Italy – The Planning
We took a family trip to Rome Italy to visit Nicole who is spending the semester there. I had every intention of taking a few moments each day to journal about the trip. I was going to do this when we were relaxing. But I quickly learned that there is no relaxing in Rome unless you are sitting down somewhere eating pasta and drinking wine.
But this was a special trip and one worth documenting. So I’m going to go back and try to reconstruct the days. I will do so with the aid of photos that we took. However, the photos will create their own challenge to my reconstruction. Not because there are too few, but because there are too many. We currently have 964 in the shared iCloud album where I told everyone to upload only their best. The first one, posted by Chris, is blurry.
Of course, the trip didn’t really start on the first day in Rome. The trip started well before that – when Nicole first thought about spending a semester abroad.
As she started planning her trip, I was excited for her. I knew it would be a great experience being exposed to a different culture and gaining independence from Mom and Dad. But I was also nervous. Would she be able to handle things on her own? I had some mild panic attacks at the thought that we wouldn’t be there if she needed us.
I resolved to let her make all the arrangements on her own. And, of course, I failed in that resolve. As it became more important to her to go, it became more important to me to make sure she got there. So, I got a little overly involved in the preparations. And because I am adept at constructing worst case scenarios and work hard at coming up with contingency plans to address all those scenarios, I drove her crazy.
Obtaining the visa was the most painful part of the process and required a trip to the Italian consulate in Boston. The woman working at the consulate told me kindly, but firmly, I needed to let Nicole answer her questions. The trip culminated with Nicole getting lost in the streets of Boston and ending up in tears, and me spending an hour on a frigid day trying to find where I parked the car. We obviously both needed practice with Google Maps. But I wasn’t the one going to Italy.
Once she got on the plane to Rome is when I believed she was actually going.
That’s when I started planning a trip for the rest of us. First the flights for five of us out of three different cities. Then the hotel rooms – one for Dave and me, and one that slept four for the kids. And then the reserving of various tours.
The first tour I booked was to the Amalfi Coast – an express train ride from Rome, boating to view and visit towns along the coast, and limoncello tasting at a vineyard. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? More on that when I get to documenting day four.
After booking the Amalfi tour, I gave the trip planning a little rest. This was so Nicole could have some time getting a lay of the land and let us know what was worth doing. It also helped that she was interning with LivItaly, a tour agency. So convenient.
She wasted no time in getting familiar with her surroundings. In addition to seeing all kinds of sites and towns in Italy, she also traveled to Berlin, Amsterdam, and Austria. And all without any help from her mother. Her Instagram feed was amazing.
As our trip got closer, she arranged a few tours for us through her agency and then added self-tours to fill up the days. She also reserved time for gelato each day. The day before we left, she sent us an itinerary complete with information on what bus to catch from the airport.
So the plan for Italy was in place. All we needed to do was get there. More on that in my next post. Stay tuned.
