Our Excellent Italian Adventure – Part 1
Welcome to Our Excellent Italian Adventure!
Since there are a lot of new people reading our Adventures this year, I should probably give you some background as to how all of this started.
In 1999 Barb and I travelled to New Zealand and the Cook Islands. Somewhere along the trip I got the idea that it would be fun to email a bunch of people that we knew along the way to say how things were going. It was sort of part electronic postcard / part travel journal.
As we usually travel around the same time each year, I now get dozens of people asking me about our next trip around early September and always if I’ll be emailing my Adventures again.
While I quite enjoy writing these emails, the biggest problem has always been that I would go to an Internet café every few days and from simple written notes, compose my stories right on the spot. This would often take 2 hours or more to do just a few days worth of notes and this was with me leaving a bunch of stuff out. I started to think that I needed to find a way that would allow me to write the journals but have less impact into the day to day time that we spent exploring a city.
Last year when coming home from France, I decided that what I needed to get was a small handheld computer that I could use to type my journals in the hotel at night at the end of the day. If I could compose the journals “off line”, it would allow me to only have to spend a few minutes during the day to post the journal to the web site for people to read. This idea turned into the Dell Axim Pocket PC* that I now have and this web site was created for the place where I can post everything for people to read.
* Many of you will have seen that I have plugged Dell’s products on my blog for many months now across several postings. Sadly, this has not turned into the corporate sponsorship for our Excellent Adventures that I was hoping for.
Now that I have all of the technology in place, I’m hoping that this will make my Adventure journals more enjoyable to you and take less of my daytime hours to accomplish this.
I now present to you Our Excellent Italian Adventure – Part 1:
Three Years in the Making
If you told me in the summer of 2002 that we wouldn’t be going to Italy until 2005, I would never have believed you. Why would we? We had our airline tickets; all of our accommodations in Italy were booked. Everything was ready to go.
Unfortunately, it didn’t happen.
I’m recollecting all of this as we’re practically on our way out the door to go to the airport today to begin Our Excellent Italian Adventure. We’re going to be meeting my brother Peter and his wife Liz at the airport as they have been with us every step of the way since early 2002 when we first started talking to them about going to Italy.
I remember Barb and I discussing a trip to Italy on our next Adventure on the flight home from Germany in January of 2002. Normally we travel in the fall but that year decided to make it a Christmas trip to Germany and returned in early January. Because we were coming home at that time of year, we knew that we had to start doing some serious thinking about our next trip as we often spend up to 10 months in the planning stages.
I’m not sure why but we decided that it would be a good idea to consider inviting another couple to join us on our next trip and we though about Peter and Liz right away.
The first conversation with them went as expected as they were intrigued but really needed to think about it. We take for granted that we will be travelling every year on a big vacation, but we understood that this was a bigger decision for Peter and Liz so we weren’t expecting an answer right away.
Fast forward several months.
All of the planning has been done and everything is booked. Flights, hotels, car rentals – the whole nine yards. We’re all ready to go on an Excellent Italian Adventure.
Then Barb goes to see her doctor.
Barb went in for surgery less than a month later and spent 6 weeks after that at home recovering.
Once we knew that Barb would be going in for surgery and that we weren’t going to be going to Italy, we contacted the insurance company to put in a claim on our trip cancellation insurance that we had purchased when we bought our flight tickets.
For the next two months, three things happened pretty much simultaneously: Barb began her recovery; we continued to provide the insurance company with all kinds of details about Barb’s surgery and finally, we started planning a trip to France.
Our “consolation” trip to France was planned at the last minute once we knew that Barb would be well enough to travel. We decided that we would put off going to Italy until the following year so that we could try and organize it with Peter and Liz again. That only left one unresolved item: the insurance claim.
Throughout the weeks dealing with the insurance company, a disturbing tone was developing with the ongoing discussions with them about paying out our claim. I remember that it was about 4 days before we left for France that the insurance adjuster called us and told us the news: they were going to decline our claim. Bon Voyage!
This was a problem on many levels. Our biggest concern was that while Barb and I could probably reuse our British Airways tickets another year, we were really worried about Peter and Liz losing several thousand dollars worth of airline tickets that they may not be able to use in the following 12 months. We honestly tried to not think about how big of a potential problem this was while we were in France and genuinely had a great time.
In the end, everything ended up OK and when we returned from France, we had four cheques from the insurance company waiting for us in our mailbox. Saying that we were relieved doesn’t really capture the moment.
We ended up talking to Peter and Liz about going to Italy the following year (2003) but it didn’t work out for them so we hoped to try again the following year. We actually got the planning stages in 2004 but everything got cancelled when our mother passed away that summer.
We were all getting quite discouraged by this time fearing that we may never all get to Italy together. Three years in a row of thinking that this would be the year only to have something go wrong was taking its toll. By the time the end of 2004 came around, Barb and I said that we would give it one more chance in 2005 but that we would want to go to Italy in 2005 by ourselves if Peter and Liz weren’t able to go.
By mid January we had already spoken to them about the subject and we all felt that we didn’t see any immediate objections as to why we couldn’t travel this year. It wasn’t until February that I discovered that there were British Airways tickets to Rome being sold online for about $500 / person cheaper than what we paid in 2002. In the stretch of about 24 hours, we went from tentatively agreeing to talk more about the subject to being fully committed and having our tickets paid for. Barring and unforeseen circumstances, 2005 would be our year to fly.
Suffice to say, we made it through the year and leveraged much of the planning that we did in 2002 to jumpstart the work that needed to get done this year. We’ve adjusted the overall agenda slightly by adding one extra city in Italy and shortened the stay in the other destinations.
As I will not be sending out emails anymore like I did in previous years, all of my Adventure updates will be posted directly to my blog right here.
After more than three years of research, planning, bookings, delays, email requests, responses, cancellations and disappointments, Our Excellent Italian Adventure has finally arrived. I hope you enjoy following along with us through bella Italia.
Ciao,
Baden
