(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.