Italy & Traveling from Mark’s Perspective

Mark is telling his story today, about traveling and how he almost never left the country for the first time….you’ll enjoy this one! 

Hello again everyone. Rhoda has been asking me to write a short piece about our Italy trip last spring, so here I am. As many of you know, Rhoda has been working with Go Ahead Tours to organize a trip next spring to Italy and many of you have written you would love to go, but are working on your significant other who is reluctant/refusing to go. I understand completely, I am, or shall I say, was both. This is for them.

I am a homebody. I like home. I want to be home. Home is good. Foreign countries are strange and they are usually a long way from…HOME. If they were next door and not across a vast expanse of ocean, I might be a little easier to persuade to go, but, they’re not, hence I’m not. Besides, I’ve seen too many Hollywood movies (who says they are not real) and I have this irrational fear…what happens if I get there and I can’t get back?! Locked up in a gulag with people who don’t speak English or bathe very often, and they don’t take VISA. Nope, not going. Besides, I’ve had to get up and go to work for 51 years so I’m staying home, I have earned it.

I then ran across this great sign which I nailed up in my garage which settled this preoccupation with making me travel:… case closed with prejudice, I win.

The next thing I knew I was on an airplane, my tail tucked firmly between my legs, flying all night across a vast expanse of ocean, landing in Paris. Then, another short flight to Switzerland and onto the long boat for a river cruise. It turned out to be one of the best things I have ever done. Europe was great, the food was great, the company was great, just like I told Rhoda it would be…hehehe! Nothing like being right.

So, last winter Rhoda got it into her head we needed to go to Italy. Well, by now I had started to backslide on this traveling thing again, but she was determined to go, sign or no sign in the garage. Now I didn’t put up too much of a fuss because I always wanted to see Italy. I mean Romans, Hannibal, World War II, the Coliseum, Pompeii and gelato, these were things I have dreamed about since grammar school. How bad could it be, besides Rhoda had been there a couple times before and she constantly raves about it and she is almost always right, sometimes it’s almost scary. Anyway, I was up for it. I will just load up my ipad with movies to watch on the plane, a great set of noise cancelling Bluetooth headphones and a really cool leather bag carry on with a couple days worth of clothes (long story, but very funny) and lots of my favorite treats.

Then she dropped the bomb…it wasn’t a cruise! We would be on a bus with a bunch of strangers. I don’t do strangers very well. Rhoda has never met a stranger, but they flock to me like a magnet. I had mental images of us riding around Italy in a school bus without air-conditioning filled with non-English speaking smelly strangers hanging out of the windows….Nope, not going.

The flight over was uneventful! The movies and food/treats were pretty good and Rhoda was very happy, too! She’s always very happy. Once we got through the airport we saw this cute young lady smiling and waving at us (I assumed she had mistaken me for a movie star, you know, Brad Pitt type, looking for an autograph) but it was Carmela (Carmen)! She was to be our tour guide and from that point on the trip was incredible. She rounded up the others in our group (you know, those strangers I was talking about) got us on a very nice tour bus (it wasn’t yellow and it had air-conditioning) and we were on our way to Napoli (as she told us, Naples is in Florida, Napoli is in Italy). Once at our hotel, Carmela took several of us who wanted to go on a guided walking tour around town where we got to know several couples very well, who we hung out with frequently, enjoying several adventures and a lot of laughter together. Later, we had a meet up with all the others in our group for a drink and pizza. I was completely at ease with how friendly they all were (and clean). From that point on, I was sold on this tour.

Over the course of the next 6 days Carmella took us to see almost everything you would want to see. From museums, to restaurants, to ancient ruins, I was so engrossed it just seemed to fly by. All I knew was I loved seeing Italy through the eyes of an Italian who really loved her country and loved her job showing it to others. There were so many things that were great about that trip that I would love to share, but it would take more space than this to do it in, so let me share this little story with you of the men in my family and I’m done.

My mother had tried for years to get my father to travel and he just refused. Didn’t want to leave his home, his cows and his acreage (the apple didn’t fall far from that tree). So, she finally told him, let’s just go this one time and if you hate it, I’ll never bother you about traveling abroad again. She booked a tour in Europe and off he reluctantly went. When they got home, he had her book another tour. They were in their early sixty’s. They traveled extensively for the next twenty years, sometimes alone, sometimes with my Uncle and Aunt. I never heard him say a single bad word about their trips, but he loved to tell the stories of all the funny things that happened to them. They stopped traveling in their eighties. My mother, who is now 94 has only one regret…she wishes they had started earlier.

My grandmother always wanted to go to Hawaii, nowhere else, just Hawaii. My grandfather didn’t want to spend the money, so they didn’t go. My grandmother developed Alzheimer’s in her early eighties and died at ninety years of age. My grandfather lived to be a hundred. He told me after she was gone, he wished he had spent the money and taken her.

I love our home, I don’t like leaving it, but there is a great big world to see and Rhoda wants to see it. So, I guess I will have to change the last line of that sign in the garage….No One Can Make Me Want To, Except Rhoda.

Oh, by the way, Carmela is supposed to lead this tour Rhoda is trying to get together, you would love her.

Time is short.

Andiamo

Wasn’t that hilarious?! I told him he really needs to write for my blog more often. He’s quite the entertainer. So now that you’ve read this anecdote, if any of you need to persuade your hubbies to go on this trip, let them read this one! We still need 7 more signups for the April 2025 trip to be a GO. You can check out the blog post about the tour that I posted in May to find all the details and links to Go Ahead for tour information. PLEASE join us! I have less than 30 days left to fill the tour and after that it will be too late.