Thoughts on the Italy Trip

Just a few random thoughts about our trip to Italy (if you get here without any back story, look at the previous two weeks of posts):

First; I loved Italy as a destination.  The landscape, the archeology, the art, the people, the food, the cappuccino, the wine, all superb.   If I have to get marooned somewhere, let it be the Amalfi Coast or Capri.

Italy seems to have gotten a lot of little things right (food, wine, coffee), and a few big things wrong (work ethic, government, and just keeping things up).  They seem to value their past at the expense of their present.

I need to go back on "induction" Atkins diet.

We really enjoyed doing this trip with a tour.  Your mileage may vary. Without a tour it would have been nearly impossible for us, working from the states, to arrange transport, hotel accommodations, and we simply wouldn't have known of the many opportunities without it.  You get better accommodations for less money with a tour. The tour director (Nicollette) was tireless, and worked hard to make the experience a good one.  The local guides, for the most part, were also engaging and excellent, and I think the system that Italy has imposed with the local guides, worked for us, although I don't approve of the government, even the Italian government forcing itself on industry that way.

At the same time, there are mornings when we didn't feel like answering that early wake up call. Sometimes the pace seemed a little frantic, as, in an attempt to make the best of an expensive trip that we're not likely to repeat again, we signed up for most of the optional, and moderately expensive, activities.  Most nights we crawled into bed gratefully.

Italian hotels don't seem to have double beds, let alone king or queen sized.

Italians eat dinner late.  Most restaurants don't open until 7 PM, and the action picks up after 9 PM.

The driving?  Exciting, in the same sense of the ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in exciting times."  There is no way I would be comfortable driving the Amalfi Coast road. My hat off for the bus drivers who do it daily.

The IPad (we bought a 3 in anticipation of this trip) was a pretty good connectivity solution.  Getting an AT&T specific IPad version (rather than Verizon, or wireless only) allowed us to walk down the street in Venice the first day, buy a SIM card for 10 gigabytes of data for 30 euros, have the shop owner pop it into the IPad, and be using the IPad for internet within an hour, and never had to worry about running out.  This morning, we popped that SIM out, and  replaced it with the original AT&T SIM, and it's back to functioning as before in the states.  We used the IPad for email, browsing, blogging, and mapping.