We weren’t going to travel this year.
We’ve been doing a lot of traveling in the last few years and enjoying it very much, thank you, but it’s been a busy few years in many ways and when we started the year our plans for the summer were to step back a bit and have a quiet couple of months and perhaps let people come to us. Also, to be honest, it’s been a rather horrifying time to be an American for the last few months so keeping things low key seemed prudent. We had some friends who wanted to plan a trip with us but we ended up working out a plan for something closer to hand (coming soon!), which we are looking forward to immensely. Plus, we do in fact have friends visiting us later this summer as well – Fran and her parents will be coming over from Belgium and it will be lovely to see them again.
It seemed pretty set.
But more and more friends kept insisting we should travel to Europe to see them, which is a very high-class problem to have when you get down to it, and eventually they wore us down. It seems strange to say all that in a world where such opportunities are a privilege after all, but once we made the first call the rest of it kind of slotted in. Maybe it’s a life-cycle thing – you reach a certain age and you have enough money saved up to do this sort of thing and you’re still pretty healthy so you figure maybe you should just go Do The Thing even if you have been doing the thing a lot recently because there will be a time in the not all that distant future when you won’t have much say in the matter.
Our friends Stacey and JR were in Florence – they’d rented an apartment in April and were staying through June – and said we should join them there. Our friends Joshua and Sarah were going to be in Portugal and offered to meet us there as well. And our Swedish friends pointed out that we owed them a visit, since the last time we were there was 2018 and they’d been here in 2022, and if we timed it right we could be there for Midsommar.
So in the end we went. And it was, with one notable exception on a Sunday morning in Florence, a lovely time. Yes, I will explain that in due time.
It is a good thing to travel, really, especially if you can get outside of the bubble of the tourist stuff and walk around a bit. It’s good to do the tourist stuff too, don’t get me wrong – and we did a fair amount of it, being tourists and all – but sometimes you just walk into the grocery store to pick up things for breakfast, or ride the trams and buses around town, or stop in at a little hole in the wall restaurant where you’re the only person who doesn’t speak the language and you eventually manage to order something that isn’t quite what you were expecting but is clearly what everyone else is expecting when they order that, and you get a small glimpse into another world.
Familiar and normal are different things.
Of course, deciding to go was, in some sense, the easy part. Because then you actually have to make it happen. This is where Kim comes in, because she is an excellent planner who actually enjoys the process while I tend to get overwhelmed by the whole ordeal and end up just staying home. Everyone involved in the planning for this trip uses spreadsheets, which is another thing that I find mystifying. One of my goals in life is to get to retirement without ever really having learned how to use MS Excel, and I’m nearly there. I was asked to contribute my ideas to these spreadsheets, which I dutifully did – I looked up what one does in Florence (a lot) and Porto (also a lot, but with port wine) and in Stockholm (many things as well, but since we’d be there with friends over a holiday I figured they’d have more ideas than I would) and I made a list and handed it to Kim and a surprising amount of it ended up in the final plans, probably because much of it overlapped with other lists of similar ideas.
We also had to figure out who was going, which got complicated quickly. Kim and I were definitely going. Oliver ended up staying home because he has other life events coming up shortly and he needed to focus on those. Lauren started her graduate program in May and therefore would be busy for much of our trip, but it turned out she could meet us in Sweden for that leg and then that turned into quite another adventure that is still ongoing but is really her story to tell. I’m looking forward to hearing all about it when she returns.
Part of the planning process is that you have to download a pile of apps onto your phone. Everything happens on your phone these days, which is a strange thing indeed. There are airline apps for tracking flights, getting boarding passes, and receiving a myriad of targeted ads begging you to join various travel clubs and acquire branded credit cards. There are city apps, designed to give you overviews of where you are traveling. There are apps that you can use to pay for things, apps that you can use to enquire about things, apps for public transportation systems, apps for restaurants, apps for translating things, apps to get eSims for your phone that will actually let you use your phone where you’re going, apps that let you book cars since taxis seem to be going away these days, apps that let you book hotels or apartments, apps that let you pay for parking and even apps for keeping track of all of your apps. It’s an app eat app world out there, folks. Setting that up took days.
For myself, I bought a new travel notebook since my old one is now full (again, an odd notion) and I like having something where I can actually write with a pen on paper. I wavered back and forth about whether I should bring my actual camera or just use my phone (there’s an app for that too) and in the end I left the camera at home. It’s heavy and it makes me instantly identifiable as a tourist, even more so than I already am, and I think it was the right call. I do wish I’d figured out the photo app on my phone a bit more than I did, but so it goes.
When all was said and done we were on eight different flights on anywhere from four to six airlines depending on how you count, each of which has its own app and its own rules, none of which give you much space for luggage unless you pay them handsomely for the privilege. We decided we’d just go with carryon for the trip – one backpack each for the overhead compartment and one bag to go under the seat – with a weight limit of 8 to 10kg each depending on the airline. Not bad for 21 days abroad. It just requires you to do laundry now and then.
We’ve been doing a lot of traveling in the last few years and enjoying it very much, thank you, but it’s been a busy few years in many ways and when we started the year our plans for the summer were to step back a bit and have a quiet couple of months and perhaps let people come to us. Also, to be honest, it’s been a rather horrifying time to be an American for the last few months so keeping things low key seemed prudent. We had some friends who wanted to plan a trip with us but we ended up working out a plan for something closer to hand (coming soon!), which we are looking forward to immensely. Plus, we do in fact have friends visiting us later this summer as well – Fran and her parents will be coming over from Belgium and it will be lovely to see them again.
It seemed pretty set.
But more and more friends kept insisting we should travel to Europe to see them, which is a very high-class problem to have when you get down to it, and eventually they wore us down. It seems strange to say all that in a world where such opportunities are a privilege after all, but once we made the first call the rest of it kind of slotted in. Maybe it’s a life-cycle thing – you reach a certain age and you have enough money saved up to do this sort of thing and you’re still pretty healthy so you figure maybe you should just go Do The Thing even if you have been doing the thing a lot recently because there will be a time in the not all that distant future when you won’t have much say in the matter.
Our friends Stacey and JR were in Florence – they’d rented an apartment in April and were staying through June – and said we should join them there. Our friends Joshua and Sarah were going to be in Portugal and offered to meet us there as well. And our Swedish friends pointed out that we owed them a visit, since the last time we were there was 2018 and they’d been here in 2022, and if we timed it right we could be there for Midsommar.
So in the end we went. And it was, with one notable exception on a Sunday morning in Florence, a lovely time. Yes, I will explain that in due time.
It is a good thing to travel, really, especially if you can get outside of the bubble of the tourist stuff and walk around a bit. It’s good to do the tourist stuff too, don’t get me wrong – and we did a fair amount of it, being tourists and all – but sometimes you just walk into the grocery store to pick up things for breakfast, or ride the trams and buses around town, or stop in at a little hole in the wall restaurant where you’re the only person who doesn’t speak the language and you eventually manage to order something that isn’t quite what you were expecting but is clearly what everyone else is expecting when they order that, and you get a small glimpse into another world.
Familiar and normal are different things.
Of course, deciding to go was, in some sense, the easy part. Because then you actually have to make it happen. This is where Kim comes in, because she is an excellent planner who actually enjoys the process while I tend to get overwhelmed by the whole ordeal and end up just staying home. Everyone involved in the planning for this trip uses spreadsheets, which is another thing that I find mystifying. One of my goals in life is to get to retirement without ever really having learned how to use MS Excel, and I’m nearly there. I was asked to contribute my ideas to these spreadsheets, which I dutifully did – I looked up what one does in Florence (a lot) and Porto (also a lot, but with port wine) and in Stockholm (many things as well, but since we’d be there with friends over a holiday I figured they’d have more ideas than I would) and I made a list and handed it to Kim and a surprising amount of it ended up in the final plans, probably because much of it overlapped with other lists of similar ideas.
We also had to figure out who was going, which got complicated quickly. Kim and I were definitely going. Oliver ended up staying home because he has other life events coming up shortly and he needed to focus on those. Lauren started her graduate program in May and therefore would be busy for much of our trip, but it turned out she could meet us in Sweden for that leg and then that turned into quite another adventure that is still ongoing but is really her story to tell. I’m looking forward to hearing all about it when she returns.
Part of the planning process is that you have to download a pile of apps onto your phone. Everything happens on your phone these days, which is a strange thing indeed. There are airline apps for tracking flights, getting boarding passes, and receiving a myriad of targeted ads begging you to join various travel clubs and acquire branded credit cards. There are city apps, designed to give you overviews of where you are traveling. There are apps that you can use to pay for things, apps that you can use to enquire about things, apps for public transportation systems, apps for restaurants, apps for translating things, apps to get eSims for your phone that will actually let you use your phone where you’re going, apps that let you book cars since taxis seem to be going away these days, apps that let you book hotels or apartments, apps that let you pay for parking and even apps for keeping track of all of your apps. It’s an app eat app world out there, folks. Setting that up took days.
For myself, I bought a new travel notebook since my old one is now full (again, an odd notion) and I like having something where I can actually write with a pen on paper. I wavered back and forth about whether I should bring my actual camera or just use my phone (there’s an app for that too) and in the end I left the camera at home. It’s heavy and it makes me instantly identifiable as a tourist, even more so than I already am, and I think it was the right call. I do wish I’d figured out the photo app on my phone a bit more than I did, but so it goes.
When all was said and done we were on eight different flights on anywhere from four to six airlines depending on how you count, each of which has its own app and its own rules, none of which give you much space for luggage unless you pay them handsomely for the privilege. We decided we’d just go with carryon for the trip – one backpack each for the overhead compartment and one bag to go under the seat – with a weight limit of 8 to 10kg each depending on the airline. Not bad for 21 days abroad. It just requires you to do laundry now and then.
It turns out that nobody ever checks the weight on carryon anymore. As long as your bag doesn’t look too big they just assume it’s fine and let you go, and once you’re within security nobody even pretends to care about it for connecting flights. I was within weight on every flight, but on the flight back Kim was a bit over on one bag and we weren’t bothered. I think the airlines have just figured out that it costs them more to police that than they’d be getting back in baggage fees so they just wave you through.
We left on a Wednesday morning, piling into my little car and driving down to O’Hare with Oliver, who switched into the driver’s seat and drove home while we navigated through security and out to the gate.
Our first flight took us to Toronto, and it was a pretty cheerful ride. There were a lot of kids on the flight, and at some point the whole plane sang happy birthday to a random passenger. Kim and I sat in different places, and in front of me there was a family that had three kids under six years old, all going to Rome and I wanted to give them suggestions but it seemed rude to butt into their conversation and I’d never been there with small children anyway so I just let it go. It was an uneventful flight as you’d want it to be and we ended up having a nice Indian dinner at the Toronto airport.
The flight out was delayed because of “groomers” – which is what they call the cleaning staff, I hope – and water issues, and this started a trend. We’d be on a total of four flights before we reached Florence, and all of the last three were delayed for one reason or another. Fortunately this meant we made them all. Three cheers for compensating errors, I say.
They never give you enough to drink on these flights, but that’s good practice for being in Europe where they never give you enough to drink there either. The two things that immediately mark me as an American on these trips are 1) I am resolutely monolingual, and 2) I cannot conceive of a beverage of less than 600ml (with free refills). This is not how they do things in the rest of the world.
I managed to get a bit of sleep on the flight, which I rarely ever do. There’s something about sitting in an upright position eight inches from the seat in front of you on a metal tube a mile in the air hurtling through the atmosphere with only the cold trackless waters of the North Atlantic below you that tends to make sleeping difficult, I find. Maybe it’s just me. But eventually we landed in Stockholm, and by that time it was Thursday.
It took us the better part of an hour to go through passport control and we were grateful for the fact that our next flight was delayed. It was a smaller plane but comfortable, and we were soon in Frankfurt. The flight from Frankfurt to Florence was an even smaller plane that was also delayed – just enough that we managed to make it – and at some point we found ourselves in the Florence airport.
Win.
Getting from there to our rented apartment was pretty straightforward, actually. We found the T2 tram into the city, figured out our stop, and then walked about two blocks to the front door. Then it got complicated.
To get from the street to the apartment required a nine-step instruction sheet that the host kindly sent to us. We pushed a button, which allowed us to open the front door. Once in the lobby we entered a code into a mailbox and another into a lockbox inside the mailbox to get our keys (fortunately we only had to do this step once). We then walked over to a tiny elevator that was about the same size but somewhat more powerful than the one we had in Budapest last year in that it could lift four people if you could all somehow squeeze in. We opened the outer door and then the inner doors, closed all the doors behind us, and then punched in our floor. There followed an almighty THUNK and the elevator would rise up to the fifth floor, whereupon we had to reverse the process to get out. The instructions were very clear on the fact that we had to close all of the doors behind us or the elevator would be stuck on our floor until someone came up and took care of that, and these instructions were reinforced by a sign on the inside of the fifth floor door. This sign only appeared on our floor. It’s the emojis at the end that really sold it. That and the fact that it was in English rather than Italian.
From the elevator you turned left and were immediately confronted by a locked door which could be opened by one of the identical keys that were in the lockbox, and then you were in a vestibule that was maybe a meter square and the door on the right opened with the other key. It takes a while to get used to how much more compact things are in Europe vs the American midwest, where we have nothing but space.
There weren’t many other visitors in the building that I could tell – most of the people there lived there – but there was an apartment on the first floor that was being rented by a group of young women who couldn’t figure out how to get in when they arrived a couple of days later and I got to use my Dad Skills to show them how to work the locks and the door (doors open inward in Europe – I have no idea why their fire codes allow that) and they were happy about that.
It was a very nice apartment, austere in the way that most of the apartments we’ve been to in Italy have been, with few soft surfaces, but comfortable. The only real trick to the place was that the shower was really, really small. It’s one of those glass box showers that are common in Europe, where two of the walls have sliding panels that meet in a corner, so you slide both of them back and get in and out that way except the whole thing was maybe 28” square and I’m a sedentary American which meant that squeezing through that opening was a bit of a trick and every time I would try to get something off the shower floor I’d back into the water knob and turn it off.
It felt good to wash off the travel grime though.
We let Stacey and JR know that we’d arrived and they walked over to greet us. It’s about a 15 minute walk from their apartment, and we got to know that route pretty well by the end. They brought a bag of groceries for breakfasts, which was a lovely thing and very much appreciated, and we made plans for the next day before they headed back home. It’s such a nice thing to have friends in a new place.
Our goal was to try to stay up until a reasonable hour so we could get past the jet lag as soon as possible, so we decided at that point to go out and find some dinner. It was a nice night with the sun rapidly setting, and it was good to explore the neighborhood a bit.
This store was on the corner of our block and I never did see it open. I just love the fact that it’s a menswear store. Yes, that's a penguin on the logo.
We wandered around a bit as the sun went down, listening to the music in the air – somewhere nearby there was a concert happening and at one point we thought we’d try to find it but we decided against that and it turned out to be a good thing we did because eventually we learned that it was a lot further away than it sounded. After a while we found a little pizza place that had outdoor seating and we spent a happy hour or so eating good food and watching people walk or drive by. There were a lot of couples who seemed to be on dates.
We walked back to our building, followed the various entry procedures, and found our way to a very comfortable bed where we collapsed in two tired but happy heaps.
Welcome to Florence.
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