Blog

Our trip to Italy was our very first solo vacation to a country where we did not speak the local language. We learned a little conversational Italian beforehand, and though we were entirely on our own (no tour group) we managed to get by okay; and because we were on our own we slipped pretty inconspicuously through our tour sites to better see what they were really like. And, of course, we got to visit only those places we really wanted to see, missing most of the standard not-of-interest-to-us tourist traps.

Fred wanted to go to Florence to see the Renaisance art; but Betty Lou said if we were going to Italy we had to also visit Rome and Venice. So we flew into Rome to visit there, took a train to Florence for a second tour, then a train again to Venice for our last sightseeing. This way we did not need to rent a car at all.

It was fun for Betty Lou to see places she had read about as a young woman in her Latin class, and fun for Fred to see so many new and interesting things. At one point, though, it was scary. We found ourselves walking to our hotel in Rome in the evening and I realized this trio of troublesome realities: 1) there was no one else on the street but us, 2) all the first-floor windows were barred, and 3) the loudest sound by far was the clicking of Betty Lou's heels on the cobblestones. But, not to worry, all went fine.

This vacation was the beginning of my joy in learning unexpected stuff by visiting new-to-me foreign countries. For instance there is a stereotype of Italians as not being able to make anything work efficiently. But in Venice the water taxi system worked like clockwork, getting us where we wanted to go easily and quickly, whereas many boat systems I had previously seen in the U.S. were problematic. All in all, this was a great vacation that inspired us to consider visiting other foreign countries, which we have since done a lot.