From Griffin - The Mean Old Lady That Made Me Cook

The Mean Old Lady That Made Me Cook🍳

I walked up the steps of an apartment building in Florence with my family and a nice person who was Canadian! After a worker opened the door, we walked inside a large kitchen and a lady came up to us. She looked like she was in her 50’s with a big black chefs apron and crocs with exotic fruits on them.

She said “This way to the cooking class.” She walked us to our designated spots around a large table with eggs, flour, cheeses, fresh ingredients from Sardinia and Florence, and a pasta maker.

“My victims we will be making ravioli with a cheese sauce and gnocchi with onions, cilantro and other ingredients,” she said with a heavy Italian accent.

“Would you like to use garlic?”

“What do you think,” my dad said?

“Oh, I hate it, but you can use it,” we started laughing and said okay.

It took about an hour to make the two dishes. It all was hard, from softening dough to making cheese filling. We laughed a lot because our cook would yell the occasional comment of “I will kill you if you fail!” and “Good job parents, you get wine. Kids no wine.” After we finally finished, we felt accomplished (and hungry). We then saw five other people walk into the room and take a seat at the dinner table.

“Are we cooking for them?” I asked.

“Of course not! You are eating your food with them. They eat my food,” the chef exclaimed.

So 30 minutes later, we were talking to a bunch of different people when the waiter gave them their food and set the food that we cooked in front of us. It was really good, and after we ate and ate, the waiter brought desert out and the chef came out to talk.

She said “Good?” And all of us said “very.” She started talking about how she travels and how she hates San Francisco but loves Asia and New York. And she kept on sticking her tongue out at us and making weird faces. We started recording her and she walked up to my sister’s phone and made a weird face. We ended up going to bed happy and full of funny memories of an old Italian lady yelling at us to make better ravioli.

(From Greg) Little Cuttlefish On a Stick

Three weeks into this year of travel with my family, and I’m having a surprisingly hard time casting off from the maddening details of modern life.  I’ve been constantly pulled back into a  round of emails and phone calls with some company back home.  Italy has a crappy cellular network, and Wi-Fi is really spotty.  Even when it works, some companies won’t let me log in from Italy … (Why the Hell do they care if I’m in Italy!?!?)  So, after having sold or stored all of our stuff, put life on sleep mode, and left the rigamarole of daily dealing behind, here I am spending hours hunting for a good Wi-Fi signal or sneaking off to call some 1-800 non-human phone tree to sort out billing or forwarding addresses.  And then today it all came full circle.

We’re in the Cinque Terre - a string of a five picturesque seaside towns South East of Genoa with extensive trails between them.  Maybe it’s Rick Steves (a pox on his house!), but the town centers are seething with tourists.  My far-seeing wife, however, got us a gorgeous cliffside shack looking out over the Mediterranean far above the madness.  The place is a hike in off the trail, just  a few beds dug into the rock hillside.  We slept outside last night looking up at the milky way, feeling like we were in the ancient Roman empire.  

We struck out early and headed away from the hordes, staying high above the towns. It was a truly epic day - gorgeous views, wild trails, and almost no one else around.  After a few hours, we stopped in a tiny hilltop town with one restaurant.  The restaurant wasn’t open for a bit.  How long? Well, you’d have to speak Italian to know that … so we played cards until it seemed like roughly time to go back.  It wasn’t, but they told us to sit anyway and eventually came over.   We sat under a trellis of kiwis next to an outrageously beautiful garden in the ocean breeze.  Everything on the menu was grown, killed or caught there: salad, wine, lamb, and yes …. “Little Cuttlefish on a Stick.”  Easily one of the best meals I’ve ever had.

Many hours later — after wrong turning at the very end of a very long trail, hoofing it along the hot asphalt an extra 2 miles to a town with a ferry, which we missed, searching out the one ridiculously expensive taxi, and explaining our cliffside location in broken Italian — we got dropped off on the side of the road at the trail back up to our house.  I sent Colleen and the kids ahead and waited to pay the taxi guy, who had just bought a new mobile card payment device (some Italian equivalent of Square).  After waiting 20 minutes while the cabby tried to get it to work, constantly losing connection, making four! calls to the company and swearing throughout with all the lovely extravagance you’d expect from an Italian cabby, it all came full circle for me:  It’s the same everywhere.  Everyone, everywhere spends hours dealing with some company or some widget that just won’t work and doesn’t really make your life much better, but that you can’t avoid.  I’m a horrible procrastinator, so I spend more time than most.  But it’s the flip side of our technology-dependent lives.  

So, as I sat there watching the cabby, I realized that I’ll never really get to cast-off and avoid emails and phone trees without humans.  But that’s ok because I can still do it from a Mediterranean cliffside restaurant … reveling in my little cuttlefish on a stick.  

Ps. After the cabby finally left, we realized we were at the wrong trail head two miles up the road.  But somehow our family of four hitched a ride and made it home in time to slog back down the hill to meet Barbara (Colleen’s friend from her old farming days) and her husband Gianmaria who had driven down from Milan to see us.  What a wonderful world. 

By Rowan:

95 degrees. Literally. We stepped out of our little apartment in Trastavere only to be met with immediate heat, and to make matters worse it was already smoking hot in our building. So we were sweating. A lot. It was the first week of this trip and we had no idea how heavy our packs would be, which was a really unwanted surprise. So on this non travel day and we were grateful we didn’t have to carry everything to where we were headed. We walked along the sidewalk for around five minutes until we reached a little cafe where we bought some croissants and coffee and headed on our way. 

We waited for what seemed like forever for the bus to roll up, we almost hopped on one. At this time, we were covered in sweat, and the only water we had was gone, we weren’t even halfway into the day yet. Finally the bus arrived and we stumbled on. It was around a half and hour ride to where we were planning to go. We rode up to our stop,  hopped off, and we had arrived. The Basilica of St. Peter stood a couple of hundred feet away from us, towering over us so that I could barley see the top. 

The Vatican is considered it’s own country apart from Rome. This decision, which was a deal made a long time ago, was when Rome was trying to conquer the world. The Christian church asked only to keep the Vatican, and named it Vatican City, now considered a country with it’s own laws, so as not to be controlled by the Roman government. We entered the new country with every intention of exploring immediately. But instead we found ourselves collapsed on the entrance while my dad went to go get us tickets for the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican. 

We were maybe into ten minutes of waiting when all of the sudden we hear, “water water, cold water”. This was something you hear a lot in Rome. There are always a lot of immigrants from the middle east who work as street vendors selling water on the hottest days of the summer in Rome. A lot of people end up buying water because it is so hot outside and the sightseers are usually drenched in sweat from walking around in the 100 degrees weather mid-day. So naturally we had just ordered some water and the vendors had moved on. Then out of nowhere we see all of the vendors running and  furiously texting on their phones. We heard buzzes and more vendors running around the corner, picking their way over people to get out of the Vatican. We were so confused, but suddenly we saw a police car roll up. But we had seen these vendors selling everywhere else in Rome and not getting chased by police, we were so confused. Apparently, it was illegal to sell anything not authorized inside the country. These men, were risking their immigration status to make a few extra euros. The thing we found even more boggling was that as soon as the police car had rolled away, the men came back, again an again and again. I guess the few extra euro really was worth it, and the hot tourists were eager for the water. A cycle that a police car filled with one or two men or women probably wouldn’t be able to rid the country of. 

Logistics

A lot of folks have asked about logistics - how, on a nuts and bolts level, does a family unplug and opt out for a year?  We got great advice on the logistical issues from other friends who've done this, and I want to share a few key items.

Plane tickets:  The biggest debate here seems to be whether to buy a Round the World Ticket or to buy individual flights.  For a family of four, cost is obviously a huge issue when planning something like this, and the airline companies have invested a lot of time and energy into preventing people from finding those cheap international flights.  If you are the type of person that wants to spend hours combing the interwebs looking for flights, have at it!  We tried doing that on our own, but finally opted to use a fantastic service out of San Francisco called Air Treks.  They are a RTW flight consolidator that we found very affordable.  You spend an hour discussing your itinerary with an agent, and they help you think about not only price, but also layovers (for example, we are spending 24 hours in Dubai!), upgrades, and routes.  We ended up getting a RTW tickets for our flights from Seattle to Rome, Prague to Bali, Ho Chi Minh City to Singapore, and Singapore to Auckland.  And we ended up racking up credit card miles for our flights from New Zealand to Japan to Kauai and home.  That brings me to the next issue.

Credit card miles:  The best deals tend to change pretty often.  We ended up each going with the Chase Sapphire card, which at the time offered 50K miles to sign up, and 2x points on meal purchases.  We charged everything from groceries to gas to rack up miles for about 6 months, and I would highly suggest that if you’re thinking about doing this, start racking up those miles early.  I’ve also heard good things about the various American Express cards.  I found Chris Guillebeau’s travel hacking blog really valuable on this and other issues, see:  https://chrisguillebeau.com/travel-hacking-resources.  We also have the Alaska Airline credit card which provides annual companion fares, but be warned, in order to use them, you have to either depart from or fly into a US city, so you can’t use them to fly between international destinations.

Mail forwarding:  We are using Traveling Mailbox.  You basically change your address with the post office and for $15/month, your mail gets forwarded to this service, which will open, scan, forward, and / or delete your mail.  Don’t forget to sign up on the Do Not Mail list to get off the junk mail circuit.  

House rental:  At least in Seattle right now, renting your house is easy as housing inventory is incredibly tight.  We listed our home on Zillow for free and had a ton of applicants.

Cell Phones:  T-Mobile provides great international rates - we are paying $40 per line for unlimited data, and are able to use this in every country we plan to visit except Vietnam. 

Insurance:  Navigating the US heath insurance system was honestly one of our biggest challenges, and I am sad to say further disillusioned us with our health care system, what a mess!  If you’re used to getting your insurance through your employer, as we were, it is a pretty big eye opener to navigate the insurance exchanges and try to wade through the various insurance plans.  COBRA was cost-prohibitive at $1700 / month.  Washington’s insurance exchanges are actually pretty great, and our kids are both on the Apple Health plan (i.e. Medicaid - because we’re not working).  Greg & I ended up really getting cheap catastrophic coverage, in addition to airlift / traveler’s insurance, but we had to ensure that what we got constituted “qualified coverage” under the ACA in order to prevent a $2000+ penalty when we get back and in case the Republican pass their plan on preexisting conditions.  Also, no matter what happens with the Republicans’ plan, we’ll have to reenroll for something more expensive in January because we’ll need real health care when we get back to the States in June, but you can only change plans in January (open enrollment) unless you’ve quit work, etc.  

Where to Stay:  I LOVE AIR B&B!  So much less expensive than hotels, you can cook at least some of your meals every day, and many of them have laundry machines so you don't have to waste time at the laundromat.  The hosts that we’ve encountered have been so incredibly helpful in term of giving us the scoop on the best local restaurants and markets, off the beaten path things to do, and transportation options.  We were fastidious about doing research on neighborhoods before booking in various cities, as choosing locations can be overwhelming.  We tend to stay out of the higher priced city centers, and look for neighborhoods with good transportation options, have a reputation for being safe and family friendly, and that are walkable to good food options.  

For example, in Rome we are staying in Trastevere, in a gorgeous and quiet (air-conditioned!) apartment across the street from the local farmers market and a 2 minute walk to a fantastic trendy square with tons of bars and restaurants that are reasonably priced, where we had dinner at 10pm amidst throngs of Italians out for the evening stroll.  It took us about 35 minutes to walk to the Forum and Colosseum, and we are a 5 minute walk from the tram that can take us all over the city.  

OK, that’s it for now, I hope this is helpful if you're considering a year of adventure!