Life Happens…
Around the first part of January, I started to loose focus on the Italian trip and had to start focusing on my life. Shit started to happen while I was out making other plans, as the song goes. School began to get more intense. The Elementary Music Teachers, over reaching again, were looking at doing three or four grants for instruments, equipment, a traveling drum set, refining a keyboard methods book we had all had a hand in developing, and just plan teaching. Vintage Singers had their annual Twelfth Night Concert and we did one of the hardest Handel pieces I think I’ve ever done, ‘Dixit Dominus’, written by a 22 year old Handel while visiting Italy. You see, even Handel went to Italy. Our director promised that our spring concert at the end of April would be much easier. We all hoped she was telling the truth.
And church. Church had barely let up after Christmas. I was losing choir members left and right. One had cancer surgery and was awaiting the second surgery to put her internals back together after her chemo. My only tenor was quickly succumbing to Lour Gehrig’s disease, and his wife, my strongest alto, had to become his caregiver. My other strong alto had been out of two months with a strange auto-immune disorder. My friend and lead soprano had to tend to her business degree before she failed the classes. That left me and a soprano, who fell and dislocated her lower leg bones, to sing tenor. I had to switch my other good alto to soprano, and my lead bass was retired, going off vestry, and probably going to runaway with his wife in their motor home for some place far, far away. Preparing and planning for weekly services was taking more and more time, and interfering with my real job and my home life more than it had every in the past. It was with great sadness and resolve that I decided to resign my Music Director position at St. George’s. I had an Epiphany during Epiphany.
I would be 54 in two weeks and I was still running around, multi-tasking, pleasing everyone else, but slowly watching my life drift away. I did the things I enjoy doing, but I felt like I had to work through it all and I really didn’t get the enjoyment out of it. I planned to tell the Priest around annual meeting at the end of February; I would work my last day the first Sunday in June and that was all I would do.
Knowing the way things were going with the trip, that would be the day we would have to pack our bags for the plane ride on the following Thursday. I could already envision that last week before the trip being an absolute ‘madhouse’. I would have to work Saturday and Sunday at school to get grades done. At Church I would have to file music and make everything presentable for the next director. The list was getting longer by the day and I hadn’t even finished planning the Italy trip yet--or paid for anything yet.
So while all of these things were swirling around in my life, I got sick and lost a day of work. That day, after returning from the doctor, and two hours in Rite Aid waiting for prescriptions to be filled, I wrote down a little list of things that needed to get done—things that I could remember, at the time, that we had to do or decisions we would have to make.
TO DO LIST ITALIA:
- European cell phones
- Check limitations/transaction fees of credit cards
- Buy a large suitcase (checked)
- Walker for Marianne
- 4 photo copies of each passports
- Get Euros
- Money belts 2 for each?
- 2 Small or 2 medium packing ‘boxes’ for both
PORTLAND June 9 & July 4
- Motel in Portland 2 nights with free parking & shuttle to and from PDX
ROMA giugno 10 & 11
- Shuttle tickets from Fiunacino to Termini Roma (at airport)
- Confirm/Pay Hotel Sileo Roma ($220)
- Hop-On-Hop-Off Tour in Roma
MAGIONE
- Fernando Scattini: Driving us to Firenze or taking treno?
- Or Ticket cost: Magione -S.M.N.
- Pay F & R (Bella Magione)
FIRENZE
Locate luggage storage in Firenze giugno 19 noon to 4 PM ?
- Find Transportation
- TAXI/Elettrico Bus A to Piazza Cimatori 19.6.10
- TAXI/Elettrico Bus costs/stops in Firenze/Fiesole
- Book Firenze/Donatella tours / pay for them
- TAXI from Pz. Cimatori to Treno stazione S.M.N. 26.6.10
- TRENO Firenze (S.M.N.) to Empoli
EMPOLI
- Maggiore Rent
- Locate: Maggiore Rent in Empoli
- TAXI to/from Maggiore Rent from Empoli treno stazione (26.6.10 & 30.6.10)
- Phone #’s for Maggiore & taxi in Empoli
SAN GIMIGNANO
- Elettrico Bus stops/costs/schedules in San Gimignano
TUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE
- Admission Costs for:
- Etruscan museum (Volterra)
- Ab. San Galgano
- Banfi Winery (Montalcino)
- Mate Winery (Montalcino)
- Ab. D’Abato
- La Foce
- Etruscan museum / parking (Chiusi)
- San Bagio (Montipulciano)
- Monteriggioni?
- Dievole Tour (E40)
- Treno tickets/costs: Empoli to Lucca
LUCCA
- TAXI to/from treno stazione: Albergo Diana giugne 30 & luglio 2
- TAXI to Pz. Verdi and back/etc.
- Bus to/from Campo dei Miracoli (Pisa)
- Schedule/book/costs for Campelino climb
- Lucca Tours/etc.: bikes / Torre Guinigi / San Giuseppe concert tickets?
TRENO tickets/cost: Lucca to Roma
Shuttle Treno: Roma Termini to Fiunacino
Shuttle to/from motel
Motel at Fiumicino airport luglio 2, 2010
I suddenly started to get a panic attack. This was too much to do in such a short time—well four months time. I handed the list over to Marianne who appreciated it very much, but I could tell she really couldn’t believe that I was worrying about all matter of minutia while being sick. She smiled and thanked me.
By the end of the week, she had found a hotel at the Rome Airport—researched to make sure it had a free shuttle, etc., and even paid for it. This is when we found out that a foreign business will not take credit cards that have an expiration date before the reservation date. Our card’s expiration date was 2/10. I had called the card company and they had assured me that the card was good through the end of February and that we would have the new cards within three weeks, but that did not calm the apparent fears of the Italian people. We had opened our travel account with another bank in October, and of course they had given us a Visa card. We just hadn’t called to activate it because we didn’t want another credit card. One is just enough, thank you. So, while Marianne’s on the computer making the reservation, I am on the phone conversing with the automated card activation service. It didn’t take more that 15 minutes and we had a non-expiring card and a reservation at the Hilton at Fiumicino. The next day I found the best rate anywhere near the Portland airport for a ‘stay-park-fly’ package that cost just about as much ads the Hilton room in Italy.
Soon Cristina, from Firenze, we thought, was bugging us to send her copies of our passports. I had assumed that this would be collected along with the €30 cleaning deposit on the afternoon of June 19 in Firenze. She wanted it sent electronically, but I ‘mi scuzi, mi dispiace’ed her that we had no way of doing that and that I would be glad to run out and photo copy the documents and send them by snail mail. She agreed and sent an address, Bologna. I couldn’t believe it. Bologna. I though she was going to greet us in the Piazza Cimatori in Firenze. It was sounding like she wasn’t going to be there for that key exchange, but yet someone else. I actually had concerns about she premature tactics and I emailed the Firenze Chamber of Commerce. Yes, they actually do have one of those.
Next, we had to find out if Fernando would drive us all the way to Firenze or if we had to get treno tickets. We knew that if he did drive and drop us off, that Fiona could probably help us find our way to the apartment. Next came the problem of, which sometimes woke me up in the middle of the night, finding the car rental place in Empoli.
I searched and found a contact email and began a brief conversation with yet another Cristina, and found out exactly where the Maggiore Rent was located. It was not out a country road as Google Maps claimed, but across the Arno River in the town of Solvignana, about five minutes from the treno stazione. Once I had that all confirmed I started looking a Google Maps to find the easiest, and I mean safest, route for us to drive out of the two towns and south to San Gimignano. The roads I found came within 20 km of the hill town of San Miniato. I couldn’t believe it. Early in my search of places to visit in Italy, I found Vinci (Leonardo’s birth place) and San Minato. Vinci was a little north of Solvignana and not in the direction we were heading, but we could, in theory, take a 30 side trip over to this absolutely picturesque hilltop town of San Miniato. Then we could wind down adequate rural roads, avoiding some of the more populated areas that are on the highway that leads from Empoli, south and east, eventually to Poggibonsi. We could leave the highway at Cauldo and head up S-1 to San Gimignano.
I was feeling confident about things, until I realized that both Fernando and the Albergo Diana in Lucca had our credit card information, with questionable expiration date. Would our reservations be disregarded because of this ‘glitch’? Then I remembered that the Hotel Sileo in Roma hadn’t communicated with me in two months, since before Thanksgiving, and I was sure they didn’t have any credit card information. We were stuck until the Visa Company reissued our new cards.
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