Traveling home
 
First Class is the best way to travel! Too bad it takes so many air miles to buy a seat on British Air. I had a shower and massage at Heathrow before taking the non-stop back to Seattle. The food was great, the service superb, the seats very comfortable, power was available for my laptop, three movies I’ve wanted to watch. And then once in Seattle, we breezed through immigration and customs, and on our way to our home in 35 minutes! Maybe this was the easiest part of the trip.
 
This will be the last entry in this particular blog. This trip is over. Now we will have to figure out what to do with the more than 4,000 digital photos and 8 hours of digital video tape that we collected over the last six weeks. I’m sure at least one DVD will be produced. I will put together a few more photos pages to add to this site, with highlights of my photos. We will share more in-depth highlights of the trip with family and friends in person.
 
Someday the memories will fade. We may visit some of these sites again, we may not. Now it is time to return to reality, of research and relationships.  
 
At the end of this journey, my initial reflections:
  1. The trip did not feel like a vacation. Although I did a lot of recreational reading, we were on the go a lot. A cruise with ten ports is not that relaxing, but was very interesting.
  2. Going to Europe from Seattle takes a lot of time and cost, so we felt like we needed to see everything. By the end of the trip, we had seen so much (if I see one more Roman ruin...) that it all seems to run together. That makes the photos and videos fun to help us remember.
  3. I think this was almost the longest trip I have taken at one stretch... almost six weeks... and about a week too long. I was ready to go home once we had seen Rome. But with Erin joining us on the last weekend, we had something to look forward to, and it was a nice way to end the trip.
  4. If I go back to Italy again, I will take a good guide book. We missed a lot because we didn’t have something to help us find the best sites. For example, on the first day we went to Pisa, we drove through Siena, but didn’t find the magnificent cathedral and medieval square, because we didn’t know how to find it. Also, driving around a foreign country can be frustrating and confusing, raising the stress level of both navigator and driver.
My Travel Blog
Tuesday, June 6, 2006