malpensa airport, monday, 8/27/07, 0908 hrs

nicki is asleep. i’m absolutely exhausted. i slept only briefly on the flight to milan. now it’s about two in the morning chicago time and i’m feeling it. i need to sleep. however, nicki took a sleeping pill on the o’hare runway and it hasn’t yet worn off. in order to make sure our carryon luggage remains safe, i must remain awake at least until we’re sitting on the plane to florence (firenze in the local language). so forgive me if these words are obtuse or charged or just plain crazy. i’m not online right now anyway, so this isn’t going to go out live. i’m sure i’ll edit it later on, when my wits return to me.

the flight was fairly smooth, apart from roughly fifteen minutes of turbulence somewhere over the atlantic. alitalia, our airline, is not quite as fancy as air france, i must say. there aren’t individual screens with a choice of programming. we were instead treated to random movies on VHS tapes shown on community screens. whenever a movie would end, the screen would pipe in the map of our progress, until a stewardess finally shoved in the next tape. the first movie was some crazy italian drama. very slow paced. very heavy drama. i was only watching, i wasn’t listening. i was in fact listening to my italian lessons on my ipod using my noise-cancelling headphones (which make a tremendous difference on a plane, mike weaver was certainly right about that). the highlight was the nude scene fairly early on in the flick. it was a few seconds long, but it was full frontal nudity. this was perhaps 4:30 in the afternoon. all the kids were definitely still awake. so, well, the movie seemed pretty long, or maybe it was just boring, but that was the movie i slept through the most. every time i woke up, it was the same movie. eventually it did end, which was shortly followed by ‘meet the robinsons’. hmm. i’m surprised they didn’t show the kids movie first. but then, my surprise waned when i realized it was an international flight, meaning that my fellow patrons were probably not the puritanical types that tend to censor everything at home. it was just a naked woman. i’ll never understand the taboo about it. anyway, this isn’t my own blog, so i won’t continue with the pseudo-sociopolitical commentary. ‘the astronaut farmer’ closed out the in-flight movie trilogy, but i’d lost complete interest by then. i instead chose to concentrate on trying to sleep, by which i mean to say that i utterly failed to sleep at any point after the first two hours of the flight.

our darling nicki, to her advantage, has basically been sleeping most of the time, other than when food was being served or we needed to move around (during these times she was the cutest zombie wife anyone has ever known).

i can barely keep my eyes open, but we have another twenty minutes or so before the plane to firenze begins to board. i’m praying that i’ll finally check out for a little while, even if the flight’s less than an hour long. we have an hour’s drive after we leave the firenze airport, but i’ll have to be awake for that. i have to help navigate our way there.

i get the feeling i’m gonna be living on caffeine and the promise of a bed in my future.

next time, i’ll probably have something to say about the wedding, er, two days ago now (losing a third of a day adds to my disorient..). from what i heard from everyone that night, it seems like our wedding was being considered a really good idea. if so, then i’m glad we thought the idea up. anyway, hopefully, next time i will be on the other side of sleep. 0940 hrs.

in flight to chicago, monday, 9/10/07 1122 hrs Italy, 0422 hrs Chicago

we’ve been in flight perhaps 20 minutes. nicki’s already asleep. i’m just as sleepy. this time i doubt i’ll have much trouble getting to sleep. we’re somewhere over switzerland, i believe. the view of the snow-capped swiss alps from this height in clear sunny skies is breathtaking. a small comfort to send us off to sleep land. we won’t land in chicago for almost ten hours. it’s always worse coming back to america; the flight takes longer.

ah, my second entry here in this honeymoon-related kinda deal. well, i was a bit busy. amy had asked me before we left if i was going to do a journal like i did in paris. “of course,” i answered, but it didn’t turn out that way. there was always something to do, somewhere to go. even if it was nowhere. y’know? there was never a time that seemed ideal for writing. ultimately, this isn’t the kind of trip when i should be sitting at the computer jamming away. throughout our honeymoon, i had a tendency to make clever mental notes for what i will eventually write, and at this point, if i remember half of them, i think i’ll consider it a success. i still intend to write a ton about what we saw and what we did, we did have an amazing time. in short, greece was a favorite spot for both of us. we intend to return as soon as we can, because santorini and corfu were so wonderful. next time, i’d like to spend some time in the mainland. everyone was friendly, the food was nice, and the scenery was amazing! definitely a highlight. anyway, i’m getting a little ahead of myself. might as well start at the beginning as we arrived in firenze (florence) and proceeded to the car rental desk after wrestling our six billion bags onto a luggage cart… (since i can’t really do a dated journal-style for this, i’ll divide sections in a mixture of locations and dates.)

firenze to chiusi 8/27/07

wow. we thought we’d seen the craziest drivers in chicago. we’d witnessed unbridled recklessness on the roads at home. we’d seen people obviously too stupid to be allowed to drive bulldoze their way through traffic in the largest vehicles sold in the public market, barely avoiding mass-murder of everyone in their vicinity.

then we drove the A1 from firenze towards roma. our destination was about halfway along that route, in a tuscan villa in between chiusi and chianciamo. at this point, nicole had slept through most of both flights as well as the layover. other than early on in the first flight, i’d barely slept a wink and i was breathing and swallowing and sweating adrenaline by the time we’d packed up our tiny rental car and made our way south. italian signs are confusing, and i initially led us in the wrong direction, towards bologna. i took us maybe 20 km out of our way before we could turn around. i had marc’s magellan with me, programmed for the region we’d be in for that time. it proved useful on several occasions, mostly to tell what direction we were going in. “something ain’t right,” i said, when i noticed that the little arrow on the screen was pointing up instead of down. we were going north.

we stopped in some random town to eat, since we were both famished. the waitress, as soon as she realized we were americani, immediately wrinkled her nose and told us, in italian, that she doesn’t speak english. for the length of the meal, we were entirely ignored. the amenities that the locals enjoyed, like bread and oil and vinegar (the italian staples), were denied to us. we would’ve taken our filthy disgusting american selves far, far away from her hate much sooner if she had simply provided our check in a timely manner. we sat there for an uncomfortable eternity. this was our welcome to italy. although it wasn’t the last time we’d experience this sort of disdain, thankfully it wasn’t universal throughout the country. an acquaintance would later tell us after returning that tuscans are well known for this behavior. but then, that’s the small town vibe, so i don’t really find myself all that surprised in retrospect. there are certainly plenty of small towns in this country that are less than welcoming to strangers. well, whatever, armed with the correct direction, we finally left the restaurant and made our way towards our first destination.

i started clicking away with the camera to capture our first visions of italy. it’s a very mountainous terrain.

they often dug tunnels through mountains in order to accommodate the highways.

anyway, it’s gorgeous there. lots of earthy colors. nicole commented that it looks exactly like the movies. what we didn’t expect, and quickly learned, is that we’d been driving much too slow. after about the fifth time an italian flashed his brights at her rear view mirror, she realized that the speed limit was merely a suggestion. the speed limit is 90 kph, which i’d heard is roughly equivalent to our 55 mph. the average speed for italian traffic, as we later figured it, was about 130 kph. the trucks were probably doing 120. most of those tiny european cars were doing at least 150. they swerved and weaved with complete abandon. they’re nuts. we couldn’t figure out how we didn’t constantly see piles of smart cars everywhere along the highways. even up the winding, dangerous mountain roads, they still drove as if the devil himself was chasing them. it’s uncanny. we chose to keep pace with the average. most of the time, we were hovering around 130. that’s much faster than even nicole usually drives, and she’s known for exceeding the speed limit. who knows, perhaps it was merely the small size of our car compared to our usual mini-SUV experience that threw us off.

it seems like it was taking forever to get to where we were going, but eventually we found our exit off the highway towards chianciamo and chiusi. about a kilometer off the highway, we found our destination up a steep driveway made of gravel. up the hill we went to our first honeymoon stop. il patriarca.

our first order of business after checking in? passing out.

next: is this really our view?…waiting for the tow truck…tuscan towns and firenze…and please, get us outta here already!