It’s hard to believe, but our first international travel since before the pandemic is just around the corner. The excitement is building and the small irritating items are starting to show up.

We can’t wait!

I’ve been keeping busy. I have details on places to visit, things to see, and a couple of tours that we are considering. I always seem to have enough options for three times as many days as we’ll be someplace. Of course, the funny part is that we end up finding plenty of other things to do once we get there and my lists just return home with us until “next time”.

My restaurant listing for the various cities and towns is also now up-to-date, noting that I’ve had to remove many places that have closed. No worries though. Coming from a long line of hunter gatherers, we shall not go hungry. And yes, I WAS an Accountant, so I have a spreadsheet listing restaurants for each town or city in the countries we’ve visited.

I reloaded my Italy travel apps on my phone and iPad: Trenitalia for train schedules and tickets, DayTrip, my various Italian city guides and Rick Steve’s Audio Europe for info. The Rick Steves app will come in handy, as many art museums have forgone the use of audio guides due to the effort to clean them between uses. From our previous museum adventures, you know that I enjoy viewing the art and don’t need to understand each brush stroke (PPS – Pretty Picture Syndrome). Oh, and one new one – Flush. It’s to help find nearby toilet facilities. It works here at home, though our neighbors were surprised when I rapped on the door! 😉

While looking at opening and closing times for some of the museums we are interested in visiting, I noticed that many have limited tickets left right through to September. I guess that means that tourists are returning to Italy. Having to sit home for two years, people are itching to get back and enjoy their travels. More sites are also offering online ticketing to “skip the lines”.

Additionally, after doing a little research, we saw that Europe has ramped up the use of credit cards with the ‘Tap’ function. Cash is still used, but the preference since the pandemic began is credit cards, especially touchless ones. Many American cards still don’t have the chip feature, so check your cards before traveling abroad.

On the annoying side, we are on our third set of flight changes. As we booked early, I’m sure that most of the changes are the result of firming up flight schedules and only one of the changes was more than fifteen minutes. That one created a problem for us though, as the airline actually cancelled the later flight. Instead of having to worry about flight delays in Rome or getting through customs and then having to dash to our next flight (I really don’t “dash” these days), we decided to stay overnight in Washington. – È la vita!

A quick Covid update. The current restrictions still require visitors to be vaccinated and under certain circumstances masks are required for indoor locations. We’ll be watching to get updates prior to leaving and will likely get a second booster. That will give us the same access to restaurants and bars as the so-called “Super Green Card” that residents use.

So for now, I just have a few tickets to purchase, reservations to make and menus to check out. We’re practicing our Italian daily. So, until we’re ready to go, I will bid you goodbye for now.

Arrividerci, amici miei!