Nobody's Fool

Gordon family vacation, Part 3: Italian towns, Italian cities

With our car seat lost in limbo somewhere between the U.S. and Italy, we met Sam and started out for the 1 1/2 hour drive to Viterbo with Maddie riding "Italian style" in the backseat with me. (Sam told us that, though Italy has a car seat law, it's not uncommon to see Italian mothers driving their stickshift cars with two babies on their laps, smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone ... so driving with Maddie and no car seat was actually not so bad in comparison.) The drive was a lovely one. Sam drove us along the highway near the coast so we could catch glimpses of the sea to the west, then took a two-lane winding road through little Italian towns and past ruins of ancient Roman viaducts. Maddie and Andrew both dosed while Sam and I chatted.

We arrived in Viterbo in the afternoon. Maddie and Eli reunited after 8 months, and within a few minutes they were running around the living room shrieking and playing like long lost friends. Because it was a Sunday, we spent the late afternoon strolling around Viterbo's central square and enjoyed our first gelato cone. The way to do it is to order two flavors: a blend of cioccolato and crema was a favorite. Caroline and Sam taught us their trick for Eli, who of course wants his own cone; they had the gelato shop give them an extra cone and then added some gelato from their own cones. Thus we were able to indoctrinate Maddie with her very own ice cream cone without wasting a lot of precious gelato.

That evening Caroline and Sam took us to one of their favorite pizza places in town, where we were introduced to real Italian pizza. It's very thin, and so long that it takes two plates to serve it. The custom is to order different toppings on each half (meta diabolo, meta funghi). Unbelievable, but it isn't difficult to eat most of the pizza in one sitting.

On Monday, Caroline and I drove around in circles for awhile looking for the car rental place so I could pick up the VW I had rented for the week. Viterbo does not have street signs, and the names of roads (and where they pick up and leave off) can be very confusing. It also doesn't help that we were looking for the wrong name of the business. We finally deduced that it was the Avis rental car outlet we were looking for. Like a typical American, I showed up with no paperwork or vouchers, expecting to produce my passport and driver's license and get my keys. Turns out I needed a printout, so I had to go next door to a copy shop, get on the Internet, print out my voucher and pay 50 cents euro for the privilege. Once I finally got my car, it took me awhile to figure out how to shift into reverse. Caroline helped me, and about two and a half hours later we were finally on our way.

We spent Monday touring a couple of the towns around Viterbo, including Bagnaia, where there is a famous 16th-century garden called Villa Lante. Unfortunately, the public garden was closed on Monday, so instead we enjoyed our daily gelato cone and let Maddie run off her sugar high through the streets.




Later that afternoon, Sam and Eli joined us and we all drove to a nearby lake. A dormant volcano is near Viterbo (which is why there are so many hot sulfur springs there, which we enjoyed later in the week), and this lake was actually were the crater of the volcano used to be. We hiked in to the beautiful open space, and saw signs along the trail notifying us of the wild boar we might run into along the way.




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Florence
We set out early Tuesday morning, following espresso and pastries at the cafe around the corner from Sam and Caroline's apartment and a quick trip to a store for food for Maddie for the trip, for two days in Florence by ourselves. Tuesday was rainy and very cool, so it was a good day to have to spend the day driving. The ride is about 2 1/2 hours, and we had Lisa and Jeremy's trusty GPS (already pre-programmed from their trip to Italy) to help us. (We had one little mishap getting out of Viterbo; when the GPS says to "veer right" sometimes it isn't completely clear what that means, and I ended up following a scooter a little narrow street that ended up in an even narrower alley, off limits to cars ... not scooters of course. All the shop owners stepped out to watch the curiosity of an American tourist uncomfortable with driving a stick try to turn her rental car around right up against a dropoff dead-end. We were very lucky we didn't end up in jail or seriously injured.)

At one point the GPS steered us off the interstate and into the countryside, through some little towns and winding around narrow two-lane roads, but ultimately it got us to where we needed to go, which was the Autostrade (the major toll freeways that run between the major cities in Italy).

By the time we rolled in to Florence around 4 in the afternoon, the rain had subsided. We followed the GPS's direction and were amazed to easily find our hotel, a brand new business hotel about a 15-minute walk from all the major attractions of Florence. Our hotel was beautiful (and affordable, presumably because it was so new) and very modern. Some highlights: a library off the lobby which Maddie insisted on visiting each time we came and went so she could pat the lion and bear statues on the shelves ("lion, lion, lion, lion" ... you get the idea); a gorgeous rooftop gym and patio; an in-room refrigerator with free beverages; and free breakfast at a very nice buffet -- if you can even use that word for a very yummy European-style breakfast -- in the morning. Also, free parking, which is evidently unheard of in Florence.

We relaxed for a few minutes, then headed out to see as much as we could see before dinner. Just walking through the neighborhoods of Florence was so amazing; I think the residential sections we passed through when walking to and from our hotel were some of my favorite moments of Florence. Based on our map, I saw that we would be able to arrive easily at the Ponte Vecchio, the bridge over the river that hundreds of years ago was where the butchers of Florence had their shops, and which featured a secret passageway that allowed Florence's royal family to pass unseen from one side of the river to the other. One Florence ruler got rid of the butchers at one point because he didn't like the smell; then goldsmiths moved in, and today it's lined with high-end jewelry shops.

It's also crowded with hundreds and hundreds of people. We had seen the bridge on a Travel Channel program before our trip, and it must have been 6 a.m. when they shot it because there were like 5 people on the bridge on TV. It was practically impossible to even get through the crowds.

At this point we sort of wandered around, stumbling upon historically and artistically significant attractions that we looked desperately through our guidebooks for explanations of. We tried to get into one of the basilicas but things were starting to close for the evening (it was about 5:30 at this point), so we snapped some pictures and headed back to the hotel to freshen up for dinner. Sam and Caroline had luckily lent us some of their guidebooks, including one about the best food in Italy with a great section on Florence, and we got a good recommendation for Trattoria Armando, home-cooked Italian food at a place where the owners are relatively understanding of Americans' bad ordering habits (i.e., our tendency to order pasta as our main course rather than as a first course), and we felt that sounded like a place that would also tolerate our restless toddler.

Not only were the people at Armando sweet to Maddie and very kind to us, they brought Maddie plain linguini with tomato sauce that she went crazy for. Andrew and I also had incredible food: for me, pici con ragù di carne e funghi porcini, and for Andrew, pappardelle sul cinghiale (that would be pappardelle with wild boar). A family came in with a baby and that kept Maddie captivated for awhile, then she stared at all the other patrons for a bit while we finished our wonderful meal.

We headed back to the hotel after dinner, but due to a late nap Maddie was all wound up. We went out to view Florence at night from the hotel roof, then went back to the room, with the plan that we'd all lie in bed and watch television and Maddie would eventually drop off to sleep. We couldn't exactly pick up much English-speaking TV, so we watched a bit of "SOS Tata," which is the Italian version of "Nanny 911" -- you kind of don't need to know what they're saying because it's all pretty formulaic, and so it helped us pass the time. This trip, though, was the beginning of a new phase for Maddie: if she has too many people in the room with her, she is absolutely unable to calm down. She was climbing, jumping, and basically being a tireless monkey until midnight, when I finally decided we needed to turn out the lights. That did the trick; once the lights were out, she passed out in bed and we transferred her to her crib. She was so tired that she "slept in" the next morning, which meant we didn't head down for breakfast until nearly 10 a.m.

Wednesday was our big see-the-sights day. Florence is an amazing city, but it's also exhausting and can be ... well, glaringly touristy. And Andrew and I are known for getting testy if we try to pound the pavement too much on vacation. Florence was hot and crowded, and we spent a lot of time walking around looking for things that felt "authentic" rather than touristy (which was difficult ... and ultimately, for example, we settled for a mediocre, overpriced open air cafe for lunch because we were starving and knew places were going to close soon). Plus, while we were staying in New York I had reserved tickets over the Internet for the Academia to see David. We had reservations for 11 a.m., which I had believed would be more than doable since Maddie usually wakes up so early; I figured we would have been out of the hotel for hours by then. But my experience with the car rental place had me thinking that I should probably have printed my vouchers, and when I pulled down my email via the iPhone (no Internet at our "business hotel") I was right -- the disclaimer said I absolutely must have my voucher, no exceptions. We discussed finding an Internet cafe and trying to print everything out, but by this point it was 10:45 and we were going to miss our reservaton time. So we were feeling pretty disgruntled about the wasted money and wasted opportunity.

But we got to see absolutely exquisite cathedrals, including the Duomo and the Basilica Santa Maria di Novella. We visited the indoor food market, Maddie got to go on a carousel ride, and we ultimately ended up across the river at the Boboli Gardens, which were gorgeous and a nice way to end the day.

But by this point we were exhausted and it was much later in the day than we had hoped. We headed back to our car at the hotel, set the GPS to point us homeward, and set off around 5 p.m. (rush hour, by the way). About 15 minutes into our departure, we began noticing what the GPS was telling us to do wasn't corresponding with what we actually could do; for example, we'd be stopped at a light and the GPS would be plugging ahead telling us to go right and left and right. The satellites were all messed up, and we couldn't figure out how to get back on course. We had wandered into a part of the city where no one spoke English. I even pulled over at one point to ask directions back to the Autostrade at the caribinieri (Italian state police) station, and even they didn't speak English; he understood "Autostrade" and produced some hand gestures that at least pointed me in the right direction. This episode was definitely the low point of our visit to Florence because ... well, let's just say, being as tired as we were, we didn't exactly handle it very well. But ultimately we ended up getting back to the Autostrade, the GPS got itself together, and we got home safe and sound (and probably a little richer for the experience).

On the way home, we stopped at a big Autogrill, which Caroline and Sam had told us about before we left. These are the big travel plazas along the Autostrade, and some of them are big enough to cross the freeway like a big overpass. There are a number of food options, a big food store where you can buy fresh meats and cheese, a book store, toys, you name it. We fumbled our way through ordering food and sat at a window overlooking the interstate while Maddie gobbled half of our paninis. It was a fun end to a very long day!

Next up in part 4: a lovely and relaxing Italian holiday, and a day in Rome

Gordon Family Vacation, Part 2: Damn Brits

British Airways is pretty darn cool. When you travel with an infant or toddler they assign you to the bulkhead, and they have “bassinets” (which in reality are sort of like those baby seats we used to stick Maddie in before she could sit up) that strap to tables that fold down from the wall.

Our plane wasn’t all that crowded, so we got the window bulkhead and had the whole row to ourselves. Our plane took off around 7:00. It wasn’t long before Maddie was asleep and we were able to sit back and enjoy a little dinner and wine (free on international flights, baby!) and relax a bit. All in all, the flight was relatively uneventful, consider how bad it could have been. Maddie slept some of the time, though she was fitful about it. Andrew and I did not sleep, at all, even though we had some little white pills that were supposed to help with that.

Our saving grace was that Maddie fell fast asleep not long before the plane landed in Heathrow. She managed to sleep through what was hands-down the worst airport experience Andrew and I have ever had! We’d heard the horror stories about Heathrow’s new Terminal 5, which is supposed to be state-of-the-art and instead has caused nothing but headaches since it opened a few months ago. We, unfortunately, got to experience it first-hand.

We got off the plane in Terminal 4. It was about 7 in the morning, and the terminal seemed deserted. We walked and walked and walked, not exactly sure where we were headed. Finally we came to a down escalator, which was right next to a “lift,” which we opted for because of our “pram” (10 minutes in London and I was already speaking like an Englishwoman). Just as we stepped on to the elevator we noticed that they blocked off access to the down escalator, so our fellow travelers couldn’t go down. We had no idea why.

Until the elevator doors opened on the ground level and we saw the people in line waiting. Waiting for what? It took us a few minutes to figure out that we were all supposed to get on busses to go to another terminal. It took us another 15 minutes to realize that the back of the line was only the tip of the iceberg, and that as we rounded the corner the line snaked back and forth and filled up an entire waiting room. Busses were only coming every 15 minutes or so, and there were easily 200 people in line.

When we finally got on the bus to go to Terminal 5, the friendly recorded announcement informed us it would take 20 minutes to drive to Terminal 5. It was at this point that I, operating on no sleep and a shocking absence of morning coffee, began to realize why Americans get such a bad reputation abroad. Whereas everyone else on the bus rode stone-faced, Andrew and I were huffing and scoffing and making obnoxiously sarcastic comments to each other, a la the Griswalds.

We arrived at Terminal 5 in a record 17 minutes and walked into a beautiful, shiny lobby, where an employee escorted us with our sleeping babe-in-stroller to the lift. At this point we were pretty sure we were home-free. We rode the elevator up to another vast, shiny lobby. Then, we walked around the corner.

At this point I should mention that we had a 2-hour layover between flights. We were probably about 50 minutes away from the “door closes at” time listed on our boarding passes. In front of us, however, were hundreds and hundreds of people. We could not exactly tell where they were going, or what they had to do when they got there. All we could see was a mob, and that we were at the back of it.

We went through passport check, where the BAA employee checking our passport was so disgruntled he told us how incompetent everyone working there that day was, and told us to seek out “the only one who halfway knows what she’s doing” to see if we could get pulled out of line and sent up the elevator. We finally realized that people were queuing up to go up an escalator, and that there was a security checkpoint at the top. They were letting about 15 people up the escalator at a time. We later saw why: there was such a short distance from the top of the escalator to the checkpoint that people would have had to queue up the escalator.

Our saving grace was that someone plucked us out of line and sent us on to the elevator. At the top, we joined one of the lines for security. One of the employees had told us to pull our baby bottles with milk out and put them in a bin, which I did along with our shoes. Maddie was still fast asleep and the BAA employee let me walk through the scanner with her in the stroller, which I was grateful for.

But what they didn’t tell us when we sent the milk through was that we had the option of tasting it back before sending it through the X-ray. And that if we didn’t taste it before the X-ray, it would have to be hand-checked at the end. We got through the scanner and saw that our bin (with bottles and shoes) had been flagged for hand-check. In front of us in line were about 6 Italian tourists who were carrying countless pieces of leather hand luggage. A single security employee was meticulously opening each bag, turning each content over and over in her hands, walking to the back of the station for each piece of paper that had to be discarded … it was infuriating. Again, the pissy Americans in us emerged while the clock ticked away. Finally, she got to our milk. As I sipped the warm and not-so-fresh milk from Maddie’s bottle, the security employee smiled pleasantly and said: “You know, if you had tasted the milk before the security checkpoint, you wouldn’t have gotten held up.”

Sensing that this was no time to start cussing out the airport official, we threw on our shoes and started to run. Ten minutes left. Maddie woke up at this point, and were just lucky that she stayed calm, almost serene — she must have sensed that we couldn’t deal with a temper tantrum at that point. We raced through the terminal following signs for our gates. Guess what! We had to take a tram to the B gates. A sign told us to be absolutely sure we actually had to go to B gates, because it would take 40 minutes to get back if we ended up there accidentally. We were sure that we were just plain screwed.

Luckily the tram ride only took a few minutes, and we got off and ran as fast as we possibly could with 50 pounds of string cheese, bunny crackers and Sandra Boynton books on our backs. We arrived at the gate with only 2 minutes to spare. As crazed as we were as we got the gate, we were also so happy to have made our flight and were laughing and exclaiming as we flew into home base – but the British Airways gate crew didn’t really seem to have much of a sense of humor about it.

After all of that, we had a pretty uneventful flight to Rome. Andrew decompressed and Maddie discovered how to open and close, open and close, open and close the window shade. We arrived around 12:30 on a Sunday, which meant the airport wasn’t heavily staffed … so when our car seat never showed up on the conveyor belt, Andrew stood in line at the passenger assistance line for nearly an hour to talk to someone about it. Maddie and I finally went out to meet Sam, who had driven to pick us up. Andrew finally joined us, car seat-less (it arrived a few days later), and we had our first Italian meal in the airport.

Next up in part 3: Italian towns, Italian cities

Maddie's first Italian meal at the Rome airport

Gordon Family Vacation, Part 1: New York

It’s hard to believe more than a month has passed since we returned from our Big Vacation — the one we’d been talking about and planning for months. We returned from that trip May 5, richer by about 700 digital photographs, poorer by thousands of euros, and relaxed and fulfilled through and through.

Like with all good vacations, we wanted to bottle that feeling of satisfaction and happiness, but as always it melted away within mere days. I started working on a new project that has had me working every spare moment and late into every night, and we’ve been dealing with a toddler who’s stopped sleeping through the night and is going through a particularly bad case of no-mommy-don’t-go separation anxiety (in which I can’t even go to the bathroom without setting off a major temper tantrum).

Fortunately I’ve been working hard to try to keep the details of our trip in my mind. It helped that our friends Caroline and Sam detailed the trip on their own blog (filling in the Italian names of everything, which we often failed to retain even when were in the places themselves).

Gotta write it all down before I forget it, so here goes …

About the trip
For those who don’t know, last summer our friends Sam and Caroline and their son Eli (who is 8 weeks older than Maddie) left Oakland to live for a year in Viterbo, Italy, a town of about 70,000 people located about an hour and a half north of Rome. Sam is a Latin teacher, and he was chosen for a position to teach at an American study-abroad program in Viterbo. Caroline left her job, they rented their house, and they moved. (Since they’ve been there, they actually signed on for another year there, and also decided to sell their house in California and move to the East Coast, where Sam will take a job at a boarding school when they return to the States.)

So when the invitation came for us to come and visit them, Andrew and I knew that there would never be a chance like this one, to have someplace to stay and hosts who knew the language and how to get around. We also knew that if we were going to do Europe with an 18-month-old, this was the ideal situation, because Maddie would have a playmate — and not just any playmate, but Eli, who was one of her best buds when she was only 10 months old.

First stop: NYC
So we decided to break up the trip a little bit by first stopping in New York for a couple of days. The original idea for this was to help Maddie get adjusted to a small time change before heading off to Europe, and also to not start the trip with a 13-hour flight. We chose to do a red-eye from Oakland, leaving around 9:00 at night and getting in to JFK around 6.

(Before I go to far, let me just mention that packing for a trip like this was a challenge. We were going to be gone for 12 days. Once we got to Italy we had no idea what the weather would be like or what exactly we were going to be doing. We also really overthought the toddler entertainment and food challenges. Andrew and I shared a big suitcase (in which, to my credit, I only packed two backup pairs of shoes, and yet we still had to pay overweight fees when we checked it because of how much we overpacked), and Maddie got her own suitcase. Our carry-ons consisted of a refrigerated backpack to hold Maddie’s milk and endless snack options (all of which became truly disgusting regardless of the ice packs meant to keep them fresh), plus endless picture books, games, toy cars, flash cards … you name it. Throughout the trip we were packing and repacking and fighting with and cursing all those stupid bags. In hindsight, most of the books and toys could have stayed home.)

The red-eye turned out to be a brilliant idea. Maddie had her own seat and, once she fell asleep in my arms, I managed to transfer her to her car seat where she slept until about a half hour before the flight was over. Even though she’d only gotten a few hours of sleep, she was wide awake in the car on the way to the city, looking out the window at all the buildings of Queens and saying “Mine, mine!” to everything like she was a mini Donald Trump.

We stayed with our cousins David and Man-Sau. No one was expecting us before 7:30 or 8, considering we arrived during commute time on a weekday, but we got into Manhattan in record time and showed up at their apartment around 6:30. We all crashed in the guest room and slept for a few hours, finally rousing ourselves around 10:30 or 11 and heading out for a “breakfast” of bagels and coffee around noon. That afternoon we dropped by Aunt Elaine and Uncle Bruce’s apartment and then headed to the park behind the New York Public Library for a quick rendezvous with my old coworkers Peggy Jo and Ren, so they could meet Mad in person. Maddie immediately spotted the carousel there, which we had to try out.

New York was busy. We spent all day the next day with David and Man-Sau, hitting F.A.O. Schwarz and the Apple Store, having a pizza lunch and doing lots of walking. Friday night Elaine and Bruce hosted a second Passover dinner (since we arrived late in the week of Passover) for us. Maddie slept through the seder (she fell asleep in the stroller on the way) but woke up in time for food, though she was pretty freaked out by all the new faces and by her portable, inflatable high chair that we had purchased for the trip. After dinner was over she warmed up to everybody though, and flirted with her relatives the rest of the evening.

Saturday was a very exciting day for me. I got to reunite with my friends Susan and Steve and their daughter Katie, who we hadn’t seen since well before Maddie was even a glimmer. (The last time we saw Katie she was 9 months old and still doing the “army crawl.” Now she is an amazing almost-4-year-old.) We met at Central Park Zoo. The kids were mildly into the animals and crazy into each other. By the time we headed for the exit they were running ahead of us hand in hand, Katie clearly enjoying her big sister role, and Maddie (as usual) in total awe of her new older and wiser buddy.

We returned to David and Man-Sau’s apartment for a mad-dash repacking. Saturday afternoon was not exactly the most fun time of the trip; as strategic as we had tried to be about planning Maddie’s food and packing for the Oakland to NYC trip, we simply didn’t give ourselves enough time to repack for our red-eye to London. We ended up having to throw a bunch of things in a box to ship home, sat on our suitcases, and finally piled in to our car at 5:00 for our trip back to JFK. Our European adventure was about to begin!

Next up in part 2: The Gordons survive Terminal 5.

Watch this space ...

for a travelogue from our Italy trip. It's coming soon, I promise. Post-vacation catch-up has been consuming all my time.