Places I've Been: Venice

A few years back, I coupled Paris and Venice together in a 9 day vacation. As dreamy as that sounds, it was almost like eating all your Easter candy in one day. Sensory overload. There was just too much beauty and awe in that trip to even make sense of it, even when I'd already been to Paris a few times before. That said, I do feel that Venice is truly beautiful. It is a heady concept to wrap your brain around: that there are no streets and no cars and no buses. You either walk or get around by boat. Seems sort of crazy but you adapt pretty quickly. There is also the inevitable "getting lost" which everyone must do at least three or four times as maps don't always nail down that little side alley, or fully accept exactly where a street transitions from one name to the next. Venice is a place to be seen, sooner rather than later, before it is entirely destroyed by one or several of its many floods. Get there. Soon. Here are some of my favorite shots from that trip.

Here we have a view of Piazza San Marco from the balcony of Basilica di San Marco. The square is pretty good sized, and known for its cafes and the dueling bands that play at each every evening.



My favorite shot is this one, taken from beside the Doge's Palace across the canal toward San Giorgio Maggiore. I think the contrast of the gondolas and the colors of the water and the sky striking.



If this shot isn't stereotypical Italy, I don't know what is. I love the contrast of the decrepit buildings, the neatly hung every day laundry and the gorgeous flowers.



The Basilica of San Marco is actually a white stone building. However, if you visit it at different times of the day, it will actually pick up the color of the sunlight. Here, it was sunset and the white stone was rendered a soft orangey pink.



The Bridge of Sighs connects the Doge's Palace and prison. Prisoners would cross the bridge to their imprisonment, glancing out at beautiful Venice for perhaps the last time, and sigh.



This Bocca di Leone was a mailbox used to collect complaints from residents anonymously. There are several others throughout the city.



San Giorgio Maggiore lies on an island across the Grand Canal from San Marco. The church houses Tintoretto's Last Supper.



Traghetti are smaller gondolas used to ferry passengers across the Grand Canal. That's about the only place you'll see them, and you'll note they are predominantly used by locals, who are brave enough to stand for the crossing!



The Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute is in the Dorsoduro district of Venice, across the Grand Canal. It houses a Tintoretto and several gorgeous Titians.



Burano is one of three islands that visitors can day trip to from Venice (Murano and Torcello being two others). On Burano, the residents paint their houses vibrant colors so that the fishermen in their families can easily see their homes as they leave and return home from long journeys.

Places I've Been: Tuscany

Back in 2005, I went on a cycling tour around Tuscany with Vermont Bicycle Tours. This ended up being one of the best experiences I've ever had, not just on a bike and not just in Italy; I mean best EVER. Now that I've done it, I can highly recommend seeing the area this way if only because it feels like you're in a movie, with the hills and valleys of Tuscany wrapping around you like an IMAX shot. We started in Florence, rode to San Gimignano, Siena, Montelpuciano, Montalcino and Pienza. It was, in a very insufficient word, gorgeous. The mileage wasn't horrible. Now I look back and laugh though. My longest day was 35 miles. On average they were 20-25 mile days for a week.

The Duomo in Siena, which to me, remains the most amazing church I've ever seen, hands down. The striped marble carries through on the inside and is just stunning.




This is me outside the Duomo (cathedral) in Siena.


Even then, I managed to find cat friends wherever I went. This little guy is in Colle Val d'Elsa.



This is the view of San Gimignano from the belltower there. The hills and patchwork fields are amazing. The tower you see is one of the 7 "skyscrapers" that San Gimignano had.


This is the view of San Gimignano from the patio of our villa. You can better see the "skyline" of the town from a distance.


This is near Villa Ducci, near San Gimignano. These were vineyards, which were everywhere we rode, it seemed.


This was the view from my window in the villa in Pienza



This is me near a poppy field somewhere on the way to Pienza.


This is the stereotypical cypress shot that everyone seems to get when they go to Tuscany, but they really are pretty. This was somewhere on the way to Pienza.



This was a house where locals served us lunch on the front porch. I had the best house wine, picci (hand rolled thick pasta, like spaghetti), tomatoes with basil and olive oil and homemade lemon sorbet. It was the lunch of champions! Unfortunately we lost one of our group here, who ended up too drunk to continue riding!



This is me at the town gates of Montepulciano.



This is Montepulciano as seen from a distance. They don't call these "hill towns" for nothing!



This was our picnic stop during one of our day rides. We had a fully stocked SAG wagon as well as guides who really knew how to feed us well!



This is on the way to Montelpulciano, more cypresses.


This was our group out at our last dinner. We survived!


Our group got ready every morning much as you would at home, except the guides would inflate tires and fill water bottles for us. We just had to show up and ride!


Here I am (second in line, in white) finishing off a hill.


Finally, I spent a couple days on my own back in Florence, taking a day trip to Pisa. This is actually much more awe inspiring than I ever imagined!

Thinking back to Ireland

I suppose maybe it's the day that has me waxing nostalgic for Ireland. If memory serves me correctly, it's been 8 years since I have been on the auld sod. Ireland was my first trip out of the US that wasn't Canada. Everything about it was new: plane travel, jetlag, the country, the accent, the food. Little did I know then that what would happen that week would change me for life. For the better, I tend to think.

Matters of the heart had me going back and forth from Boston to Dublin more than a few times a year for the next 10 years or so. Sometimes I would hop a plane on a Thursday night and come back Monday afternoon. After the first couple times, it wasn't so much about what we did as who we saw and how we spent time together. Eventually the "we" I was traveling with became just "me". After so many visits, it wasn't worth my friends' while to go with me. It was more fun for me on my own once I'd established myself there anyway.

I saw Dublin change from a sleepy town where, to me, "everyone was Irish". It didn't seem that immigration to Ireland was terribly popular; why would it when unemployment was over 20%? As the Celtic Tiger was born and flourished, I saw Ireland, and Dublin in particular, lose it's home town charm. It seemed to have more foreigners than Irish. There were more faces that seemed better suited to London than there. The locals I knew and ran into were still the same joyful spirits I remembered, but it was notable nonetheless that the warmth and charm that I felt from the beginning was lost as the country started to climb out of its doldrums. The Dublin I knew went from a city with a single "skyscraper" barely 16 stories high to, over time, more like a proper metropolis with its share of towers, the most notable of which built by U2 themselves.

But once I'd experienced Dublin, I all of a sudden started to take baby-steps further afield. Edinburgh first. Then London. From London to Paris. Then beautiful Italy. The progression continues through eastern Europe, the lowlands and of course, further south to Spain and east to Russia. Making that leap out of the comfort zone of home clearly ignited a wanderlust in me. It made me want to see more. It made me have to see more.

It is funny though, when I think back to what most impressed me on that first and how far and wide I've gone and with that, how wide my mind has opened up. The places these eyes have seen in the 18 years since that first trip may have relegated Dublin somewhat into something not quite as grand as I first saw it, but it has not at all squelched my passion for the town I loved so well.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Places I've Been: Prague

I was going back through a lot of old photos and found the set I took in Prague. That trip in 2004 to Prague and Vienna was my first entirely solo journey. I learned a lot about myself and also stepped outside the comfort zone of Ireland/France/Italy for the first time.

This is Prague Castle, which lies on a hill that is a bugger to climb. I was there in October and it was briskly cold but offered up crystal blue skies. Visitors reach the castle by crossing Charles Bridge and walking through Mala Strana "Lesser Town" and uphill.

This is the view from one of the towers on Charles Bridge. Obviously, the bridge is a great place to people-watch as well as find souvenir hawkers and street musicians.


These are views of both Castle Hill and Charles Bridge, day and night.

This was a quiet little canal I found walking back from Castle Hill.

2010: Travel Lessons Learned

I didn't travel as much this year as I usually do (Miami, Russia, Paris) but I felt like between planning and anticipating and actually going, I had a whole lot of travel on the mind. Looking back, I've come up with a few lessons learned. 1) No matter how many times you've been somewhere, it can still feel new again. Honestly, I had lost count how many times I've been in Paris. I know, that's a terrible problem to have. But looking back at my passport stamps, I count six, so this time was seven. As much as I relished being able to hit the ground running without having a learning curve, going at Christmastime lent itself to a completely "new" Paris. No tourists, no English spoken here, no crowds, but in their place there was cold weather and snowy fringes left behind after an earlier storm. The Christmas scene in Paris was breathtaking. It was not suffocating like a Hallmark-induced, Labor Day-onward commercial explosion. It was rejuvenating, liberating, and dare I say, spiritual. Paris was looking beautiful for a completely different reason this time of year. It felt new to me again, and it carved its own special memories in my heart. 2) I indulge greedily in the differences. Russia blew me away. That, in fact, may just be the understatement of the year. Perhaps, the understatement of my travel life. Looking back now, I think about what struck me most, what made the biggest impressions on me and what are the fondest take-aways from that time, and it was realizing and appreciating what made Russia and its culture different. I love that the language and the written word are so different (and that I managed to figure them out, even a little). I love that their art and culture is rooted in a history so different from ours. I love that what survives there is based on a spirit that has twisted and suffered under unimaginable influences but somehow persevered. Everything from the pastel colored palaces in St. Petersburg to the grandiose Russian living room of Red Square to blini with caviar and vodka shots makes me smile. No, I can't see that at home, or many other places I travel to, which is why it is all that more precious to me now as I look back. 3) Sometimes, travel changes just work out for the better. American Airlines tore me away from my weekend in Miami unexpectedly early. At first I was disappointed and then frazzled, but I was also relieved. It had not been the best weekend for me; I'd been suffering through it quietly, and I really welcomed the opportunity to jet home early, no matter how hot, sweaty and inconvenienced I was and how many delays and plane changes were ahead of me. I will never look upon a travel diversion again as a bad thing...sometimes, they are the lucky twist of fate. 4) Don't listen to the haters. As people found out I was going to Russia, I got all sorts of unsolicited advice. A docent at the Museum of Russian Icons said "I would not go there now with all the bombings." Friends of my parents said I was crazy for flying on 9/11, another said "I would never go there alone." Well look folks, I went and I came back safe and sound. Instead of thinking that my experience was just a stroke of luck, I instead tend to believe that their perceptions and my actual experience are a reflection of the differences between us and how we approach travel. Honestly, if I didn't do something out of fear or concern for things real or imagined, I'd never go anywhere. Seriously. Travel smart and lean on your common sense. 5) Never say never. Paris was not even on the short list this year, or the next few years even. Russia was always a "bucket list" dream destination. But the desire to celebrate my 40th year in style and also my wanderlust and craving for Monet all played a role in how my travel itinerary played out this year. I've never outwardly ruled out a destination (well, perhaps Iraq or Afghanistan, for now) but it's just sort of funny how my destinations come about. Right now, I'm thinking Croatia or Poland for next year. I wonder what I'll be talking about 12 months from now... 6) Don't try to recreate perfect. Twice I was tempted to recreate what was, to me, a perfect experience. The first came in Moscow when I had the meal to end all meals. I mean really, it was unbelievably good. I remember every detail and recall that the next day I wanted to go right back to have the same meal again. It was that good. My guide encouraged me not to. "Don't mess with perfection", she warned me, and pointed me in the direction of another really, really good meal. She was right. What if I'd gone back the next night and it was sub-par? What if I ordered something else, or worse, the same thing, and it just wasn't as good? She had a point. A couple months later, my sister and I returned to rue de Buci to find our favorite eclair shop, only to find that our little nook of pastry perfection had been converted into an upscale boutique furniture shop. Distraught, we walked away remembering our last time there, and knowing that it will forever be "perfect". Sometimes remembering experiences as they were is far better than trying to recreate the magic. That's it for now...wishing you merry travels and lots of destination dreams!