Travels with Matthew

We arrived in Cannes this morning, and while we wait for our tender from the ship to shore, I thought I’d take the opportunity to catch you up on yesterday’s adventures in Florence.

A friend of mine had lots of recommendations for muesums and sites in Florence and even lent me a book with his favorites marked. We didn’t do any of it. (Not that I didn’t appreciate the gesture!) Instead, Mark booked us a climb to the top of the Duomo so that we could see the city, after which we intended to wander, get a bite to eat, maybe try to get last minute tickets to see the original David in L’Accademia.

The day started off fine and ended well, but it went a little bit awry in the middle. Our tour bus was running just a tad late, so when Monica, our diminutive guide, announced that we would first make a stop at a gold artisan shop, Mark and I  begged off. Our tickets for the Duomo were for 11 a.m., and it was already 10:30 when we stepped off the bus. Even Monica looked a little worried that we wouldn’t make it there in time, but she gave us directions and sent us on our way. We immediately got lost.

Maybe that’s a little melodramatic. We knew the general direction we were heading, but we probably could have chosen a more direct route. As you can imagine, the streets in the old city are far from straight. It’s impossible to see more than a couple blocks ahead. They are also very narrow (though not as narrow as old Barcelona’s streets), and the buildings along them are three or four or five stories tall. The overall effect of this is that even though the Duomo is quite tall compared to everything around it, you could see the dome from almost no point along the way. We did, however eventually make it to our meeting site, but our guide for the Duomo tour, however, is another story.

We were told to meet outside Aromi Firenze at 10:45 a.m. By 11:05, we were starting to get nervous. Mark flagged down another tour guide who kindly called our tour company to find out what was wrong.

“We canceled that tour yesterday. Didn’t you get our email?”

“Of course we didn’t get your email! We we’ve been on a ship with barely tenable internet access for a week!”

“We’ll send someone over right away.”

So they sent a representative to talk to us about the mix-up. They had no one available to take us on the tour, but he made arrangements with the tour guide who had so kindly called our tour company to take us on if she had any no-shows. Her tour was not quite the same as what we had planned, but it would still climb to the top of the Duomo. Just before she was about to welcome us in, though, her last two stragglers showed. Damn.

The next-best compensation that our original tour guide could offer was two tickets to climb the bell tower and enter the baptistery and the crypt. The bell tower has the same view as the Duomo, he assured us, and is the same height. The height is less important to Mark than the engineering and architecture of Brunelleschi’s dome that is so ingeniously supported, but at least we’d get to see the view. When we entered the baptistery, though, an attendant told us that our tickets were expired.

We never got into the cathedral at all, and we’d wasted more than 90 minutes of our five hours in Florence. I was so disappointed for Mark, but like the optimist he is, he decided that it was a sign that he wasn’t in good enough shape to climb the several hundred stairs and that we should just move on and do the other things we’d wanted to do in Florence. A little dejected, we wandered through the city from plaza to plaza just taking in what we could.

Figuring that we would not be able to get tickets to see the real David, we went to see the replica in Piazza della Signoria, at the Palazzo Vecchio. Monica had assured us that it is identical to the original, although we know that subtle differences in the marble likely made the original even more beautiful. Nearly perfect replica or not, it was incredible. All of my friends who have seen the statue tell me that pictures just don’t do it justice, and they’re right. (I’m going to show some anyway.) It’s enormous, of course, but for me, seeing it in person gave me a much better sense of the youth Michelangelo was trying to capture. In all of the pictures I’ve seen, the David of the statue seems older to me—a late adolescent. Presented with the actual statue, however (well, not actual statue, but you know what I mean), he seems more like a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old.

Many other sculptures, including Rape of the Sabines, Hercules and Cacus, Nettuno, Perseo, populate the square, and I’ve included some of those, too.

We didn’t go in the Uffizi Gallery, but we enjoyed the statuary outside of it and then wandered along the Arno River (for which one of my favorite typefaces is named). We stopped at a little cafe to get pizzas; we expected a slice or perhaps two for the price. Instead, we each got a 13-inch pie! Their crusts were super thin, though, so Mark ate all of his. I probably could have eaten all of mine, but it had more cheese than I wanted, so left about a third of it.

We did more walking after lunch and stumbled on a small gallery/art studio. The paintings weren’t anything earth-shattering, but they were nice and not terribly expensive, so Mark bought a couple. The artists didn’t speak much English, so communication was a little difficult. I’m always amused to watch Mark speaking English to non-English speakers. It’s almost like he expects them to understand anyway. I just go dumb. Mark must be doing something right, though, because he usually gets his point across somehow.

Here are a few more pictures of the city from our wanderings.

Both of us tired and with aching backs—walking on cobblestones for four hours takes a toll—we limped back to Piazza Santa Croce to meet our group and return to the ship. We grabbed a bite at the steakhouse on board and then killed a little time until the ship’s production of the Broadway musical, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert began. I can’t say it was the best show I’ve ever seen, but I laughed a few times, and it was a nice enough way to spend the evening. At 11:30, which is well past our bedtimes, we turned in and slept through until the alarm this morning.

We don’t arrive in Palma, Mallorca until tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll post about Cannes in the morning.

I had in mind several ways to begin this blog post, but in the end, I opted to be positive—well, as positive as a pessimist can be. Despite having trouble with my photos (accidentally deleted all of them from my camera; was able to get everything back except Herculaneum, but I think I can get those when I get home), my keycard (lost it and waited for nearly an hour in line to get a replacement), and my wi-if package (left the iPad logged in and burned through all of my free minutes), Tuesday was a wonderful day overall, and I’m glad I got to spend it with Mark.

We arrived in Naples overnight, and in the morning, I took some pictures of the city from our balcony. I counted 24 domes across the city, but only some can be seen in these pictures.

We spent a leisurely morning on the ship, which was mostly vacant. Most people had morning or all-day excursions, but our trip to Herculaneum didn’t start until 1 p.m. Our tour guide, Massimo, was very knowledgeable and friendly in a weird, reserved way. He explained Herculaneum something like this (imagine the Italian accent). Pompeii was a commercial center destroyed in 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius erupted. Herculaneum was also destroyed in the eruption, but it was a residential community for the wealthy. My take is that Herculaneum is less famous and, so, less crowded, and it has more beautiful objects, mosaics, and frescos more beautifully preserved than Pompeii. (FYI, I was able to recover my photos. These are some. Just a heads up, the last one is a little disturbing.)

Where I was standing in this shot is on the top of what I thought was just a hill. In actuality, I was on the top of the fifty-foot high mudflow that buried Herculaneum. Those arched portals you see in the foreground are boat slips that used to be right on the Mediterranean. The shore is now about 800 feet behind my back.

This is what’s to be found in those boat slips I pointed out above. Dozens of people tried to flee the mud flow from Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 AD by sailing out into the sea. What they found, instead, was that they were trapped between the turbulent ocean and tons of falling ash and the mud bearing down upon them. The sea proved to be no escape route. I think we’ve become accustomed in our culture to seeing skeletons in Halloween displays and cartoons, but it’s something entirely different to see actual bones that were once actual people. And it’s horrifying to see the remains of real people who died in agony and despair nearly 2,000 years ago.

Our overall impression of Naples as we drove through it was that it was poor and in disrepair. It is possible that we only passed through a rougher part of the city, but it’s clear that the buildings there are very old and could use some love.

After Herculaneum, we returned to the ship, got cleaned up, had a nice stroll on deck and then a nice dinner in the ship’s Italian restaurant. My dietary fussiness gave our waitress and the restaurant manager a bit of a fit. After I ordered and told them that I can’t eat onions, first she and then he came out to tell me that all of their sauces had onions that couldn’t be scraped aside. They were very kind about it, and the manager had the kitchen make up a special spicy aioli for my pasta.

We turned in fairly early knowing we had to get up early this morning in Civitivecchia and get down to the pier to meet our driver. Turns out we didn’t need to get up as early as we’d thought, though. He was 45 minutes late picking us up. After yesterday’s rotten luck, I got more and more nervous that I had done something wrong in booking our excursion and that we were going to be left with nothing to do today. About 20 minutes after our driver was due, the tour company called to tell me that he had been delayed by an accident on the highway and an unusually aggressive port security that, today, was slowing everyone down.

Needless to say, we were a little disgruntled when Mauro finally arrived, but we were determined not to let the delay ruin our day. He apologized profusely and was really quite nice. And while I was somewhat comfortable interacting with Spaniards for whom English was a second language, I was not at all sure I could communicate with a similarly equipped Italian. I didn’t know enough Italian to fall back on if my English was not clear enough. Turns out, though, that Mauro had lived in Sydney, Australia until he was 16, so his English was nearly perfect.

Mauro made good time—much better than the guides we’d read suggested we would—and we arrived in Tivoli around 10:15. Tivoli seems to be a very nice town. It was definitely more well cared for than the part of Naples we’d seen the day before, but it was still obvious that the old structures needed a lot of care.

I should probably clarify for those of you whom we haven’t already told that today was marketed by the cruise line as a day in Rome, but early on, Mark and I decided that Rome was just too much to see in six or eight hours and that we’d only be haunted by what we’d missed. Instead, we decided to go to Tivoli to see the Villa d’Este gardens and Villa Adriana (aka Hadrian’s Villa).

Mauro suggested we see Villa d’Este first because it had an earlier closing time. He got our tickets for us and sent us on our way. He is not a tour guide—he only drives—so he waited in the car. I hope he had the AC on, because we were in the gardens for nearly two hours and could have done more. If you check out the hyperlink above, you’ll learn that the Villa d’Este gardens are filled with fountains and waterfalls and other beautiful water features, all of which are gravity fed. Not a single pump is used to produce the water ballet in these photos.

Villa Adriana was not at all what we expected. Mark and I both thought that we would be touring the inside of a palace. Instead, we found ourselves in a compound so large that “Village” Adriana would have been a more appropriate name. It was a very large property—several acres at least—filled with lots of ruins with barely a roof to cover any of them. That’s important because about 20 minutes into our visit, a thunderstorm rolled it, and we had to huddle against a wall to keep from getting soaked. We did have our umbrellas (oddly fortunate!), but it was pouring for at least 20 minutes. It was much darker and greyer than it looks in these pictures.

We didn’t see all of Villa Adriana partly because it was soaked with large puddles forbidding entry into just about every ruin and partly because we wanted to be back on the ship well before we were due. What we saw, though—at both Villa d’Este and at Villa Adriana—were beautiful and interesting enough that when we finally do spend a week in Rome, we’ll make a day trip to Tivoli to take a more leisurely stroll through each.

Our drive back from Tivoli to Civitivecchia (about 60 to 90 minutes) was pretty uneventful, and we boarded the ship dog tired but extremely happy with our decision to skip Rome. If you can’t tell, I’m hurrying through now because it’s late, we have another early morning, and I’ve been writing up yesterday and today’s adventures for quite a while. We got cleaned up and had an early-ish dinner at the ship’s steak house where the maitre’d gave us a wonderful window seat with a view of the harbor (and the eight—EIGHT—other cruise ships in dock). After dinner (and ice cream, which we’ve eaten at least one time every day since boarding), we wandered though the entertainment, including a couple live game shows and an Elton John tribute. It’s now about 11:30 p.m. local time, so I’m going to copy and paste this entry into WordPress, activate the links, insert the photos, and call it a night. See you tomorrow.

Today is Monday, our day at sea. I didn’t post yesterday because we were boarding and getting settled. Those of you who have traveled with me (and probably the rest of you from reading this blog) know that I find the actual process of travel very stressful. Once I actually get to my destination, I need a day to settle in and destress. Yesterday was a destress day because even the relatively simple process of checking out of our B&B, getting a cab, and getting to and aboard the ship tied me in knots. Now that we’re here and I’m settled, I’m ready to get back to writing.

As I said, yesterday morning was tied up in extricating ourselves from Barcelona. We made sure we’d collected our possessions and emailed the manageress of the B&B to tell her we were heading out (and to tell her that one of the posts on the toilet paper holder had popped off the wall bracket and needed to be reattached). Then we dragged our luggage a couple blocks over to hail a taxi. All throughout the area where we stayed, the sidewalks are patterned. I wish I’d thought to take a photo of one, but I didn’t. Most of the ones near our B&B look like six-inch square tiles with circles carved into them. They’re fun and interesting but a pain to drag small-wheeled luggage over. I”m sure we woke some residents up as we clattered along.

Of course, the usual stress ensued when we found a cab and had to figure out how to tell him we wanted the cruise port. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized that it might be tricky. “Cruise” sounds like “cruz”—“cross” in Spanish, so his first thought might have been that I wanted the cross-port. I couldn’t think of the word for boat (“barco”?) or ship (???), so I started to do some sort of “Walk Like and Egyptian” dance move—I suppose to represent trying to steady oneself on a rocking boat. Fortunately, the driver was smarter than I am gesturally creative and figured out what we wanted. We didn’t say another word to each other until our parting “gracias.”

Because we’d arrived a little before our boarding time, we didn’t have a lot of delay getting on the ship. The lines were relatively short, and we were at the head. The downside was that our rooms were not ready, but the upside was that we could hang out on the decks relatively unmolested and look back at the city. Here’s some of what we saw.

After we sailed, we went down to the LGBT meetup to meet some people on the ship. We’ve always found it nice to be able to know other people on the ship besides ourselves, and indeed, after eschewing the six very loud, very young gay men who were having a lot of fun, we met three fellows around our age and had a nice chat.

We eventually wandered off to dinner and then to bed. We overslept again this morning until 9:30 and then got cleaned up and made our way to breakfast. I forgot to pack a swimsuit, so I’ll probably go look for one after I finish writing.

More tomorrow after we get back from Herculaneum.

I’m sitting in the little living room of the B&B that Mark and I rented through Sunday morning. It’s a tidy, quiet little place in a bustling area—perfect for a few days in Barcelona. It’s a second-floor walkup with two bedrooms and one bath, a laundry room, a living room, and a kitchen/dinette.

While nice, it’s mostly unremarkable except for. A very pretty tile in the kitchen and bathrooms. It’s so shiny it almost looks like glass.

How we got here is perhaps not as pretty, though it certainly could have been worse.

When we originally decided to do this trip, I was scouting for airfare. Tickets were routinely coming in at $1,200, $1,400, or even $1,600 per person. Our cruise cost just barely more, so I was starting to think we had a problem. I kept looking, though, and stumbled on an American Airlines fare through justfly.com for $720 per person. I jumped on it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying attention to where I landed.

In my haste Alt-Tabbing from website to website, I got a little lost with the “Back” button and ended up booking only my tickets. I started to book Mark’s separately, but when I got to the end of the process, the website asked me to select seats. Hmm. It didn’t ask me to select seats for my tickets. Mark decided to take over his ticket purchase while I tried to figure out how to add seats to my booking. Turns out I couldn’t—at least not on the website.

I called American and explained the situation to a gentleman who seemed disturbingly confused by what I was asking him to do—add seat assignments to my flight adjacent to the seats Mark had selected. He told me that he would reassign Mark to new seats and put me next to him. He didn’t sound convincing. Mark and I had dinner plans, however, and so I was in a hurry. I let him reseat Mark and me and thought, “I’ll check on this in a couple weeks.”

A couple weeks became a month before I finally got around to calling them again. While I was on hold, I discovered not only that I didn’t have any seat assignments, but also, Mark had misunderstood what flight I’d chosen for the Columbus–Charlotte leg and had booked himself on a different flight. Gah! Now I know that the fellow from American a month before didn’t know what he was doing. He couldn’t have sat us next to each other on the first leg of the trip because we weren’t on the same plane!

The customer-service rep that took my call this time asked how he could help, and I laid out the whole, long, complicated mess we’d made of our booking. He was charming and knowledgeable and was able to truly rebook us in adjacent seats on three legs of the flight. On the Columbus–Charlotte leg, however, he didn’t have any options. Both of our flights were reading as full, so he couldn’t move one of us to the other’s plane. He was very sweet, though, and booked both of us in seat 17A on our respective flights, so at least we would share that. (I’m pretty sure he’s gay, too, and went out of his way to help “family.” I’m grateful for him.)

So, blah blah blah. Mark flew to Charlotte two hours before me, but we both got there and spent the rest of Thursday shuffling from Concourse A through Concourse E killing time. Our flight to Barcelona was scheduled to leave at 8:15 p.m., but it got delayed to 9:15, then moved to another gate, then delayed again to 10:05. By the time we actually got on board, we’d eaten too much, walked too much, and run out of things to talk about. Staring us in the face was seven hours trying to sleep in tight seats.

Mark got a few winks, but as usual, I pretty much didn’t sleep at all. Any sleep I did get was not restful. I was, however, lucky to be in an aisle seat, so at least I had a tad more room. Korean Air this flight wasn’t.

I watched a couple movies—Tolkien (illuminating and entertaining, but not particularly earth shattering, despite the writers’ attempt to inject pathos in to it à la The Theory of Everything), and Men in Black 3? 4? Whatever number it was, other than Chris Hemsworth, meh.

By the time we arrived in Barcelona, my feet had been in shoes—shoes, not sandals—for 24 hours and were killing me. My back hurt, my mind was foggy, I had developed a rash, my breath stank, I was dehydrated. All I wanted to do was get to the B&B and rest. Fortunately, the travel gods were through tormenting us, and I was able to check in quickly, send the manageress of the property on her way, and take a two-hour nap.

When I got up, I felt well enough to do a little exploring, so Mark and I walked around to start getting our bearings. Like a black hole, however, the Basilica of the Holy Family (aka, “Sagrada Familia”) drew us to her gates. I have a tour booked for us on Monday after the cruise, so we’ll get to see inside for quite a while, and I’ll talk more about the basilica then, but we took this opportunity to look around the outside. Pictures don’t do it justice (though I’ve shared some of mine below anyway).

After our little excursion, we went back to the B&B freshened up and had a nice birthday dinner (yes, today’s my 51st birthday) at a little Italian restaurant near us called Galú. I’ve been trying to practice my Spanish here and did so tonight, even though the waiter/maitre’d/bartender spoke perfect English. I hope to have goaded Mark into trying to practice his, too. While in Rome, eh?

Well, Mark and I are in the Charlotte airport waiting to begin our first foray to continental Europe. Booking the trip has been a challenge, but hey, nothing worth doing is easy. We flew down on two separate planes due to a miscommunication when each of us was booking the flights, but we both made it. Elvis still has two dads.

My layover will be around eight hours—ten for Mark—so we’re just cruising around the concourses. We got this view from the concourse A window wall and thought it was a fun picture with which to launch the trip blog.

Look for more posts over the coming days. First up, Barcelona!