We was in South Beach, y’all! SoBe, y’all! It’s full of old concrete buildings and tourists from all over!
Everyday we’d walk everywhere. We’d drink coffee. We’d sit at the pool. We’d walk to the beach. We’d eat seafood for dinner or we’d eat pizza. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. We went to a museum. We ate Haitian food. We took a walking tour. We walked everywhere in SoBe. We walked everywhere. We didn’t see any celebrities, but we saw that there were some there on the internet. So many European tourists! Don’t they know that their economy is collapsing??? We didn’t celebrate New Year’s as it is not our custom.
We had a great time. I wound up liking Miami more than I expected.
Friday night… made use of our mint plant, crushing up the leaves with sugar and mixing with rum and ginger ale. A real ol’ fashioned cocktail hour for me and the lady. Woke up super-early on Saturday to do fitness. Rode 30 miles. Hosted a brunch at noon. Had eggs and bacon and fruit salad and drinks and some people and some babies come over to our house and such. This one baby, Allie, was absolutely exasperated just looking at me. She kept eyeballing me like I was gonna steal her stuff or something. Baby Henry on the other hand was happy to just bounce up and down and laugh when someone would wave their arms in the air. Both babies tried to use the dog as a pillow for napping with little to no success.
Went out to dinner that night and then early to bed. Also watched a lot of the Tour de France all weekend. Plenty of wrecks.
Sunday I did more early morning fitness, riding 27 miles. Bethie wanted to go to the lake. We’ve discovered a new favorite beach in terms of driving in, driving out access and a minimum amount of people. I don’t want to say where it is though because I don’t want it blowing up. We brought some lawn chairs and some US Weekly’s and sat out on the concrete pier for a while. I went in the water. It was cold and clear. We got some Fiore’s subs for lunch. Went and took in a movie. Super-stressful. I hate going to the movies and parking and then trying to get your car out of there afterwards. Movie was pretty good though. Got a pizza on the way home. Ate pizza. More rum drinks. A real classic weekend experience.
We went to Cincinnati last weekend. Saw a totes adorbs baby. Supes cute. It’s Bethie’s brother Brian’s baby and her name is CC. Niecey CC as Bethie would say. We flew down there on Friday, all excited for the weekend. But our flight was delayed and we were bummed out. In Cincinnati, stayed in the historic village of Mariemont at the Mariemont Inn. It was like a medieval castle. On Saturday, we went to visit the baby, then went to the country club pool, I read two New Yorkers and one Dwell. Went to Brian’s bar for drinks and apps. Bethie gets way too excited for the cordon bleu chicken bites. It’s cheese, ham and chicken deep-fried. Of course it’s good. Why wouldn’t it be? Had dinner that night at the hotel followed by ice cream.
On Saturday we went to the big baseball game. Brian got us tickets in this upper deck section where they had all-you-can-eat everything. We ate a lot. Good game, Reds won. Spent a good part of the game looking up baseball jargon on my phone “Ducks on the pond, ducks on the pond. Hit it where they ain’t.”
Went back to Brian and Kim’s for a barbecue. Had sausages and hamburgers. Fun.
The next morn we went back over for more baby visiting. I held the baby for a long time. It really liked me. The baby liked to touch it’s own face a lot. It also liked to lie quietly and occasionally open it’s eyes. She was only 8 days old.
Flew back to Chicago Monday afternoon and all was well. Good 4th of July, but still probably not as a good as a Kansas 4th of July. At least that’s what Bethie says.
So this is about the time that me and James went down to Omaha and I had a lot of fun but he didn’t have any at all. We left Chicago Friday afternoon, despite the fact that I told James we should leave in the morning, because that would be better. I made some bumper stickers for the car. One of them said “Omaha or bust.”
We got to Omaha about 9 that night and went to our friends Ryan and Amy’s. We then went to a bar called the Homy Inn. We ordered a pizza from the pizza restaurant across the street. The guy walked across the street to deliver the pizza. We talked to Bill.
Saturday morning, we went to a coffee shop called “The Deuce.” Weird name for a coffee shop. Got coffee. James got a egg sandwich and was depressed that they put a tiny bit of ham on it. I guess he wanted more ham.
Then a little later we went to get more breakfast at a place called Dixie Quicks. The waiter was trying to give me a hard time because I asked him to recommend something. I settled on the Chilaquiles and it was outa site. James got a mountain of french toast covered in whipped cream. Yet again, he was not happy.
Went to the NEW home of the college world series. Met up with Andy and Joey at a beer tent. Drank several brews. Scalped a ticket from a guy outside. We could have gotten a better deal, I think. Went to the game. It started out at a brisk pace but soon slowed. I had a snowcone. We told these teens that they weren’t allowed to keep getting up and walking around. We said “It says on the back of your ticket you are only allowed to get up 5 times.” A little while later, when they were getting up to leave again, one of them said to me “I read the back of the ticket and it doesn’t say that.”
After the game we drank more brews. James found a lovely lady who would not leave his side. But yet again, he was not happy! We walked to the river market. Drank some more drinks. Probably too many drinks. Went home by 3.
Sunday morning we had breakfast at the 11worth cafe because it is an Omaha institution. It was the most crowded I have ever seen it. I tried to finish all this biscuits and gravy but it was too much.
We drove back to Chicago, James complaining the whole time about how he didn’t have any fun and how he never has any fun. We agreed to stop in the small town of Oxford, Iowa to eat dinner at the Augusta. It’s run by a young couple with awesome culinary experience from New Orleans and Chicago. The food was very good, but I felt bad I didn’t get the tenderloin sandwich.
Got home last night around 10. What a big weekend we had. I think James secretly had fun.
Bethie and I did a real pro job of moving some stuff this weekend. We borrowed Dave’s truck on Friday night and went to the storage space to pick up our spare bed. It was covered in storage space warehouse dust. we wrapped the bottom part in plastic to keep it from getting snow and melt all over it. That is a helpful tip for when you are trying to do extremely technical precision moving routines like what Bethie and I do.
The next day we took the truck and our car and filled both the the brim with the rest of the storage space stuff. It was a beautifully executed Tetris game of boxes, bags and furniture. I managed to get that truck backed right up to the door of the house and we unloaded in a flash. Then, we went out to the suburbs and relieved her grandpa of a pretty cool late 40′s dining room table and some chairs.
Sunday we went antiquing, procuring some more dining room chairs and two pretty wacky nightstands.
All in all, we were both surprised by how hassle-free this round of moving seemed to go. Of course, there will still be a couple more rounds to go before it’s said and done.
We spent most of the trip playing “Words With Friends” on our respective devices. I’ve come to find out that people have been playing Words With Friends for years, but it was new to me. So sue me. (Don’t sue me.) We played so much Words With Friends. Pretty much all the time. By the pool, at dinner, right before going to sleep, right when waking up in the morning. At first, I was no good at this Words With Friends, but now… now I am awesome at Words With Friends. Words With Friends.
Other things we had did… tried to scuba, but the water was terrible. We got to see some stuff, but mostly it was real cloudy. Oh well, at least we got to ride on a boat. Boats are great. We also got to cruise around on some kayaks in the bioluminescent bay. That was good. The water would light up when you touched it! We also got to ride around on this huge catamaran boat and go to an island and snorkel and eat sandwiches and drink rum mixed with Hawaiian Punch. Man, I love boats. Boats.
I drank lots of that rum, as that was one of my planned reprieves right there in the middle of Soberuary. I’ve only taken four days off from Soberuary, but I’ll tack those days back on at the end. One of the other three days I took off was for the office party a couple weeks ago. I thought I had lost my sweater at the party – a stinging reminder of why you should not take days off from Soberuary. Then my sweater mysteriously appeared back in the office. In the meantime, I had ordered a new sweater off the internet. Now I have TWO sweaters! Sweaters. Soberuary.
In summation, Puerto Rico is a nice-ass place. Much nicer than Humboldt Park.
Yesterday was a big ol’ snow day. There was snow everywhere.
I had left work on Tuesday around 1, so I had missed having too bad of a commute getting back out to the neighborhood.
Let me take you back to Friday, when Bethie and I had bought a house. We don’t get to live in the house, because it is fully rented. So we’ve become de facto landlords. This is fine… just a little bit of added responsibility.
Especially in the middle of this recent third biggest snowstorm in the history of the city. Since purchasing the house, I had been using the phone to bang myself in the head repeatedly, trying to get the gas company to turn the gas on to the basement. The first two calls and they told me the gas was not turned on, and that I’d have to get it turned on. One of those calls required me faxing them two forms of ID and some papers, then waiting a day and calling them back. Uhhh… what? So I play their little game. The fax number doesn’t work. I call a different number. This lady I talked to, holy shit. She was like a sitcom character getting all irate with me for asking questions and such about the gas. “That gas is already on. I don’t know who you talked to that said it ain’t on. It’s already on! Are you trying to confuse me. Do not insult me with these questions.” So it turned out the gas was on.
This episode reaffirms my strategy of dealing with nameless, faceless corporations. Keep calling back until someone tells you what you want to hear. So the gas is on, but the basement smells like gas so I want to get someone to check that out and make sure that the furnace down there will work. The lady on the phone thinks I am trying to pull some sort of fast one on her like what I really want is to waste the gas company’s time and mine’s by scheduling an appointment. So she tells me I gotta call a different number to report the leak.
I call this other number, and tell them it smells like gas. When you do this, the gas company goes on extreme high red alert. They tell me I gotta be there in 15 minutes or I risk the gas getting turned off to the entire building. Oh jeez. So I leave work around 1.
I get there right as the gas guy does. He’s like “Oh yeah, this is a real bad leak.” He fixes it quick though with a couple of wrenches and tells me the furnace should work fine. I hike up to the grocery store to get a lighter to light the pilot. The storm is just starting to pick up. I get back to the place and get the pilot lit. The basement is warm and the pipes won’t freeze. I trudge home and it’s really kicking up. Furious wind and snow.
On the way home I stop for provisions at the Italian deli… A lasagna for dinner and Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Get home and do the second shift of shoveling then hunker down. It was SO snowy. So very, very snowy. And then there was thunder and lightning to go with the snow. I was happy to be inside.
The next morning and it’s still snowing and windy. The snow is drifting up around everything burying cars and filling up alleys. I help do some morning shoveling, cutting a trench down the sidewalk for people to get by. Then Bethie and I bundle up to walk over to the new house and check on everything there. The streets were absolutely dead. We walked through drifts of snow that covered our legs. Everyone was walking right down the middle of the street. It looked like what the end of the world would look like, but people were mostly pretty cheerful.
We got to the house and had to trudge through all this snow in the gangway to get to the back. Then we had to shovel out the stairwell to get down to the basement. All was OK. We shoveled the rest as best we could, but this house we got is like a compound that takes up pretty much the whole lot. There wasn’t much room to put all the extra snow.
We walked back and I stopped for a coffee at Star Lounge. If this were truly the end of the world, than the Star Lounge would have been the last survival bunker anyone could flock to. There were people everywhere. I was thinking how they were probably thinking about how cool and fun and cozy it would be to go down to the coffeeshop and wait out the blizzard… but they weren’t thinking about how everyone else was thinking the exact same thing. It was like a high school cafeteria or something. Definitely not cozy and relaxing. But the people working there seemed pretty happy. But they’re always pretty happy… but now probably especially ’cause of all the money they were making.
I go home and don’t leave the house for the rest of the day. When I get home, Bethie is on the phone yelling at a stranger because she can’t remember who her favorite celebrity is. She was trying to get on the H&R Block website to start our taxes and that was the security question. She was getting real mad at this poor guy and kept saying the names of celebrities like somehow that would work… “I don’t know, Madonna?! Matt Damon? Jennifer Hudson???” It was reeeally taking me out of my fun, cozied-up in a blizzard, zen mindset. I quickly checked my computer where I had saved her favorite celebrity from last year and told her to hang up the phone. I then spent some time chastising her for not having written it down for herself. I would tell you who her favorite celebrity is, but that would be in violation of our own security.
I spent the rest of the day watching Top Chef and eating cookies.
As I was getting in bed that night, Bethie says to me in her sleep “I thought we were just leaving that physical. that fiscal. that f-f-f. I thought we fi… that flight.” I wished her a good night.
Today the snow was still there, but more piled so people could drive their cars. Everyone on the radio was already complaining because not every street was cleared or some shit. Bunch of whiners.
Our Trip To Italy: A Travelogue Chapter From My Upcoming Memoirs
I’ve decided to get an early jump on writing my memoirs so that 40 years from now I won’t have to waste ALL of my retirement time hunched over an old typewriter with my half-lens reading glasses on. I want to get out there and live! Maybe restore an old sailboat. Actually… now that I think of it… by that time we surely will have an invention that just transcribes our thoughts and prints them out in book form. I could plug that thing in and work on my sailboat at the same time. Oh well, at least I’ll get this chapter out of the way just in case.
The Pagan Winter Holiday
Celebrated Christmas Eve with plenty of raw meat. Slept in a chair. Up with the sun, we made our traditional Christmas trek to Kansas. I got to sleep first-shift and was much the better for it. Somehow Bethie managed to drive and send a picture of me sleeping to Facebook. People responded positively.
We ate sandwiches we packed in our lunchpail and drank gas station coffee. I bought a Little Debbie Christmas Tree cake to celebrate the season. We listened to lots of rap music.
We made record time, arriving in 9 hours and 7 minutes. Exhilarating, but kind of bittersweet. This will be a tough time to beat… unless they someday raise the speed limit or we can brainwash ourselves into not needing to pee.
Pete and Candy’s Ikea kitchen is really shaping up. I guess all they need now is the countertop. This is but one step in their ambitious multi-stepped whole house makeover.
Spent the next day in the giving and receiving of gifts. I got a lazer level.
I took Bethie and TOTAL on a guided tour of the neighborhood; pointing out the approximate locations of forgotten old forts, now replaced with houses. Also where the issue of Penthouse was hidden up in the woods.
Ate multiple foods from multiple crock pots.
On the 27th, we made the trip in reverse in almost as good of time. Listened to comedy CDs through desolate, downstate Illinois. Hit the ground running back in the CHI. Unpacked, repacked, Bethie yelled at me about shaving.
Tuesday, we went to the gym. We went to the fancy bank downtown to get Euros. Bethie yelled at me about some more about shaving. At the bank we were in receipt of 1100 European Union currency notes. I felt like a big-time secret agent walking out of that bank tucking a plain, white, cash-filled envelope into my jacket pocket.
Roman Holiday
Did some last-minute packing, readied our entertainment options.
Got to the airport. So cool, so cosmopolitan, jetting off to Rome! Wait a second, what’s with this old-ass plane? It’s almost 2011 and we still don’t have TV’s in the backs of every seat on every airplane yet? And what’s with all these people wearing sweatpants? This is not cosmopolitan! This is not glamorous! Alas, spent most of the the flight attempting to sleep upright. What a fool’s errand “Oh, maybe if I move this leg to the right, and turn my head this way… ah, comfort.” For two minutes, then it’s torture. Then it’s, “Ok, foot forward, head straight and arms crossed… ah, comfort.” Then torture. “Ok, both legs back, shift to the left hip…” And so on.
Land in Rome. It’s 8 AM and a word of possibilities spreads out before us. Bethie struggles with Italian coffee culture, and frankly, I do too. You mean that no one in this country likes coffee “to go?” These folks are sorely missing out on the convenience of a cardboard cup. Bethie orders a coffee and a hot chocolate to go. This results in some confusion with the coffee people. We wind up with two small plastic cups the size the dentist gives you when it’s time to rinse. One w/a shot of expresso (pretty good) and one with hot chocolate that was essentially a couple pumps of hot fudge sauce. Bethie threw it away and went with a diet coke. She says you can always rely on a good ol’ diet Coke.
Got off the train in downtown Rome and came to the swift realization “Hold on a minute. I don’t speak Italian! I don’t even speak one bit of Italian! Was someone gonna remind me that I was supposed to remember that I don’t know ANY Italian?” Well, there’s no time to learn now. Best to just mumble in English and not make eye contact. At least if it was Spanish I’d feel alright faking it. This is utterly, by definition, foreign to me.
Got hustled by a nicely-dressed cab guy, but get to our location. “What do we look like, we just got off the plane?” Because we did. We didn’t know our way around yet. After that, I studied the shit out of them maps and had them old Roman streets figured out in no time flat. Man, do I love knowing my way around.
In addition to my almost-divine sense of direction, we had at our disposal:
-One copy of Rick Steve’s 2011 Italy guide.
-One Lonely Planet: Rome iphone app.
-A couple Italian translation apps.
-A few free Florence and Venice travel apps.
-Rick Steves Italy Guide podcasts.
-Several free hotel and tourist info maps.
-A limited international data plan to search Google Maps. (This came in handy later on.)
All in all, we got around just fine.
Had dinner that night in a fine Roman hostaria with very bright flourescent lighting.
Old Roman Stuff
Bethie and I woke up the next morning and got all continental on our continental breakfasts. I could totally come around to the eating of rolls with butter and jam every breakfast… as long as it was free and close to where I was just sleeping.
Let’s get into this old Roman stuff. They got this Coliseum over there. Yeah, it’s huge. It’s an engineering marvel. It looks nice. But here’s the thing… It is SO old. So, so old. That’s the thing I took away from the whole trip. How cool all this incredibly old Roman stuff is.
2000 years ago, they were walking around in Rome, eating in restaurants, going to the Coliseum, voting… all that everyday stuff. 2000 years ago!
And these Roman buildings and statues they got. They been there for 2000 years… getting lost, discovered and lost again. That’s crazy. I hope to remember that the next time someone asks me what I’d like to do if I wasn’t doing what I am doing now; that I will remember to, without pause, say “archaeologist.” Just send me to Rome, hand me a shovel and turn me loose. I’ll find me some treasure!
Old Rick Steves guided us on an audio tour of the Coliseum and then the Roman Forum as well. This was a real fun couples thing to do, as we had to both plug into my phone to listen to it. So we wandered around, side by side, trying not to get the headphones pulled from our ears. I likened it to walking TOTAL on a very short leash.
We got this Roma Pass that got us into the Coliseum, the Forum and the National Museum along with free trips on the subway. We went to the National Museum in the afternoon. Bethie loved this almost as much as she loved the pizza place we had lunch at beforehand. She was most excited for the coin museum down in the basement. I could not get her out of that coin room for nothing. She could have looked at those coins for ages. Finally I got her back to the hotel and down for a nap. But boy, she would not stop with telling me how much she loved the coins and how interesting they were and the precise difference in details between a double denarius and a classic argenteus.
We hit those tough Roman streets later that night on a mission. We wanted to find Bethie some Cacio e Pepe. (Pasta.) We settled on dinner at a place actually called “Cacio e Pepe.” We took the train there and it was super-easy. That Roman subway system consists of two lines crossing at the train station. Our hotel was right on one of the lines. We went three stops across the river to the restaurant.
Cacio e Pepe is a rustic dish of noodles with oil, cheese, white wine and pepper. It’s super-simple and what people eat in their houses. This restaurant made a specialty of it. You could get cacio e pepe, carbonara or gnocchi to start, and then there was a couple different seconds you could have. We went with the meatballs in lemon sauce. Very good, but didn’t hold up to the awesome pastas. I love a menu with only 6 or 7 things on it. Actually, this place didn’t have a menu at all. The lady just told us what they had.
The Panic
This whole going out to eat thing was such a trip for me. I had all these restaurants on my list to go to, but most of them were closed for the holiday. Among the ones we did go to, I tried to have us avoid touristy ones, but that was real hard. Most all of them seemed pretty touristy. I also tried to not go to dinner before 7:30, because most places don’t really get going until 8:30. But what could we do? We are Americans, we eat earlier. I was also convinced that everyone at every restaurant hated us for being tourists and not knowing how to read the menu. Bethie assures me this was not the case. I’m not sure. I’m worried they were hiding all their good Roman foods in the back and wanted us to eat the bland stuff.
Anyway, the food at Cacio e Pepe was very good. The neighborhood we were in closed up pretty early, so we took the train back to the hotel. Bethie wanted gelato from the gelato/sandwich/bar/nightclub across the streem. I’m pretty sure they hated us.
Gelato is very good. I ate a lot of it. I guess it’s ice cream made with milk instead of cream. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that doesn’t really make that much of a difference.
New Years Eve Day
Forget about remembering how to say “Happy New Years” in Italian. At this point, I was giving up on trying to say anything Italian aside from “Parle Englese, per favore?” And I’m so good at faking Spanish! It’s a real shame.
So we go to the Vatican. We had booked online and had our tour at 9:30. The line for dopes that didn’t book online was around the block. Which is to say, it wrapped around the giant castle walls that encircle the entire Vatican and hold it all together.
We toured the museums and saw the Sistine Chapel. Holy shit. The Vatican is not going to run out of money or art anytime soon. That place was loaded from floor to ceiling with classical art and a whole mess of tourists.
Oh it was stressful and packed with people… and art. People bumping into you. People bumping into the art. You bumping into the art.
You get desensitized to classic art pretty quick on a trip to Italy. By the time we got to these one rooms with these famous Raphael frescos, I was a little over it. That’s when I saw some of the most interesting stuff in the museum – 500 year old graffiti that was carved into them frescos by German invaders. I loved that. I liken it to how they would quarry the marble from the Roman Forum for the insides of their cathedrals, or how those Roman temples would be converted into Christian churches during Medieval times. It’s really something how people’s priorities change over time. At one point, people gave such a shit about these paintings that they carved their names in them. Now they are so important that people line up for miles and hours and pay 30 Euros to look at them. and in another 500 years probably no one will care again… and so on and repeat. Monuments get buried and paintings get forgotten about, then rediscovered. That’s really cool. I gotta get me a shovel.
So we jostle and bump our way though the museum, see the Sistine Chapel ad try to take Rick Steves shortcut to the St. Peter’s Basilica, but this guard is giving everybody the brush off, saying we need to exit through the museum. This entails another couple MILES of exhibits and more gift shops than I would care to count. It took us about 45 minutes by the time we get out of the museum and in the line for the basilica. We get pretty close to the front and “Sorry folks, the basilica is closed for New Years.” Just missed it. I was really puzzled what all those dopes that waited in line for hours for the museum were gonna think when that closed early as well.
We took in the St. Peter’s Square, then meandered across the bridge to go check out the Pantheon. Pretty good. Again, the use, disuse and reuse of a place over thousands of years is really cool. It’s a Roman temple, turned church with some 19th century kings buried in it. And the place is so old that over thousands of years Rome has build up around it and over it, burying it very slowly.
Had a forgettable lunch at a “students” cafe behind the Pantheon. Took a nap in anticipation of New Years. Bethie and I rarely stay up for New Years, but given that it would be 3 PM Chicago time when we were ringing it in, we didn’t have much of an excuse for missing it.
Later that night, at street level, we weren’t much hungry. I ate some really good take-away pizza as we wandered looking for a restaurant without a special NYE fixed-price menu. Settled on a bar/wineshop with an expensive menu. Bethie got her favorite classic, the pasta Bolognese.
This whole task of figuring out which restaurants are quality and which are more or less “fake” was a real task. This place, on my way to the bathroom, I spied their “kitchen” which was basically just a closet full of microwaves for these fancy frozen pasta dishes. I think part of it is them trying to dupe tourists, but I also was forming a hunch that Romans know this is the way it is done sometimes and that maybe it’s ok if you are not trying to have a full-blown meal but just want something to tide you over. Or maybe with real estate at a premium it’s too expensive to run a full-blown kitchen? Who knows. Bethie said it was good, at least.
I bought a big bottle of Belgian beer to serve as my champagne adn we wandered up to the top of the Spanish Steps. I wheeled and dealed for a lazer pointer for myself and an LED pin what for the lady to look festive. I got the guy down to 12 Euros and felt pretty good about it… but then the guy next to me said he got his lazer pointer for 10 Euros! Alas, he did not get the LED pin, so I think it might have been a square deal. But then… THEN! Bethie goes and loses the back to her LED pin. This is why she can’t have nice things.
We rang in the New Years on top of those steps with a couple fellers from Dallas who were there on their 5th trip to Rome.
Bethie was captivated by this food truck that was selling sausage and mayonnaise sandwiches. We both thrilled to seeing actual Roman candles getting shot off in actual Rome. On our way back to the hotel an immigrant-looking family was firing guns off in the air. That somehow made me miss Chicago.
Augustino, the hotel bartender with whom we would chat from time to time, gave us some prosecco when we got back. Then, these super-Catholics came in that had just been at the Vatican Mass and were getting up early to go back for the Pope’s blessing in the morning. Super-Catholics.
New Years Day
Bethie overslept New Year’s Day, so we didn’t get to receive the Pope’s blessing. (We really could have used that blessing, too… as it would later turn out.) Also, that whole iPhone alarm issue kind of screwed us. Rolled out late. More pizza from the pizza stand. Wandered. Ate gelato. Ate more pizza from a different pizza stand. We love pizza. Went back to the hotel to pack. Had a nice dinner at a different trattoria. Apologized to the waiter for being an American and being the first people in the restaurant and eating early. Very good though. Good fried vegetables.
The Worst Day
Up and out. Next leg, on to Venezia. Like some old pro’s, we pop down to the subway and get off at the train station. “Ahh, a four-hour train ride to Venice. I might watch a movie. Maybe go visit that dining car and have a caffe. How nice is it to not be one of those dummies chasing down a train as it’s just about to leave. We’re here plenty early to just go up to this ticket machine and get our tickets and…” SOLD OUT… and SOLD OUT… so is the next one and the one after that and so on until the entire next day.
SOLD OUT?! SOLD OUT! TRAINS SELL OUT??? What kind of shit is this! Apparently this happens on a Sunday that’s also the day after New Years. Even in retrospect, I could not have imagined this happening. What to do, what to do… what are our options?
Well, you can’t take a bus… there are no busses. We could fly, though. We can’t stay because we already paid for our room in Venice. (And what a room! More on that to come.)
Oh ominous portent. If only Bethie had woken up for that papal blessing, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now! But we watched it on the TV, lying in bed. Doesn’t that count for shit?! Oh Pope! Why are you doing this to us?! Oh Pope! Why hast thou forsaken us!?
No use lamenting. We’ve got to move. We’ve got to fly. We’ve got to get to the airport. We buy the airport train tickets from the machine. Shit. It’s leaving in five minutes. We run to the train like some dummies.
At the airport, we briskly move from ticket desk to ticket desk. “Parle Englese? Good. Thanks. When in the next flight to Venice? How much is it? That much? That late? Ok, Thanks.”
Bethie is pressing the entire time about renting a car and driving there. “It will only take like 5 hours!” She says. The best we could do for flights was one leaving in an hour that would cost us 700 euros. I wanted to spend the 700 euros. I desperately just wanted to do that and be done with it. Bethie did not and kept telling me I’d wake up to regret it. I still don’t think I would have. I definitely did not want to hang out in the Rome airport for 8 hours waiting for the next flight we could catch… which would have cost us about 400 euros. So, I humored her rental car fantasy, figuring it would go nowhere and we’d book our plane tickets. From the start, I was certain we couldn’t just rent a car being from a foreign country and not having one of their Italian driver’s licenses or what have you. It turns out that was not a problem at all… here were the problems:
Approach the counter…
“Do you have cars?
“No”
Approach the next counter…
“Do you have cars?”
“Si, only tiny ones.”
“Are they automatic?”
“No”
Approach the next counter…
“Do you have cars?”
“Si, only tiny ones.”
“Are they automatic?”
“The Smart Cars are… the Smart Cars are automatic.”
“Will it fit all of our luggage?”
“No.”
Approach the next counter…
“Do you have cars?”
“Si, only tiny ones.”
“Are they automatic?”
“The Smart Cars are… the Smart Cars are automatic.”
“Will it fit all of our luggage?”
“I think, maybe?”
“We’ll take it!”
So for about 200 euros, we rented a car the size of a golf cart with the grand plan of driving it all the way across italy. The people at the rental counter gave us a map.
It turned out the Smart Car did fit us and our luggage and that it was an automatic. But with a manual-shift mode that took us a few kilometers to figure out. At first, it was smooth sailing… all expressways, free and clear. I got to thinking we could have maybe even forced ourselves to drive stick if it was gonna all be like this. We bounced around the stations on the Italian radio. We took in the countryside. We theorized on why the European cars were so different than American ones.
Things were going great, until… backups. Holiday traffic. Not only were the trains overloaded, so were the roads. I’m sure there was a perfectly plausible explanation for it, but we could not possible fathom why in the hell, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the italian countryside, in the middle of the expressway, with no exits around, the traffic would suddenly just slow to a crawl for sometimes up to 20 minutes. Aren’t these Italians supposed to be masterful, fearless and fast drivers? It makes sense when there’s traffic going through a city, with people getting on and off and so many cars and there is gridlock, but this really, truly felt like we were in the middle of nothing, with no good reason for it… and it… was… infuriating. The Italian traffic radio station was no help. It was all in Italian.
The situation got progressively worse. It took us 5 hours just to make it to Florence – roughly our halfway point. By then, it was dark and we were both depressed.
Here’s another weird thing! There was a rest stop gas station thing every 30-40 kilometers. Some of them were at seemingly normal capacity; while others, like the two we stopped at, were literally bursting with Italian travelers. Cars were lined up just to park, not even to get gas. You muscled and bumped your way through the insides. It was such a laugh how the women’s restrooms always had a long, miserable line to use them, and the men’s room had toilets to spare. We would push our way out of the rest stops and get back on the road as quickly as we could.
We got past Florence. Finally, we got past Florence. Things seemed to lighten up a bit… and speed up a bit. I managed to buy Bethie a quite good gas station panini on our last gas stop.
Then, a whole new horror befell us. One sign pointed to Milan. One sign pointed to Bologna. No sign pointed to Venice.
What to do, what to do, what to do, what to do. Quick… gotta think fast… “Stay on the expressway to Milan. I bet the exit off to the expressway to Venice is still up ahead.” Oh fuck. We quickly realize that is not to be the case. Screams were screamed. Fingers were pointed and feet were stomped. This was pretty much the low point. I wanted to break down. I wanted to sit on the side of the Italian highway in shock and exhaustion. Instead, we turned on the phone and turned on the maps. Bethie did a daredevil stunt to bypass a tollbooth. An extra 45 minutes had been added to our journey, but we were back headed in the right direction.
Five hours later, in the dark of night, bleary-eyed and weary, we rolled into the parking lot at the Venice airport. It took 10 hours and 40 euros worth of tolls, but we made it.
Thank God these Italians like to stay up late. The airport was still open. We returned the car and booked tickets for the water taxi to take us to Venice. Sweet! A boat ride! Only this boat ride is in the dark so there’s nothing to see, and it’s cold and we both just want to sleep and it takes an hour. Great.
And Then… And Now… Venice
The water taxi lets us off at the Piazza San Marco – the nearest stop to our hotel – and we have to walk a short distance across the island to the Rialto Bridge. A short distance. No problem. I know Rick Steves cautions us that Venice is a place where you will get lost, but this stylized map actually makes it seem straightforward enough. This should be easy…
Holy shit. This is insane. This is the weirdest of possible weird. A literal maze. I love weird. Absolutely love it. But this was no time for weird. I didn’t want to get lost at this particular moment in our lives. Oh, I so did not. By the grace of God, we managed to follow the signs to the Rialto Bridge and our hotel. But he wasn’t quite done yet punishing us for Bethie’s transgressions…
The Rialto Hotel
The Rialto hotel did not get very good reviews on the internet. But it was centrally located! I figured we’d be spending as much time as possible out wandering and this would be just a place to lay our heads. Thus… the central location.
Ok, so, lobby checks out. Seems quiet, straightforward, normal. We check in and we’ll just go to our room. Room 205. To get to room 205, simply take the elevator to the second floor. Go left, and go up some stairs. Then turn right and go down some other stairs. Turn left and down some more stairs. One more left and that’s room 205.
Room 205. Holy moly. I like strange. I like it just as much as I like weird, but there is a time and a place for both and this is not it. Room 205 is like a house of horrors. Inexplicably, there is a child’s playpen in our room, somehow made creepier by the fact that it was a relatively new one made of plastic and nylon. Mold was everywhere if you just new where to look. A mirror hung on a rusty chain. A comically small painting hung on the opposite upholstered wall. One wall was all windows, offering impressive views of the canal and the Rialto bridge. It also served as a natural loudspeaker for all the awful canal sounds you could imagine. Grumbly boat motors going by all night, drunks on the bridge singing “I’m spreading the news.” Some sort of prehistoric canal birds with their murderous shrieks. And the smells! Oh, the smells! A thousand smells, each one worst than the last… but none of them readily identifiable.
Bethie was afraid of the covers and wanted to use the bathrobes as blankets, but they smelled as well. She settled for the blankets. I went to sleep that night dreaming of the Four Seasons. It was the only thing that helped.
I woke up sick – sure I was sick with either a cold or flu or something on account of the mold. I suffered through, showered and went down to breakfast. I had to get out of that room.
The Rialto’s take on the continental breakfast was like a badly smeared photocopy of the breakfast at our previous hotel. But it was passable.
After breakfast, I asked the front desk for a quieter room. “No Problem.” I was informed. And relieved that it didn’t turn into a whole big thing. I couldn’t stay in that room another night.
It turned out our new room was a night and a day difference. Room 415. To get to room 415, simply take the elevator to the second floor. Turn right. Go up some stairs. Turn left. Go up some more stairs. Then go up some more stairs. Left again, and there you are. Room 415. Much nicer. Still had a view, quieter, much cleaner. Bethie speculated it was because if they put you in the nice room right way, they’d have nowhere left to put you after you were obligated to complain.
Room squared away, we set off on a wander to the train station. Oh Venice. This is one awesome place. A total labyrinth with something cool to look at around every corner. I was sad we had missed the previous days explorations. At the station, we booked all the other tickets we would need. Florence the next day, and back to Rome the day after. Smart travellers.
The we got some vaporetto tickets and fired up old Rick Steves Venice Grand Canal tour audioguide. We sat in the back of the boat, turning our heads in unison as Rick Steves pointed out the sights. We ended the tour at the Piazza San Marco and got out for lunch. We wandered down just enough back alleys until we came to a really cool pizza restaurant with not that many people there. The guy recommended the seafood lasagna, so I couldn’t say no. It was very good. So was the pizza. So was the prosecco. Bethie and I wandered back to the piazza and checked out the Basilica. Too Eastern-looking. went back to the hotel for a much-deserved nap that stretched out to be 3 hours long. Woke up as the sun went down. Debated just staying in bed, but figured we’d better see it while we could. Went to the pharmacy for some medicine. Explored some more. Lots of street stalls selling mulled wine – which I credit with helping to fight off my sickness. Venice was great.
Woke the next day. Vaparetto to train station. Train to Florence. No major issues.
Florence
Florence is a rich city. So was Venice. On account of all their Rennaissance-era trading and whatnot. But Florence still feels rich. Lots of fancy art museums. Everything very clean and beautiful.
We hop off the train and I proceed to collect my bearings. It takes me mere moments to mentally record the map such that I know it like the back of mine very own hand. We make it to our new hotel and stow bags. Go to the Duomo. On the way to the Duomo get some really awesome takeaway pizza in the square. See the Duomo. Climb the Duomo. Bethie accuses me of trying to throw the camera over the side of the Duomo. I did not. I have a hard time letting that go. We descend from the Duomo. We buy tickets to the Uffizi gallery for the next day. We go to the Accademia and see the big statue of David. Big statue! Rick Steves says there’s nothing else really to see there.
Let’s go to dinner… the place I want to go to is closed! Surprise! Go to a different place. Got flustered at the menu and didn’t order that good. It was good, but it could have been really good. Maybe it was really good and could have been great. I haven’t thought about it that much.
Another loud hotel room. This time it was some drunk old Italian fellers singing “Que Sera Sera” and the incessant sounds of street sweepers and garbage trucks. All. Night. Long.
The next day, we had old Rick Steves walking us through that Uffizi Gallery. It seems a lot of that stuff was away getting worked on. Still, we saw some highlights. Afterwards, we went to go see Damien Hirst’s diamond skull because it was right next door in a different museum. It was a diamond skull alright. Way to go Damien Hirst… you got us to cough up 10 euros to lay an eyeball on that thing for no more than three minutes… as the museum worked informed us. I was a little taken aback. For 10 euros he at least could have tossed in a shark in formaldehyde, but no… it was just a diamond-encrusted human skull.
We set off to find lunch, come on old Rick Steves, don’t let us down… we head in the direction of the restaurant I had wanted to go to last night. It is, indeed, closed. We go to a different place Rick reccos. It was very authentic. The waiter seemed a little flustered at us not speaking Italian, but the food was well worth the hassle. Bethie had her classic bolognese, I had the Guanciale ragut. Bethie had the steak salad with rocket and parmesan, I had the sausages and faggioli. We had wine. We had tiny coffees. We used our phones on wifi to check in to our flight the next day. What a life.
We wandered some more. “Italy: It’s Good For Wanderin’.” They can have that one, if they need a tagline in a pinch. They can just have that one. I won’t even charge them for it.
We got some local, seasonal, organic gelato. Fancy gelato. Not like that crummy, old, cheap gelato. Actually, just as good. I couldn’t really tell the difference.
Uscita
Got the train back to Rome at 5. Nice trains. Much nicer than the plane we took to get there. We stayed at a hotel right by the train station that night. A nice big, old hotel that didn’t seem to have a whole lot of people in it. Went to the hotel’s rooftop restaurant. Would recommend it for the rooftop part, but not so much for the restaurant part.
Arrivederci, Italy. We flew back the next morning.
Here’s way too many pictures…
