L'Italie!

      In Geneva, the word for Italy is pronounced like "little-ee." This is kind of funny, coming from the Swiss, who occupy a country that is less than 1/6 the size of Italy, and not much more than 1/10 the population. Perhaps, however, they are referring to the Italian people, who are often on the short side. More likely, I think, the reference is to the size of the coffee in Italy. When the unsuspecting traveler orders "café," she receives a cup that belongs in a child's tea set, and this doll's cup is about half-full of coffee. The true Italian polishes this off in one swig, as if he were doing shots. This traveler, not being a true (or even a pretend) Italian, spent much of our adventure in Italy longing for a large mug filled with coffee that she could sip in a leisurely fashion.

   
      And an adventure it was. This is our view as we approached the Mont Blanc tunnel, which passes under the Alps from France into Italy. Why nobody warned us beforehand that we would wait 60 minutes  in a 2 km long line to drive through the tunnel, I cannot imagine. Everyone told us that we could tour Northern Italy as an easy driving trip. Clearly, the European concept of "easy driving" bears no relation to  traveling from Cincinnati to Michigan on I-75. It's more like a pleasant drive through downtown Chicago during rush hour. On the plus side, the view was much nicer than what one sees driving through Dayton and Toledo. Our GPS told us the trip from our house to Tremezzo, an appropriately romantic-sounding town on Lake Como, would take under 5 hours. Seven and a half hours later, after the tunnel, an excursion through the suburbs of Varese, and somehow becoming completely lost and reentering Switzerland (although we did meet a lovely guard at the douane who gave us directions back to Italy only after telling us all about his multiple trips to the United States and how much he loved our country), we arrived at our hotel. Like the typical brash American, we had come to Italy with a knowledge of the language which hovered somewhere between minimal and nonexistent. We did find the Italians very cheerful about trying to communicate, though, and sometimes it worked to say French or Spanish words with an Italian accent.
      When I book our hotels, my strategy is to visit hotels.com and choose the cheapest one. So far, this has worked well. Our hotel on Lake Como was small and quaint, with a restaurant taking up the entire ground floor. The receptionist walked us first to the kids' room, which was enormous, with beds, armchairs, dressers, and a large bathroom. She threw open the shutters to reveal a breathtaking view of the lake.

Lake Como from our hotel -- well, from the kids' room

      After that introduction, I was a little disappointed in our room, which was less than half the size of the other, with a postage-stamp sized bathroom whose shower was at waist level. As far as bathroom amenities, there was shampoo and a shower cap. The shower cap in the hotel bathroom is something I don't understand. I have never used a shower cap, and the only people I know who have were my two grandmothers. When I think of it, however, I have not really discussed the issue of shower caps with my friends. Perhaps everyone else finds them a very useful hotel freebie and I am just ignorant. In this hotel, however, with the shower setup as it was, it would have been impossible to get one's hair wet accidentally. It was, in fact, challenging to get one's hair wet on purpose. I will say that we slept deeply and soundly, and the hotel breakfast was quite good, and included, to my joy, pitchers of coffee and warm milk that one could mix and sip to one's heart's content. Highlights of our stay included a trip across the lake on the ferry to Bellagio, which is where George Cloony apparently has a house (we saw neither it nor him), a walk along the lake looking at huge villas from the days of the Grand Tour, and gelato twice in one day.

Johanna's gelato at dinner. The coffee in Italy is tiny, but the ice cream is  just about the right size.

Eric and Lucas waiting for the ferry to Bellagio.

      Non-highlights (lowlights?) of the trip included my decision that we should try to see the lighthouse where electricity pioneer Alessandro Volta did experiments. This led us through the unpleasantly dingy suburbs of Como Town, then up a narrow mountain road whose hairpin turns and tiny alleyways kept us in palpitations until, unaccountably, our GPS turned us around and sent us back down without ever seeing the lighthouse. Discouraged, we drove on to Padua, where our GPS again proved not so trusty, triumphantly announcing that we had reached our destination when we were in the middle of a highway bridge with no other road in sight. We have since been told that because Italy has so many roads,  a GPS doesn't really work well in that country. No kidding. Eric had booked our Padua hotel, and his strategy is to find a member of the Starwood chain where we can use points, which is how we did, finally, end up at the Sheraton. Although the hotel was inconveniently situated in Padua's dying industrial district, it did offer a free shuttle service to the center of town, which was gratifyingly ancient and quite bustling. By this time, my cell phone had run out of batteries, so I have no pictures of Padua. Instead, I'll include one taken in Como of the person who does have lots of pictures.

He usually doesn't like to have his picture taken;
this was the way to catch him standing still!

      We had a really nice time roaming the streets of Padua, which is one of the oldest university towns in Europe. It has a canal, an impressive basilica, and lots of delicious gelato. We ate dinner at a table on the square and watched people and pigeons before catching the shuttle back to the hotel.
       The next day, we rose early and took the shuttle to the train station, where Eric and the kids went to get breakfast from McDonald's (still always a highlight for our kids), and I went to buy tickets for the train to Venice. The tickets were surprisingly inexpensive -- only €3.50 a person. When the train arrived, we immediately figured out why -- it was old and run-down, but most of all, packed to the gills. We pushed and squeezed our way on, and spent the 30-minute trip to Venice in intimate proximity with the 20 or so other people squashed into the area between the cars. This was especially amusing when the train lurched and people went flying into one another or when we stopped and someone wanted to debark -- usually someone in the interior of the train who had a large suitcase. But none of that mattered, because we were thrilled to be headed to the unique and romantic city of Venice.
      And I do have to say, Venice really is a unique and romantic city. Our picture-takers couldn't get enough of the canals, gondolas, markets, buildings, and bridges. Despite having purchased a map, we became lost several times, but enjoyed the narrow alleyways, the stalls selling masks and glass beads, and the atmosphere of unreality. We decided that the lines were too long to try to go inside the Doge's Palace or Saint Mark's Basilica, and we just kind of nosed around, shopped, and ate a long, late, and leisurely lunch before returning to Padua on the train.
      Our hotel was truly in a dead zone of the city, with absolutely no restaurants or shops within walking distance. That being the case, we decided it would be very smart to take the car and find a grocery store, to stock up on provisions for the journey home the next day. Note to self: never put the words "very smart" and "take the car" in the same sentence in Europe and expect good results. Our purple GPS route looked like the path of a roller coaster by the time we had been to Lidl and returned with breakfast and snack food for the next day. We also attempted to fill the car with gas, and had to try four gas stations before we found one that was open and had a machine that would take our cards. Although the self-service machines allowed us to opt for English, they were still confusing enough that we somehow inadvertently stole €5 worth of gas from the nice lady at the pump next to us. The attendant (who had to come out anyway to help us figure out the machine, which was clearly not self-service for us) managed to pantomime what had happened and gave us change to repay the poor woman for her lost fuel.
       In order to avoid another pileup at the Mont Blanc tunnel, we decided to leave by 7 the next morning. We went to bed early. At 4 in the morning, I woke to feel the room shaking from side to side. At first, I thought we were perhaps in one of those hotel beds that you can feed quarters into for a massage and that somehow it had malfunctioned. It turned out, however, that we were in an earthquake. Worried about the kids sleeping down the hall, I listened at their door, but heard nothing. I heard a few people running down the stairs, but no alarms or sirens. Then I called the front desk, to be told that the hotel was anti-something, so we were okay. I took this to mean that I could go back to sleep, and had almost done so when an aftershock shook the room again. The kids told us the next morning that yes, they had woken up, yes, they knew immediately what was happening, and no, they hadn't been scared and had gone right back to sleep. It's nice to have secure and resilient children. We did learn that the epicenter of the quake was in Bologna, about 50 miles away, and that, sadly, several people there had died. We left the hotel feeling sad  about that, but thankful as well.
       We were also thankful for our trip home, which, perhaps due to our 6:45 a.m. departure, was without much traffic, without any episodes of lostness, and without any wait at all at the tunnel. Despite this smooth ending, however, we have resolved that it is worth almost any price to travel by train or plane on our next voyage.