With Eager Feet

It’s been far too long since I wrote about my travels here, and there are lots of awful reasons why that is. Rather than waste time talking about how I should have written more, I’m going to jump right in to my next post. At the end of April, over a year into the pandemic, we took a small family “camping” trip in Sturbridge, our (new) home town. We love to stay in cabins when we camp — you can enjoy that outdoor, campground feeling, but never have to worry about putting away a soaking wet tent, or dealing with the maintenance on a camper. For the number of times we camp each year, paying extra for the cabin just seems like a smart deal. ...

(This is part 7 of a series of posts about our Summer 2018 trip to Europe. The series starts here.) By now, the routine of leaving Milan and boarding a train was old hat. I can’t say enough about how much we appreciated having this home base (thanks, Sara!). If you can arrange your international travels so you have a friendly home to return to occasionally, definitely do it. We stumbled through the intermittent rain showers, hopped the train to Milano Centrale, and then boarded the 2-and-a-half hour train to Venice. ...

(This is part 6 of a series of posts about our Summer 2018 trip to Europe. The series starts here.) Thanks to cousin Sara, we spent the night in Milan free of charge, other than the cost of a fancy burger at a fancy burger joint (which came with the added bonus of people-watching on Corso Garibaldi, a treat in of itself). And, we were able to do all our laundry and completely shift our luggage around to reflect the next few days in Switzerland. The weather forecast was all over the place — low 70s to low 60s, with possibilities of rain at all times. Adjusting for uncertainty, knowing we’d be in the mountains, we kind of had to pack for everything. Still, it was nice to know we were only packing for two nights. We’d be back in Milan before we knew it (and our trip would be almost over, which we were trying not to think too much about). ...

(This is part 5 of a series of posts about our Summer 2018 trip to Europe. The series starts here.) We departed Orvieto via train for Florence in the early afternoon, about a two-and-a-half hour trip. The rural countryside slowly evolved into the city sprawl around Florence, and we changed trains outside town at the Rifredi rail station before arriving at the Santa Maria Novella station. We were seasoned travelers at this point, navigating the changing trains without much stress at all, though we did see the only real sketchy behavior of our trip out of an obviously drunk guy on a nearby platform who kept hitting a vending machine trying to get food to fall out of it. Train stations attract a certain type of individual, even in exotic Firenze. ...

(This is part 4 of a series of posts about our Summer 2018 trip to Europe. The series starts here.) The train trip from Rome to Orvieto was only about an hour, but it felt like moving from one world to another. The train station in Orvieto is tiny; you’re standing outside looking across the tracks at green grass, instead of a massive city station with twenty platforms. ...

(This is part 3 of a series of posts about our Summer 2018 trip to Europe. The series starts here.) The high speed train from Milan to Rome took three hours, roughly 9 AM to noon. On this trip, I grew to enjoy the rail connections we took. In almost every case, we had a group of four seats to ourselves. It was a chance to decompress, rest, read, and write. We could absorb whatever we had done already and begin plotting what we would do next. With plenty of space at our seats, room to move around, and hardly any stress at departure or arrival, it was sort of the opposite of air travel. I’m jealous of the rail system they have in Europe. It totally changes the travel equation. ...

(This is part 2 of a series of posts about our Summer 2018 trip to Europe. The series starts here.) On the night of June 22, we flew from JFK International into Milan on Air Italy, an overnight, nonstop, eight hour trip. While everyone else seemed to doze off for a few hours, I mainly stayed awake. I’ve never really been able to fall asleep on a plane. The anticipation and stress of such an undertaking didn’t help. ...

In the next few posts, I’ll be writing about our family trip to Italy and Switzerland in June and July of 2018. On the trip: Myself, Jess (my wife), and Evie (our ten year-old daughter). Italy hadn’t been a dream destination for any of us, but sometimes the road calls you in unexpected ways. Jess’s cousin Sara has been working in Milan for the past couple years, and has offered her couch (ok, really, her spacious spare bedroom) to family members who wanted to use Milan as a launching point for exploring Europe. We kept saying “maybe we should” and realized if we didn’t start really planning it, it would never happen. Life has a way of slipping by while you’re planning for the future. ...

During my posts about the big hike this fall, I didn’t really talk much about gear, about the specifics of nutrition, about what I carried and wished I hadn’t, and so on. So I thought a short post on those subjects might be worth doing. There will be no exciting pictures, no trail descriptions, no soul-searching moments in the mountains … so feel free to skip this post if that’s not your thing. ...

(Some photos on these posts are courtesy my friends Bryan and Topher and posted with their permission. This series of posts will be fairly photo-heavy.) Day Four – Mizpah Springs Hut to … home (I’ll supply an elevation profile for each day, courtesy GPS data from Bryan and processing done by Google Earth.) ...