The food was plain but delicious (and quite cheap). Jeanette had duck with fresh pasta and I had tripe stewed in a tomato sauce and we shared a plate of local black marinated olives. Yum, yum. We meandered back to our car and then back to San Gimigniano. Later that afternoon as it was getting dark, at Jeanette’s insistence, we went back to a roasted chestnut and new wine festival in another nearby hillside town, Colle D’Elsa, below San Gimigniano. We were the only tourists there. It was quaint and wonderful ... small booths selling yard-sale items (I bought an old primitive painting for five euros), local music, food stalls, etc. I think that if I hadn’t acceded to many of these side-trip adventures insisted on by Jeanette, our visit to Italy would have been a grade lower. 


Finally, the day came to return our rent-a-car. We checked out of our hotel and drove toward Florence dreading the thought of finding the Avis agency. (We had heard that another American couple had to resort to hiring a taxi to lead them to where they were to turn in their car). However, by stopping numerous times and asking for directions, we miraculously found it on the first try. We then took a cab to the Hotel La Residenza (Jeanette had talked me into giving Florence another go). It was a very unique hotel, situated between Cartier’s and Armani’s. First, one had to take the elevator (a very old-fashioned cage type) to the third floor for reception (the first two floors were someone’s home), then continue up, like a scene out of the “Third Man”, to one’s room. Our room overlooked the Via Tornabuoni and, across the street, office buildings. (It is true that Italians work at their desks late into the evening.) We settled in and did a quick sightseeing walk. We wound up at a school for leather workers (behind the Piazza Santa Croce). There, amongst thousands of leather goods, was one leather worker going through the motions of making a pocketbook. I quickly concluded that this whole operation was a sham and that all if not most of what we saw there had been made in Malaysia or some other cheap-labor country. However, this wasn’t stopping Japanese tourists from buying as many leather goods as they could carry. 


That night at the Ristorante Buca Mario (recommended by our hotel), we had probably the best meal we had in Italy. After our second course had been served, the table next to us was being served thick asparagus. I turned to admire this dish. A few minutes later our waiter brought us our own plate of asparagus, gratis, saying he had seen us eyeing this dish. 


And after dinner we did a walk-around of some of the local squares. After much frustration with the ambulatory leisure of most of the promenading Florentines I asked Jeanette, “Why do Italians drive so fast and walk so slow?” On our second day in Florence we did the obligatory sights, the Uffizi, Italian for “Office,” (make your reservations ahead ... it’s considerably easier), the Ponte Vecchio (a bridge over the Arno, full of gold and jewelry shops), the Duomo (Jeanette lit some more candles), and the Piazza Del Signoria. I won’t try to describe the Uffizi except to say that I am very glad I went. I would love to have the luxury of going back again and again so that I could adsorb all this old Italian art better. It was just too much for a single visit. And we ate lunch at a trattoria recommended by Rebecca from her trip there the previous April. Florence was actually beginning to grow on me. But, as I was starting to run out of tourist gas (again), we returned to the square by our hotel, the Piazza Della Republica, where I bought some Cuban cigars and enjoyed one whilst people watching. Jeanette was on another of her shopping excursions. We ate dinner (after or wine, Campari and peanuts at another outdoor cafe) at a rather ordinary restaurant on this same square ... inside since it was beginning to get chilly ... just pizza Magaretta and spaghetti Bolognase, but, in Florence, even plain food tastes special. 


The next morning we caught the train to Venice (Venezia), this time reserving our seats in advance. While we were waiting for our train’s track to be posted, Jeanette left to do some MORE souvenir shopping. I sat on our luggage piled onto one of those push carts which Jeanette had earlier snagged. After about four gypsy encounters, I was approached by a very pretty, statuesque blond woman who asked if I was using the push cart. I said I obviously was. She continued to flatter me and plead her case saying she had a lot of luggage that she needed the cart. I was almost ready to relent but first I looked her right in the eye and asked what nationality she was. When she sheepishly replied “German,” I, with a good bit of pay-back glee, gave her a firm “no”. (So, there are consequences for nations -- other than the USA -- for their actions.) We finally found out what track our train was on about two minutes before it was to leave (viva Mussolini!) As we boarded, it quickly filled with cigarette smoke. Jeanette, as she was using her asthma inhaler, amended her previous aphorism about stop lights in Italy saying, “No smoking signs also seem to be but a mere suggestion to Italians.” On the trip, the land flattened out along the Po valley to look a lot like our own midwest including vast fields of grain. We exited the train and right onto a water ferry to San Marco’s square. There we found our way to the Hotel Do Pozzi, a charming three star hotel, a little off the beaten path but only a short block off the Grand Canal and about four blocks from San Marco’s square. Our room overlooked a canal down a short street (not that unusual in Venice) and had a beautiful Murano-glass candelabra. We still had enough of the day left to do some sightseeing so we went to the top of the clock tower in San Marco’s (the Campanile). This was just the right first thing to do for it immediately gave us a grand perspective on the whole city (at sunset no-less) and what we might want to see the next day, The weather was clear and bright so our view was unimpeded. It was quite beautiful. Venice has an almost surreal visual feel, caused, I think, by the play of sunlight off the canals and the almost universally white buildings. It’s as though one were viewing everything through a soft white gauze. And, because there are no cars, the pace and noise level of the city is considerably reduced. Everyone should visit Venice once in their life. A bit later we had dinner at the restaurant associated with our hotel. Jeanette had pasta with white truffles and unfortunately she is now hooked on these expensive fungi. 


The following morning we took the water ferry across the grand canal to the Dorsoduro section of Venice where we first visited a handsome cathedral (more candle lighting) in the Campo Di Salute. It was very evident from the undulations in the floor of this church that Venice must constantly contend with that sinking feeling. (I later learned on PBS that much of this had been caused by pumping out the ground water during the post World War II period. This pumping has now been stopped but much damage has already been done.) We then meandered through this section of Venice till we came upon the Peggy Guggenheim Museum quite by accident. We spent the rest of the morning touring this little gem. It was quite refreshing to see some relatively modern art after the dazzling sameness of the old masters at the Uffizi. This much smaller museum contained many Jackson Pollacks, Picassos, Brancusis, Braques, Giacomettis, Mondrians, Klees, Kandinskys and even a couple of DeKoonings. I must confess that, although Peggy Guggenheim obviously knew which artists to collect, she didn’t always know which of their paintings were important. (Picasso once claimed that he “threw away his experiments.” In reality, I think he sold many of them to Peggy Guggenheim.) 


We then crossed the Ponte dell’Accademia and had a very relaxing and enjoyable lunch at a trattoria in the Campo San Stefano (square). It was then on to the Rialto section for more shopping for Jeanette. We ate dinner that night in the Castello section of Venice at a restaurant famous for its seafood, the Trottoria Corte Sconta. It was filled with beautiful people I’m sure saying beautiful things. But the food was sub par. That night walking back to our hotel we encountered many costumed young children celebrating Halloween. I knew All Saint’s Day was a universal Catholic holiday, but I was a little surprised that this bit of American materialism had invaded Italy. 


Our flight back to Boston was on SwissAir (via Zurich) at 6:45 the next morning, November 1st. Now getting to the airport, Marco Polo, from downtown Venice can only be done by boat ... either a water taxi for about 80 euros or a water shuttle, for 10 euros. The rub was that the first water shuttle left the dock near our hotel at 4:35AM and didn’t get to the airport till about 5:45AM which, considering there was still a shuttle bus to the airport from there, was cutting it rather close for an international flight. We packed the night before, had a wake up call at 4:00AM, and set our alarm clock too. But my internal alarm got me up at 3:30AM so we were trudging through the Venetian fog and noisily over its cobblestones at 4:00AM. When we got to the dock, there were no water taxis, so we had no choice but to take the water shuttle. The long boat ride was strangely attractive but nerve-racking, especially since the fog slowed us down considerably. We got to the SwissAir luggage check-in line at the very last moment and then had a nervous wait to pass through the security gates. Our queue delay there was punctuated by my outbursts at the numerous line-breakers (mostly Italians, various Senegal street merchants, and one snippy Canadian female). Their excuse was always that they were late for their flight. I shouted back, “And I’m not??? Get to the end of the line!!!” 


Our flight over the Alps in a turboprop was profoundly beautiful. Hills became mountains which became snow-capped. Scattered throughout these escarpments were numerous tarns many of which seemed to be contained by rather fragile looking ridges or possibly even dams. Looking down the valleys from these lakes were bucolic villages which seemed to me to be quite suicidal if these fragile ridges or dams were to let go (say in an earthquake). Then the geology reversed itself and we entered the flatter and more populous (and safer) area of Switzerland which, unfortunately, was cloud covered. The flight itself was very pleasant with courteous cabin staff and, despite its short duration, three different servings of amenities (delicious coffee and croissants, juice, and then fruit with chocolate). We changed planes in Zurich to a wide-body back to Boston. In front of me sat a true peasant woman who looked to be directly out of a painting by Millet. This plane itself had separate monitors and hand-held controls for each passenger where one could watch movies, play video games, listed to music, monitor the flight’s progress, etc. Although there were a few ease-of-use issues with these devices, it clearly presages the future of air travel. 


The flight was pleasantly comparable to our Venice-to-Zurich leg ... good food, free drinks, and an aim-to-please staff. But the comparison to American Airlines was embarrassing. After we landed in Boston, I asked two heavily accented people across the aisle (apparently related to the woman in front of me) where they were from. They said, “Brocco”. I tried to recall if there was a Brocco in Bosnia or Serbia (where I assumed they were from). They repeated, “Brocco, Brocco! Don’t you know Brocco?” Someone else suggested “Brockton” (Mass.) which cleared up the confusion. Their native land turned out to be Greece and the peasant woman in front of me was 92 years old making her umpteenth trip back to the US to visit for the winter. (I had assumed it to be her first trip when she made the sign of the cross on takeoff.) 


After landing and a very easy customs clearing, we were graciously retrieved at the Boston airport by our daughter-in-law, Anne, driving our car. We dropped her off in Boston and then returned to Natick to our cozy, good ole American home. Arrivederci Roma!