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.
Comments