BFT23 - We Get Ready to Travel

When the lottery went over a billion dollars a few weeks ago (as it seems to do with unusual regularity these days), we bought a couple of tickets. Why not? It’s a license to think about what you would do with all that money until someone else wins – for a couple of bucks you get hours of entertainment. It’s more cost-effective than a movie that way.

We spent some time discussing what we would do with the money in the unlikely event that “someone else” happened to be us, and you know what? It was really hard to come up with things. We have a nice snug house that we like. There are only so many cars you can drive and none of us are really car people anyway. I don’t need or want a mega-yacht, and the sorts of vanity projects that you see the super-rich spend their time on these days – destroying social media networks, buying Supreme Court justices, and so on – seem like they’d be more trouble than they’re worth really.

The one thing we agreed on is that if we had that kind of money we’d travel more.

We like traveling. Even I, a fairly anxious traveler, enjoy the process once I’m on the plane or even just waiting at the proper gate. I have no baseline expectation of comfort, so getting through the anxious parts to get to the fun stuff just seems normal to me. And it’s good to see things and do things that are not the usual things you see and do. Familiar and normal are different. Unless you get out and see for yourself, it’s hard to understand that just because something is familiar to you doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s normal in any meaningful way.

This is at least part of the reason why this year we decided we needed to plan a Big Family Trip. It would be good to go somewhere, all of us together. Oliver and Lauren are getting to the point where they will be haring off into their own lives soon enough and opportunities for such BFTs grow correspondingly thin after that. Plus, since we don’t really do much other big spending – our house and cars are paid off, for example – and this year we actually got money back from our taxes, for the first time in over a decade (three cheers for professional tax people!), we could actually afford to do it. This is a privilege in this world. Not everyone has this ability. We would take our opportunities with gratitude and go exploring.

But where?

See, the thing about a BFT as your family gets older is that it’s more complicated than it was before. Small children are essentially luggage with entertainment needs – they go wherever you take them, and you just have to plan things to make them happy. As they turn into adults, though, you enter a world where everyone has their own agenda and coordinating all of the competing desires in a way that would realistically get everyone a) something they wanted, b) nothing they absolutely didn’t want, and c) there and back again in a way that is reasonably coherent and achievable can be something of a trick.

We gathered together in the spring at one of the trivia contests that Lauren and her friends play during the semester. We got there a bit early, and wrote down all of the places we would each want to go if it were solely up to us. And then we voted. Each of us got one Absolute No to veto something that we just didn’t want, and four Yes votes to support things we did want in a ranked-choice sort of way. There followed a period of negotiations, and eventually the outlines of the trip were set.

Then we played trivia and came in second. It was a good time.

The final outline for BFT23 looked like this:

First, we’d go to Rome for four or five days, where Kim and I had gone last year, and show Oliver and Lauren some of the things we’d enjoyed and try to get to some of the things we’d missed. We could even stay at the same little apartment we’d had in 2022. Then we’d rent a car and drive to southern Italy. We’d pass through Ruoti, the little hilltop village where my great-grandparents were born back in the late 1800s, and stay in Irsina. From there we’d go all over southern Italy for five days or so, seeing whatever came to mind. There were a few things we had in mind, and in the end we managed to get to most of them. From there we’d fly to Prague and spend six days there. None of us had ever been there or had any connections to it, but it sounded interesting and in the end it was. Two of those days, however, were set aside to rent another car and drive to Germany, to visit with Lauren’s host family from when she was an exchange student in 2019/2020. And then we’d fly back. Total time from departure to return: sixteen days, including two days of just getting there and back.

This sounded like an Adventure, and we were all happy with it. It had a nice selection of what we wanted and a good balance of touristy things and off-the-beaten-track things since you really should do both as long as you’re there. It would be busy – this would not be one of those “pull up, put your feet up, and vegetate” vacations – but it would allow us to do a lot without being too overscheduled.

Of course, we had to figure out how to do this.

This is where Kim comes in. She loves making these sort of arrangements – it’s “the thrill of the hunt,” she once told me – which is good because I get completely overwhelmed by it all and am prone to throw up my hands and stay home. So she made sure we got Stefano’s apartment in Rome – he remembered us fondly, and was happy to hear from us. She found tickets to things such as airplanes and attractions. She rented cars. She found an AirBnB in Irsina and another in Prague. Also, Lauren got in touch with her host family and got that arranged, and we all read through some travel books to see what we might find when we got there.

We were also assigned to read Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which I dutifully completed. It was not an enjoyable experience. But we did end up seeing several Kafka-related sites in Prague so in the end it was good preparation.

There was also the matter of driving. Kim enjoys driving challenges, so she was looking forward to that part of the trip. Driving to me is just something I do to get from A to B, so I was happy to remain the backup driver. In the end I did no driving in Italy as our car had a manual transmission and despite heroic efforts neither Kim nor my dad were ever able to teach me how to drive one of those without causing trauma to everyone involved including the car itself. I did do some driving in Germany, though. It was a long trip from Prague, so it was good to have the backup.

In some countries in Europe – notably Italy – American drivers licenses are not sufficient. You need to have an International Drivers License, which you can get for $20 at your local AAA office. So we found one of those offices, paid them our money, got photos taken, and walked out with two snazzy licenses that we were required to carry with us at all times when were in the car, as they will write you a Ten Foot Ticket if they catch you without it. I’m not sure why this requirement exists, since there was no learning involved in the process. I knew no more about Italian law or custom when I walked out of AAA than I did when I walked in. But we had the documentation, and that was what mattered.

The one thing I do remember learning about driving in Europe is that they catch speeders with cameras. There are speed cameras mounted pretty much everywhere – though in Italy they do have to warn you about them – and as you drive by they snap your picture, read your license plate, and just send you the ticket automatically. This is a much more stringent thing than the American practice of “catch me if you can, copper” that prevails on our roads and highways. I suspect if they started mounting such cameras in the US Americans would just shoot them. So you really do need to pay attention to the speed limit signs, which is tricky because they don’t always have them and even when they do they’re not always clear. There are Standard Speed Limits that you just have to know, and often they just post signs when things vary from those. In Italy, for example, most bigger roads are either 90kph or 110kph but you have to slow down in curves and such, and they mark those but they just assume you’ll know that the speed limit goes back up once you’re done and they don’t need to tell you that explicitly. As for the Autobahn, well. You’re on your own there, folks. Mostly.

We planned to travel light, with no checked bags. All of the apartments we’d be in had laundry facilities, with one of those slow energy-efficient European washing machines tucked away in the kitchens the way they do over there as well as an assortment of lines and clothespins for drying, so we didn’t have to take too many clothes. I decided to try e-books on my phone rather than bringing actual paper books in order to save weight, a practice that worked reasonably well though I am happy to go back to my regular books now that the trip is over. And in general we tried to bring only the things we’d need. We were planning to fly on three different airlines (four if you count the one that oversaw a couple of flights but did not actually provide them – modern air travel is such a corporate shell game) and we packed for the tightest carry-on restrictions. These were for ITA, which limited us to two bags, each of 8kg. In the end we didn’t actually fly on ITA at all – a long story for a future post – but we had plenty of room for stuff when we flew home. And we could check a bag on the return flight, which turned out to be a mixed blessing but was certainly lighter for the trip itself.

The other thing we had to do to get ready for all of this was to get our cell phones straightened out. American sim cards don’t always work in Europe, so we had to get the right ones from our cell phone company. This was fairly easy. The tricky part was getting Roaming Data, since without it we’d be limited to wifi and that wouldn’t be good with GPS.

This is where Late Stage Capitalism collapses, apparently.

I called the Provider. We determined that our sim cards were in order. And then I asked about Roaming Data. The guy at the call center said he could sell us X amount of the stuff, with the proviso that every text sent, social media post made, GPS guidance determined, and minute of a voice call made or internet surfed would cost us a set amount unless we did it on wifi. We have four people in our family, two of whom are digital natives, and we planned to do a fair amount of driving in unfamiliar places. “Can I get 2X amount of the Roaming Data?” I asked him. “No,” he said. “We can only let you purchase X amount.”

Now, to an American, this is peculiar. He has a product to sell. It is essentially an unlimited product – it’s not like original artwork, which is extraordinarily finite. It is not rationed. I would like to purchase 2X amount this product. I have the money to make this purchase at the quoted rates. But – for reasons the guy was never able to articulate fully – only X amount could be purchased. It was company policy.

“Try to find wifi,” he suggested.

In the end we used about 95% of what we were allowed to purchase, mostly by being careful to use whatever wifi services we could glom onto as we careened around, so it worked out. But still.

So, prepped and ready, we set out for our trip.