The Final Destinations

Well I’m so tired of crying, But I’m out on the road again

– Canned Heat, On The Road Again

I recently returned from a month in Italy. That’s right, a month. Your first reaction is “How can he afford it?” The answer is threefold. First, I have some loose change from the sale of the business. Second, I had no place to be and that pretty much continues to today. Third, everybody says that when you retire you’ll have all kinds of time to travel. So I did.

How was it? In one line, it was good to get back home. It was great to go and I will travel again when I am good and ready but I finished the trip with a deeper understanding of the sentiments of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa who is credited with, “The idea of travel nauseates me”. This contrarian stance comes from a June 2023 essay in The New Yorker titled The Case Against Travel.

Granted, this is radically curmudgeonly content. And goes against the grain of any women I have seen on a mature dating site. Everybody appears to want to parachute into an F-1 race in Brazil. Seniors are, according to The Senior List site, averaging a relatively hefty 27 travel days a year next to 35 days for millennials. That’s about a month per year which, given the eight months of second-guessing the airlines it takes to plan such an excursion and arriving at the airport three days early, that’s pretty good. Nearly all my friends in my demo are merely in between trips at this point in their lives. If it isn’t an ocean cruise, it’s a river cruise and failing that, The Jungle Cruise at Disneyworld with the grandkids. Well-earned of course. I don’t begrudge any of these people a lounge pass.

After all, I just spent a whole La Dolce Vita month in Italy. Very few people can say that. See, now I’m guilty of fishing for something we can call “Duration Envy”. Anybody can hop over to Rome for a week, maybe hit the new hot spots in Sardinia for a fortnight. But a month, well I’m a veritable Rick Steves. Just this far away from writing my own A Year In Provolone. Not really. There’s all kinds of envies for hotels, airline status, cruise line perks, restaurants, celebrity encounters. I will admit that this ‘oneupgrademanship’ is more prevalent among younger folk. But we hear it. And it appears, to some, that throwing your fancy boarding passes around is ‘winning’ to quote Charlie Sheen. I recently ran into a former girlfriend with whom I had skied in Aspen decades ago. Told her I was perhaps headed back there this winter. She said she just got back from skiing in Antarctica. Game, set, match.

The excursion didn’t start well. There was devastating news received just as I boarded the flight to Milan (see the last installment) that literally buckled my knees. So I limped off the flight with nothing to declare but emotional exhaustion and then made a very poor decision to avoid the 600 Euro limo and take the train to the little beach town that was my first stop. Well, I waited with my luggage, very far from the loosest definition of ‘packing light’, for about an hour on a cramped platform for the oversubscribed commuter train that takes an hour to get from the airport into the Milan station. Then in Milan I grabbed a pricey ticket on the Italo “bullet to the head” (We are in Italy) train where I literally had to pay someone to find the Club Car lounge where I had about five minutes to scarf a free latte until I had to drag myself and “Bagzilla”, to quote my friend Billy Scheft, down to the platform where I struggled mightily getting my duffel up onto the train. To make things clear I had about two weeks of clothes, a backpack with a laptop and a CPAP, a camera bag with an actual vintage Leica film camera and a telephoto lens plus my shoulder “sling”. I slumped in my seat having been on the road for far too long at this point. Got into Florence and sat in a taxi lineup for half an hour and then was told the fare out to the beach and realized I had wasted about three very relaxing hours at the hotel for about $100 in savings. Not thrilled.

Where did I go exactly? The first ten days I spent on my own at an all-inclusive program covering the Jewish holiday of Sukkot in the Tuscan beach town Forte Dei Marmi. Never heard of it before I booked it and it turned out to be a terrific way to calm down and beat the jet lag. Great people and great catering in a town that must be crazy in the summer. By October it was eerily quiet but the Mediterranean was warm enough for a dip and I could take dusky walks on the beach, bare feet in the sand. I also went up to the Carrera marble quarries and learned about something I had no interest in in the first place. The author of the New Yorker piece wrote about visiting a falcon hospital in Abu Dhabi but never boasting about it because she had the same interest in falconry after the experience as before. None. One and done in Forte Dei Marmi.

Then it was off to Venice which I had done several years ago but Sherley hadn’t so I agreed to show her around because if you only had one European city to see… well, if it was 1951. Now it’s pretty much one giant slightly trashy souvenir stand, the once evocative medieval arteries clogged with Time Square-quality gondola gridlock and its legendary cobblestones, a terrific place to have a bad fall if you aren’t careful, are elbow to elbow with cell phone wielding posses of angry tour platoons elbowing their way down the back alleys like renegade Roller Derby teams on ‘the jam’. I wish the meals had been as good as the gelato. However, I bought some spectacular glass pieces on Murano and Sherley got us into a terrific hotel on the water with a stogie-friendly rooftop bar. Watching the sunset with a drink and good robusto was a highlight.

After that, three rainy days in Florence were marked by a thoroughly engaging tour of Michelangelo’s David where, surprisingly, the crowds were more manageable than the acoustics, not that either were very good. What followed was my second go at the Uffizi but it was a mob scene and The Birth Of Venus behind a couple of penalty boxes worth of plexi wasn’t worth the steps. I had bought the hotel on points so it wasn’t a crazy expense against the sites we did see. After that we caught the last gasps of the beach season in Positano where the hotel itself was the main attraction. I’m not going to name drop but the service level harkened back to a much different era leaving me a little melancholy because few of the guests were prepared to match the service staff for style. There should be a dress code at this place. Overall, nice view with lots of stores selling lemon-print linen. Like cowboy hats in Aspen, you can’t wear this crap in Orillia. Day trips to Pompeii (worthwhile) and Capri (not) rounded out that stay. 

A $200 Uber drive to Naples and then another train later I made my first visit to Rome so I could finally take a tour of the Vatican Museum which has all the ecumenical reverence of the Nexus lineup in Terminal Three at Pearson. Like the crowds in Florence at David, the exhausting scruminess of the experience far overshadowed the sheer magnificence of the work. As Emerson said, “I seek The Vatican, and the palaces, I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions , but I am not intoxicated.” Sherley said when she walked through these places fifty years ago, there was literally nobody around. I remember seeing the Mona Lisa looking a little lonely in the Louvre way back in 1982. Just as it was in Paris when I was last there in 2017, you had to go “elbows up” with about a thousand Chinese tourists to get a glimpse of The Birth of Venus. Again, enough plexiglass to make you think you are buying gas in downtown Detroit. 

But in Rome my legs were not up for the 10,000 steps a day and I had some troubles against Sherley, for whom 12,000 steps is like going to the front door to get the paper. There were tours booked and sightseeing buses boarded. As I said earlier, I’m glad I wasn’t there in the summer. As it was, they were five deep at the Trevi Fountain and no sign of Anita Ekberg. Where did we eat? One meal was spectacular. The most entertaining, however, was a Friday night at a kosher restaurant in the funky little Jewish ghetto. The last tour we took was of The Coliseum and included the pickpocket option. And when I got to the airport a couple of days later I special ordered the stolen carry-on concierge so that was great.

Why did I get violated? Because I was a tourist and acted like one. That’s why. I looked lost and paid for it. And I didn’t like being a tourist. It wasn’t that way for decades when I was in New York or Los Angeles. There, I was a local. I knew where to go and I knew what was up. Maybe I have travelled on business too much.

All things considered, where does a month like the one I experienced leave oneself? For adventure I am up for no more than a trip to New York and take the Number 5 train up the Lex line and hit the last kosher deli in the Bronx. Yes, there will be Aspen for a few days. I know that town so win or lose I will feel comfortable and confident and I don’t know how much longer I can ski. After that there might be a safari in me and certainly Israel. Thinking about an actual road trip through the U.S. I get cruising but I prefer what I did a few years ago when a couple of college buddies and I chartered a catamaran and Jimmy Buffeted about the US Virgin Islands. That I might do, cash permitting, in the Mediterranean.

But Europe is becoming increasingly anti-semitic. Italy might be the best of a sorry lot but I’m done with London and Paris. Yet, there was always a longing in me to chuck it all way back when, buy a rusty Porsche and remake that Stanley Donen film Two For The Road with someone that would do a pretty good Audrey Hepburn impression. Allowing life to happen as we wheeled through France and Italy in those glorious bygone days – figure 1967 – when you could immerse yourself in the culture without submitting bloodwork. But you do that when you are twenty two, when you could even fly solo and hang around some Swedish girls on a Greek beach and not be too concerned about eating at a restaurant you could brag to your contemporaries about. Not now, when I am looking at 72 and the thought of going to the airport invokes a special sense of dread.

So what would we do if we didn’t travel? I believe the last great adventures are of the mind and if you need to travel for that, great, but only as a reward for doing the homework. Or is travel at this point in life merely to separate our time into “before” and “after” each trip? The prospect looms of “More and more of this and then I die?” wrote the New Yorker article’s writer Agnes Collard. “Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.” Have you really transformed because of a Mediterranean cruise? Not quite as transformative as those nights with the Swedish girls on the beach I imagine.

Closed Collard, “Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel.”

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Accompanying photographs were shot on film on the aforementioned Leica, taking the author back to his days as a newspaper photographer!