Italy Day 1: Are We There Yet?

Monday and Tuesday, September 23-24

Travel from RDM to FLR

Highlight: Cold cuts and cheese for dinner with Neal and Lyn in Tuscany

Lowlight: 10 hours of temper tantrums from a child with permissive parents

Neal and Lyn's House in Tuscany

We'd been planning our getaway to Italy for over a year, our first big vacation since Alaska in 2021, and suddenly, D-Day was upon us. To date, it had not really seemed like we were heading out of the country for three weeks, likely because the planning has been so long in the works.

With the current excessive rains and flooding all over Europe much in the news here in the US, we wondered what kind of weather we were going to be headed into. Certainly the forecast for our first three days, our time in Tuscany, called for rain all three days. This would be a far cry from the gorgeous fall weather that you see in every movie and documentary about this beautiful region of Italy.

The last time I went to Europe was before my kids were born and strangely enough, I’ve never been to Italy. I was a bit anxious, truth be told, wondering how I would communicate in a language that I don’t really know. I had a few semesters of Italian in college, but that was 40 years ago and I've never had even a single occasion to dust that Italian off and practice it. What I learned is well and truly gone, at least from the currently accessible parts of my brain, though things will likely come back to me as our stay progresses.

I feel more confident in French, which I speak fairly well, in German from my trips to Germany, and in Spanish, although my Spanish is pretty much much limited to restaurant kitchen Mexican Spanish. And of course, there’s always English, which Europeans tend to speak. Beyond that there is Google translate. This latter facility, as we would come to understand painfully, is only useful with a reliable cell signal and data plan.

In any case, my anxiety was not really called for. Between the two of us, Ann and I would be able to communicate, however imperfectly it may have been.

For our long, long journey to Italy, we would be flying from Redmond to Seattle to Paris and then into Florence, staying in Tuscany with Neal and Lyn, Dyce's mother and stepfather. They very kindly invited us to stay with them and we took them up on it.

Looking at our itinerary, it seemed so weird to be leaving on Monday morning and arriving after dinner on Tuesday, the price to be paid for living on the West Coast. All my prior European trips originated at Dulles outside DC where we would depart at dinner time and arrive first thing the following morning. 

Monday morning, ready to go and sitting at home, suitcases by the front door, the pre-travel butterflies kicked in. When I am not in control such as when waiting on the car service to take us to the airport, I worry a bit. I need not have as our driver rang the front door bell a full 10 minutes early. Because it never takes any time to get through security at RDM, we generally plan to get to the airport about 30 minutes before our flight.

Arriving in the late morning, we encountered no security line. We were first and second in line and we were through security in moments. As we waited in the crowded waiting room, we started hearing the insistent beeping of a fire alarm. We and everyone else assumed that they were testing the alarm and paid it no mind, but soon enough, a voice on the PA advised us that we needed to evacuate to the tarmac.

After slowly making our way out back of the terminal with scads of others to stand in the blazing sun, we got the all clear after standing around for maybe two or three minutes. This little charade delayed boarding slightly, maybe by five minutes, but did not delay our flight. As we were boarding, we found ourselves in a group of USFS firefighters from Mississippi standing down and returning home after fighting fires in our vicinity. We and many others thanked them for their help. We are truly appreciative of those who help keep us safe.

One of my first thoughts on boarding is that fall flights are great; the children are in school so no screaming kids as on summer flights. This thought would come back to bite me in the ass on the next leg. 

We arrived in Seattle quickly. This is a flight that climbs for 20 minutes and descends for 20 minutes. The bulk of the trip time is in boarding, deboarding, and taxiing. There was no gate available when we arrived; they held us on a taxiway for about 10 minutes. This delay was immaterial because we had a 6-hour layover at SEA before our 6:15 flight to Charles de Gaulle. Unfortunately, there were no better options with shorter layovers. 

Arriving at the lunch hour, we searched for some place to eat, hopefully a place that would have a final American IPA before we arrived in a country that is not known for its beer. We ended up in a so-called brewpub featuring "local craft beer." The place was woefully understaffed and the bartender had huge attitude. We both ordered fish and chips on the basis of seeing a pretty good looking product coming out of the kitchen. It was actually tasty Pacific Cod, though super expensive. The chips were not all that and the beer list and our IPAs were a poor representation of Seattle brewing. 

Surprisingly Good Fish and Chips at SeaTac

Boarding at SEA was a fustercluck like somebody kicked over an anthill. Because of the passport checking and facial recognition screening, the boarding process occupied the better part of an hour.

There was a screaming two-year-old in our row. I blame it on the parents who I believe were speaking Punjabi. Clearly, they are converts to permissive parenting and they found it cute when the child had a tantrum. Worse, they rewarded the child's tantrums by giving her whatever it was that she wanted, reinforcing that tantrums are a great way to get what she wanted. On top of this, the members of the extended family were standing, yelling at each other to be heard across the widebody plane.

We assumed things would settle down once we got underway, but we were sadly wrong. I am surprised that the flight crew did nothing at any time in the 10-hour flight to quell the noise that was clearly disturbing our entire section of the plane. I am also surprised that not once did they make the child be seated, not even during take-off or landing. This so reminded me of a horribly unpleasant flight 30+ years ago in coach class in a British Airways 747 from Heathrow continuing to DC from Bombay, as it was called back then.

The roll-out out at Seattle was really long as you might anticipate for an A330 full of around 300 passengers, luggage, and fuel. The flight attendant doing the announcements in soft-spoken French with an American southern twang was hard to understand with some sketchy pronunciation. The Air France crews with whom we flew to and from FLR were much easier to understand.

Because of the child and her parents having no regard for any other passengers, I got no sleep. On top of this, my seat would not recline and I could not get comfortable. And apparently neither could Ann: she was super restless the entire flight.

Shortly after we left, about 8 or 9 hours after we ate lunch, the cabin crew came through with dinner. Eschewing the rubber chicken entrée, we both got something called Mozzarella Manicotti with Bruschetta Sauce. What is bruschetta sauce, you ask? It is surely not a sauce made from bread as the name implies. Rather, it was just some oversalted tomato sauce. Much later, at 2:45 a.m. Pacific Time, the time my body was feeling, the cabin crew served us coffee in paper cups emblazoned with “Great Coffee.” I found this quite aspirational for really shitty coffee.

WTF is Bruschetta Sauce?

Needless to say, we arrived in Paris exhausted. And I think Ann was feeling it worse than I was; I am at least somewhat inured to being tired. As we transferred terminals from the international arrivals to European departures, we got a big surprise. Ann had filled up her water bottle at the gate in Seattle without realizing that we had to go through security yet again on arrival in Paris. We have not flown internationally in so long that it took us unawares.

The French agent was a dick to exhausted Ann when she tried to bring her full water bottle through, not thinking and on autopilot trying to reach the next gate. The agent was a typical Parisian; a fucking dick and a half to Americans, yelling at Ann in French. For this reason, even though I speak some French, I've never been a fan of Paris. I prefer the countryside where people are chiller and more happy to meet anyone who has come to visit their town.

I was busy putting all my stuff into bins for the screening machine so I did not catch on right away to what was going on. Also, my under-caffeinated brain cells were not firing very rapidly. Ultimately, I understood the situation and asked the agent, who was selectively deaf to all of Ann's English, where she could dispose of the water. Meanwhile, the line behind us was growing and growing. I finally got directions to the nearest restroom and sent Ann off that way.

Then I focused on the agent, telling him in French that we were very tired, we were surprised that we encountered a security screen without at least a warning sign, and that I was prepared to stand and hold up the line for as long as necessary. At this point, I had earned enough points by speaking French that he asked me if I had Ann's boarding pass and when I answered yes, he took my phone, scanned both boarding passes, and put both our luggage through.

When Ann came back, he hand carried the water bottle through to us on the far side of the body scanners. At this point, he switched with another agent from scanning boarding passes to reviewing the luggage scanner. Except, he didn't really. He wasn't in a hurry to do anything and was actually looking at and chatting nonchalantly with other agents, letting the luggage come through the scanner apparently unreviewed. Bizarre. 

At CDG, it appears that nobody is in a hurry. Immigration was trivial, but because of only two open windows, it was a 30-minute wait in line. The immigration agent was actually more friendly and was happy to hear me speaking French to her, comprehensible French from a person presenting an American passport being a rarity. She wished me well in Italy and waved me through where I joined Ann.

We found a departures board and identified and found our gate. While Ann sat and came down from her battle with the security agent, I found an ATM and scored some Euros. Then we set about finding something to eat and drink. We ordered a bottle of so-so Champagne at the caviar bar in our terminal, because for her first visit to Paris (to which she vowed not to return), she should at least have Champagne.

The food offerings in our terminal were not great, so we chose not to eat at any of the restaurants. I would later grab her a sandwich, a jambon beurre or some such, at a little bakery outpost. At the caviar bar, I switched my phone to the 24-hour clock for convenience, as all the flights are posted in 24-hour time.

Exhausted Annie at CDG

After our mediocre and overpriced Champagne, we went back to our gate where we saw that our flight was delayed. Our plane apparently just shuttles back and forth from CDG to FLR and weather at FLR was holding up its arrival. As we were sitting at the gate, we were having to cope with cigarette smoke. No matter that there are enclosed smoking rooms at CDG and other European airports, it always manages to create a reek in the terminal. It seemed to me during this trip that I saw fewer people smoking than I had on my prior trips. Ann disagrees. In any case, way more people in Europe smoke than in the US.

Who Knew Tabasco was a Thing in France?

As we were sitting, we noticed that boarding appears to be a cattle call, a mass of people swarming the gate unlike the more orderly boarding by groups in the US. We also noticed that this terminal at CDG seems quiet, dark, and a little long in the tooth. We tried to charge our phones at the airport, not realizing that there is a USB voltage mismatch. We would need a special adapter that we did not have for our USB cables. USB was not even a dream in some young engineer's mind on our last trips to Europe.

At the gate while presenting our passports and boarding passes, the Air France agent made us gate-check our bags that we carried on the Delta flight to Paris. I was irritated that this would delay our getting away from the airport in Florence. The implications for the interior of the plane did not even register with me.

I am so used to A320s on domestic flights in the US that it never dawned on me that Airbus has entirely different configurations for European carriers and Air France in particular. As soon as I passed through the door of the ancient and shabby A318, I sensed that I was in a cattle car. The seats were jammed together like in an old-school low-budget 727 with no leg room. As I was contemplating my fate as just another sardine in a can, I looked up and saw the reason our baggage was checked. The overhead bins have no space. But I still think that we got singled out for this treatment because of our American passports; there were some larger bags in the bins.

The cramped flight with my knees in my chest was not a lot of fun. Moreover, Ann had to go to the bathroom and left her seat once the fasten seatbelt sign went off, only to be scolded in French by a flight attendant. All this on no sleep made us grumpy customers.

As we were descending into Florence, the captain announced in French that the runway is very short and to prepare ourselves for maximum braking. He was not joking. As soon as the plane hit the ground, he stood on the brakes and we lurched violently forward bracing ourselves against the seatbacks in front of us. Deplaning took a hot moment because they brought up a bus to the plane to move people a grand total of 200 yards into the terminal. Why?

Clearly the baggage crew works on Italian time. It took a half an hour to collect our bags before we could exit through customs to find Neal waiting for us in the waiting room. We finally got away from the airport at 20:45 local time, about an hour late, and 25-1/2 hours after we left our house in Oregon.

I was so thankful that Neal had offered to pick us up at the airport and that I did not have to deal with Italian roads and drivers on no sleep. To reach their house, we took the A11 autoroute WNW out of Florence to Pistoia and then headed due north up into the hills on a winding road that seems kind of crazy in the day and insane at night. We reached their house in the dark night in about half an hour.

Welcome at Neal and Lyn's Complete with Candlelight

We arrived at their small home in the hills in a village of a handful of houses called Croce a Uzzo. As we entered that house, we got warm hugs from Lyn and met Bella the cat. The candles on the table were a wonderful touch and we felt at home almost immediately. Within a few minutes, Neal busied himself in the kitchen and brought to the table a basket of bread and a platter of cheese and charcuterie. We chatted and enjoyed this simple meal, our best of the day, over a glass of red Tuscan wine. 

Neal Pulling Together Dinner

After chatting for a while, Ann and I headed upstairs to call it a night. Halfway up the stairs, Neal said, "If you hear a strange noise outside, it's just the deer." He was not kidding. It was right in the middle of rut and the Red Deer bucks were screaming in the night, bellowing like elk. I likened the experience to trying to sleep beside a stock yard.

I remember nothing else about the evening, day one and day two of our trip, merged into a single sleepless day for us.