Countdown, eight days.
Does everyone have their gear together? Cameras, laptops, electronic readers, hair dryers and flatirons, extra batteries, chargers? Are your papers in order? Passport, international driver’s license, insurance documents, car rental papers, credit cards, ATM cards? Have you bought any euros you want to take with you?
If you have to order anything on line, this is the last possible minute.
Get your hair cut now – you don’t want to look skinned next Friday. Make sure the right amount of money is in the right bank account.
Anyone would know we’re aged travelers. I was about to say well-seasoned, but that would imply more experience than we all have. I think aged is the right word. We think and re-think everything, and then re-re-think it until we feel some modicum of preparedness – and how well we all know we really can’t prepare for what life dishes us, especially when traveling. Staying loose is the key. Go with the flow. Travel is supposed to shake us up, take us way out of our comfort zone. If we’re going to be prepared for all contingencies, we might as well stay home.
The first of us left today. Joyce is at this moment traveling by train overnight from Miami to New York where she will board a ship bound for England, then go by Chunnel to Paris, on to Milan, then down to Siena. We will have arrived in Florence on the previous day and hopefully made our way to our villa outside Siena, and we’ll pick her up at the Siena train station.
Bon voyage, Joycie, and God speed.
ROYL Roads 