Author: wanderinglefebers

Venice left us speechless.  Its history, art, architecture, music, canals—they are so rich, colorful, and plentiful.  How on earth do I capture all this in a blog post that will not bore my friends?    The words I choose are human ingenuity.

Modern technology is simply amazing.  We carry, on a little phone, detailed maps of any city and complete dictionaries and translation programs for relevant languages.  But I am not sure this is any more remarkable than the structures and art humans created here nearly a thousand years ago.  Venice, full of enormous stone buildings, busy canals, and cobbled alleys, was built upon a marshy lagoon! How is this city supported?   Early Venetians drove wood pilings fifteen feet into the mud, sand and clay, laid down wood platforms, then built their magnificent city.  Somehow they knew the submerged wood would not rot.  Somehow they obtained, transported, and milled enough wood to float their city.  Then they built a system of canals for drainage and transportation.  And those canals still function as streets today, illustrated by a busy transportation system of bus boats, ambulance boats, garbage boats, even yellow and red DHL boats that efficiently navigate those canals. I love that humans figured all this out so long ago, and that their work remains today.

As if the bare bones of a floating stone city were not enough, Venetians used their minds to make their city beautiful.  Palaces are topped with lacy carvings.  Ordinary structures sport random sculptures.  The colorful marble columns and detailed mosaics of St. Mark’s Basilica defy description.  The glow and depth in Bellini’s paintings are fantastic.  Again, I admire the human minds that discovered how, without computers or engines, to locate, move, and carve mass quantities of heavy materials.  How to spin and weave beautiful tapestries.  How to paint shades of every color bathed in light (I learned that Bellini used vegetable oil to create his heavenly pigments). 

Ingenuity.  It’s on full display in Venice, and there is so much more I could write!  I’ll stop here because even those of you who’ve read this far are probably ready to stop.   But I’ll add one more of my favorite examples of ingenuity:  CORTISONE!  One shot of this lovely discovery has assuaged my arthritic feet and made my Venice discoveries possible.  Once again, hooray for human ingenuity!

Sally

P.S.  Thanks to Rick Steves’s book Italy and Audio Europe App for my Venice and art history lessons.

There are as many ways to plan for a long trip as there are trip planners. So we are not going to dispense much trip-planning advice here. Besides, we won’t know how well we planned until we get back, right? Only then will we know how many t’s we crossed, how many i’s we dotted, and how well we crossed and dotted.

We will, however, share two bits of advice: lists and chocolate. We’ve never gone through so many paper pads! Lists for the house sitter. Lists for the dog. Lists for packing. Lists for taxes. Creating and checking items off these lists was both maddening and calming. As we checked off, we added more. We created lists by category, only to discover that we had too many categories. List mayhem! But we checked away, and eventually the entries dwindled to just a few things on just one list. Phew. Check “organized” off the list.

How did we survive list mayhem? Chocolate! Very few things both energize and comfort. But I discovered that a well-timed Hershey’s Kiss or other foil-wrapped goodie could inspire me when I reached list-burnout, just as well as it could calm me when I reached list-panic. So, I ate lots of lovely chocolates (December, with its steady supply of treats, is a good month for managing list anxiety) and we mastered the process. Full disclosure—Bob didn’t eat nearly as many chocolates as I did. He’s just more disciplined.

I will miss the chocolates. I will NOT miss the lists!

Sally

It is exciting to think about destinations for a three-month trip. But it is also overwhelming. As I considered possibilities, I felt like a terrier confronted with a rapid-fire ball machine. Oooh, there’s one! Oh wait, how about that one? Oh my gosh, there’s ANOTHER nifty one over there! I thought I needed to chase down every possible destination.

I’d like to say that we carefully considered many locations based upon interesting criteria, like local cuisine, or fascinating historic significance, or unique local culture. But after a dizzying month of considering far too many options, we made an uncharacteristic decision: we would not research. We would not analyze. We would just choose three countries that immediately appealed to us, and consider our destination plan complete. How spontaneous of us! How daring! We felt great. Apparently research and analysis can be overrated.

In the end the decision was simple: Bob speaks a little Spanish, so we would go to Spain. I speak a little French, so we would go to France. And we both love to ski, so we would go to the Dolomite range in Italy where there are endless interconnected runs, spectacular scenery, and, well, I guess we will find out what else!

Sally

One night my husband handed me an article he’d read.  It featured a couple who had sold or stored everything they owned, packed one suitcase each, and headed overseas to live in a different country each month for as many months as they could.  Bob commented, “That sounds fun.”  I agreed.

That was many years ago, and the idea embodied in that article never left us.  Over time our conversations progressed from “Hmmm, I wonder how the trip turned out for that couple?” to “I think we might have fun doing that,” to “Don’t forget to renew the passports!”  We realized that we love to travel and the timing was right:  we recently celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Bob recently celebrated his company’s twentieth anniversary, our children are settled in college, and we are healthy.  It is now or never.

What we did not realize is that deciding to go was the easy part.  Now we had to plan.  When?  Where?  How long?  What about the dog?  VRBO or Airbnb?  The specter of planning our getaway nearly ended the adventure before it began.  However, we forged ahead, believing the summit would be worth the climb.  Strap on those crampons and launch the browser!