Rails to Ride

“You wanna freak out? Hey, c’mon,” Jim James sings on the this song from My Morning Jacket’s 2011 Circuital, and on Tuesday my answer to that question would have been a resounding yes. 

But first we have to go back to a moment frozen in time where, oh, about 20,000 people were probably doing some freaking out of their own and for much more legitimate reasons than mine. 

I traveled from Rome down to Salerno on the Amalfi Coast. It was a choice between Salerno and Sorrento mainly because both had train stations and allowed me to reach anywhere in between by bus easily. (Hahaha you’ll get the joke later.) Salerno seemed to be the cheapest place, and I found a great Airbnb with yet another fantastic view of the sea so there I went. Because of travel follies on both days, I never really got to enjoy it. 

On Monday, I headed by train to Pompeii to visit the ruins of the ancient Roman town that was preserved in such a manner as to delight visitors nearly two millennia later, but as you likely know, that was only made possible by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the fall of 79. 

The view of the still-active volcano from the archaeological site is stunning, and even more so when you realize how much of it was blown away when it blew its top and sealed Pompeii in a time capsule for us to now explore. In the photo below, imagine the area between the two peaks filled in. That, my friends, is what the mountain would have looked like back then. Without the scientific knowledge we possess nowadays, it’s understandable why the ancients thought that only gods, angry at them for some transgression or giving them some sort of a sign, could do something that honestly is still quite unfathomable. 

I’m not even sure where to start with highlights of my visit. 

First off, the couple hours I allotted myself were not even close to enough, and I gave strong consideration to going back for a second day. If you go, plan at least half a day. If you really want to dive deep, spend the whole day inside the ancient city and take advantage of the food offerings they have inside the ticketed area. 

I’ll start broadly and say that you get a much greater appreciation for the ingenuity of the Romans than you do even at say the Forum in Rome. There are a couple high points in the town that allow you to look out and see the road network spread out in front of you, in a perfectly logical grid format. The main square is blocked off by three tall blocks to prevent chariots from entering, and there are even signs indicating that it is a pedestrian-only area. The roads are substantially lower than the level the buildings are at, and at intersections you find stepping stones that you could use to cross the street while also at a height at which chariots could pass over them. On a more micro scale concerning the roads, it’s also incredible to see the grooves in the large rocks that make up the thoroughfares, worn into place by the chariots rolling over them over and over, reminiscent of old wagon trails you can see out west in America. 

Nearly every building is preserved to the point where you don’t need to have a vivid imagination to picture the residents moving in and out of them, from homes to restaurants to baths, and some of them are substantially still in tact, even featuring the original frescoes decorating the walls. 

“In the doorway, spot the huge erection.”

THE WHAT I exclaimed in my head to the voice of Rick Steves in my ear. For a moment, I was looking for something built up… erected… denying to myself that he could mean *that* type of erection. 

“The penis and the balance symbolize…” 

OH MY DAYS I exclaimed internally once more, realizing he meant it exactly as I tried to not believe he meant it. 

And sure enough. There in the doorway it was. A huge erection indeed. The following content may not be suitable for all audiences. 

Wow. So yes, apparently the big penis and the money that is equal to its weight represent the supposed fact that if you have money and fertility, you will bear fruit, which you also see pictured. Uh-huh, okay then. 

But in all seriousness, the fact that the artwork — and the rest of the uh, rather graphic images that adorn other rooms in this house — still exist is incredible.

Other things I found to be amazing were the marble countertops in buildings that made up a restaurant row of sorts, the incredible mosaic tile  work in the tavern, and intricate details like the slots in the concrete where the accordion-style doors would have been. 

I only explored maybe a quarter of the town as it exists today, and I look forward to returning sometime to check out much more. 

To get to the site, it required a short bus ride from the train station which the train company sold as a bundle. It worked perfectly on the way there, but after leaving the gift shop with some… interesting gifts (including something special for devoted blog reader cousin Rod), the bus to go back to the station was nowhere to be found. I wandered around for a while to no avail and after asking a taxi driver how much it would cost and trying unsuccessfully to withdraw some cash, I decided to just hoof it. The station was only a mile away, and the only thing this really impacted would be my plan to enjoy the sunset from the terrace. 

The next day, however, would be prove to be much different. 

If you’ve been as an avid consumer of my journaling as Rod, you have no doubt noticed that I have developed an immense enjoyment of limoncello. That totally makes sense as I’ve always enjoyed lemons more than limes, so the limoncello spritz has surpassed the margarita as my cocktail of choice in just a matter of weeks. 

And so now we have the real motivation for my visit to the Amalfi Coast, the native home of the best liqueur known to man. 

I bought the bus ticket for the hour-long journey to Amalfi proper after finding a particular supposedly quite authentic retailer of the drink, and then somewhat enjoyed the longest rollercoaster ride of my life. Up and down, around sharp bend after sharp bend, with the bus having to honk its horn to indicate it’s coming around the impossibly tight corner to any car who may be on the other side, often clinging to a cliff hundreds of feet up with the rocky shore of the Mediterranean down below. 

The views were amazing, but I wasn’t prepared for all of the jostling about as the (hopefully) experienced driver pushed it to the limit, speeding up quickly whenever he could even if only for the briefest of moments. 

When we arrived in Amalfi, the shop I wanted to visit was closed, a harbinger of things to come persons. Thankfully there were plenty of others, and o found the cutest little hole in the wall with the sweetest older Italian lady who offered me a sample, and one sip was all I needed to know I wanted her limoncello. 

I took three bottles of it, one to enjoy while on the rest of this leg of the trip and two more that I shipped home (one as a gift for my dad and one for myself, of course), and then I wandered around through town briefly before heading back to the stop. 

The lady who sold me my ticket had warned me the last coach out of Amalfi would be at 16:00 because of carnival, so I was ready to get on board and head back well before. And yet none of the buses were showing they were going to Salerno. I waited another hour, thinking maybe she had given me bad information. No buses to Salerno. 

I started to feel the same dread that I had on the platform in the Cinque Terre earlier, but I was at least comforted by the fact that I could easily get a hotel in Amalfi if need be. The only problem with that is that I was leaving early the next morning to get to Venice, and the first bus back to Salerno would not get me there in time to get packed up and make the train. 

So I finally asked one of the other bus drivers how I could get to Salerno, and he told me to take the bus to Maiori, walk two kilometers to the next town, and take the bus from there. “It’s easy,” he said in his thick Italian accent. 

A quick glance on Google Maps made me skeptical. 

But I took the next bus to Maiori (which actually stopped in Minori), followed the crowd up the road along one of those aforementioned cliffs and then back down into town, emptying out into a fantastic scene of revelers, floats, bright lights, and loud music. I kept on walking through the crowd, taking in what I could but wanting at the same time to just get home. Though I did pause long enough to snap a couple great pictures using iPhone’s Night Mode. 

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At this point, I forgot the name of the stop, and it seemed like I had gone two kilometers so I waited after climbing back up to another curve along the now-dark road. I was at a stop but no buses were there and none came. Wearily I opened Google Maps after watching a few people walk past me, and there was another stop up the way, but it was straight uphill, around two more curves, and with no lights at all and the Mediterranean lashing out below. 

Nuh-uh. Not a chance. 

I tried to get a taxi and one accepted my ride… and he’d be there in 50 minutes from Naples! I had come to terms with a substantial cost, but not what that would’ve ended up being. 

I couldn’t help but laugh and then decided to just head back down into town. Surely there were folks from Salerno who had come from the party like the crowded bus-fulls I saw leave Amalfi, and SURELY they aren’t all going to walk up Everest to get the bus back. 

To my delight, I saw a group of folks with suitcases standing around near a parked bus, and I did something I never would do: I walked right up to them and asked where they were going. 

Amalfi. 

Well, great. Thanks. Glad I overcame my fear of talking to new people for that. 

Inside the parked bus sat a driver so I walked up it, knocked on the door, and asked him if he spoke English. He gave the universally-understood shrug of his shoulders and bounced his head from side to side so as to indicate a very little bit. 

“Salerno tonight?” I asked. 

“Uhh … si (that one I knew) … uh … 7 (oh good!) … uh … [mumbles and holds up four fingers].”

What? Seven four? Seven forty? What do you mean? Oh it doesn’t matter, don’t ask. Just find out where. 

“Where?” I inquired, obeying the voice in my head. 

“Here.”

OH THANKS BE TO APOLLO! Or whoever is the Roman god of travel. 

I went and sat down for a bit, wandered back into the festivities for a while, and shortly after 19:00 I went back to the place I had found the bus, and I saw the most glorious sight in lights I’ve ever seen. 

S A L E R N O

It was honestly the sexiest thing I have ever seen. Yes… sexy. So, so pretty. 

And so I climbed on board, limoncello somehow not yet consumed in tow, and sighed the biggest sigh of my life. And then I smiled. 

Sure, seeing the huge erection in Pompeii was cool, but this is the night I’ll still be talking about years from now. 

“You remember that time I got stuck in the middle of carnival in some random small Italian town and almost climbed a mountain in the dark to get home?” I’ll ask in my most southern accent (because all of my grandest tales are told in that accent). 

I almost broke a couple times, but really it wasn’t that serious of a situation. I could have gotten a room. I could have found a later train to Venice. It all would have worked out fine. Deep down I did know this, and so I didn’t have as much as a freakout as pre-adventure Taylor would have. 

It might seem to be in insignificant ways, but when all combined, during these nearly two-months so far, I think I have changed more than I actually know. I came looking for one thing (and nothing both at the same time), and yet this journey is giving me things I didn’t (and to some extent did) know I needed. 

But all that being said, I am very much looking forward to not growing at all and just relaxing on a lovely ride along the canals in Venice. 

If you ask me, I earned it. 

I can’t say it enough: Rome is absolutely the highlight of the trip so far. 

Could I have found more to do in some of the earlier stops I made? Sure. But there is no place that I dreaded leaving like I did Rome, so let’s wrap up the few days I didn’t yet talk about.

When I went to reserve my ticket for the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel, I was a bit alarmed to find that there were no tickets available. Not for the particular day at which I was looking, and not for any day that I was going to be in Rome. This ended up being quite the blessing in disguise.

There were two premium options available: an early admission or a Happy Hour admission, and I decided to splurge and book the early admission that also included breakfast. I know some of you think of this as me being on some sort of semi-permanent vacation, but to me it’s much more than that. That being said, I still have objected to anything that requires me functioning at 7:30. I’m just not a morning person. 

So I grumbled when the alarm on my phone went off at 5:58 on Wednesday (does anyone else set their alarm for non-5 and 0 times? I don’t wake up if the time ends on a 5 or a 0. Don’t @ me.), but then I reminded myself that I was going to be in a small group of people with the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel all to ourselves.

The way I envisioned it in my head didn’t even come close to imagining just how special that was.

Take this photo of the Gallery of Maps, for example. There’s literally no one in front of us. You just don’t get that type of experience without doing something like this, making the price so entirely worth it.

I thought the Gallery of Maps, with its various cartographic representations of Italy, was amazing, considering the time period in which the maps were made, but I was about to be blown away even more and had no idea.

The Raphael Rooms. 

They were all incredible, but it was the second that will stick with me forever.

The Room of Segnatura. On one side, the theologians. On the other, the philosophers. Including on the academic side are such names as Plato and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Euclid. Raphael painted himself here, humbly off to the side but always watching the person viewing his work, and he included his not-so-humble rival Michelangelo. I found it quite interesting that not only did Raphael have — and the Pope approved — having religion and education on the same level, but that it was poetry that bridges between the two. Art, in all of its forms, is so important, and it as much as anything else part of the essence of humanity.

The entire visit that morning built upon itself. The Gallery of Maps was better than the sights before it, and the Raphael Rooms were better than the Gallery of Maps.

The Sistine Chapel 

I legitimately did not breathe for several long seconds, my mouth agape for the maximum amount of time one be in that position without pushing past the brink of drooling.

If I receive nothing else from this trip than the appreciation that I now have for Michelangelo, then it will have been worth it. I am encouraged to really study this man, and I think when I am further along into that, he will rank among my favorite historical figures. I am developing a lengthy list of homework for when I return stateside, and at the top of it is delving into Michelangelo’s life.

With our hushed viewing of the Sistine Chapel complete and after enjoying the “American” breakfast that was included (apparently Italians think Americans really like bacon and eggs because the hotel advertised such a thing also, and both it and the Vatican had those two things in common), I contended with my first long line of the trip.

To reach St. Peter’s Square, you have to leave the Vatican Museum, walk back into Italy (you better believe I’m counting this as my fifth country visited), around the outer walls, and then down a street until you empty out into the massive square. The line to get into the basilica probably wrapped more than halfway around it, but thankfully it moved quickly while also giving me an opportunity to read up on what I was about to see.

It is all incredible, but you already know what stole the show for me, right?

Michelangelo. Sculptor, painter, architect.

It is the tallest dome in the world, and you could play an American football game from floor to ceiling with room to spare. Yet this incredibly large space magically feels quite intimate… because they put a SEVEN-STORY TALL altar under it. 

I’m not Catholic, and honestly there’s a lot about Catholicism that I don’t understand. But this entire place is truly somewhere that I think people of any faith or no faith can genuinely appreciate for its significant holiness. 

Nothing that there was a special Vatican City post office, I couldn’t pass the opportunity to send an old-school postcard back home to my parents, so I bought one from the gift shop, penned a note, and went to purchase a stamp only to find out that they only took cash, which I haven’t had any of since I’ve been over here. Slightly disappointed, I made the most of it in my head and thought it would be quite funny to just hand deliver the postcard, and so I turned to walk away.

That’s when a person with a British accent offered me some money. I went back-and-forth with him a couple times before finally accepting his kind offer, and I walked back to the window and handed the change over. It wasn’t enough, so I now thought the story was going to be even better when I put the note into their hands in March. But this group of younger British folk were persistent, gave me more money, and I got my stamp. 

Humans are cool. 

You know what else is cool? The Colosseum and the Roman Forum. 

The ticket I purchased was good for 48 hours including an entrance to both, and so I went to the Colosseum first on Friday. I also paid a little extra to be able to explore the underground of the ancient arena, and even though I wasn’t able to download the app that explained what I was seeing, it was still an amazing experience being able to roam around where the gladiators would be alongside the exotic animals underneath the stadium floor. 

I’ve been in a lot of sporting venues. None of them as cool as this. Maybe it was that I watched Gladiator the night before, but it wasn’t hard at all to transport myself back and time and imagine what it had to have been like when packed for those brutal, bloody battles. 

The remaining bones of the Forum also made a Saturday afternoon stroll down those same ancient streets feel at least a little bit like what it must have been like so long ago. 

Even if it’s hard to imagine what the buildings might have looked like, it takes not any mental gymnastics to realize that you’re walking down the same streets that Julius flipping Caesar walked down. 

Incredible. 

I spent one last great meal at my favorite restaurant, coincidentally getting one of the best tables they have outside with the Pantheon right in front of me, the table lit by the dancing flames from the heat torch behind me. I enjoyed another limoncello spritz or two, and I did it as the Italians do, taking my time and not rushing. I didn’t leave the table for two hours, and I could have sat there for two more. 

I thanked Rafael who was my server all three nights, and then I strolled back to the Trevi Fountain and found a seat, enjoying soaking up being firmly in modern times in this ancient world. 

It was nearly midnight by the time I returned to my hotel, doing one more lap around the square in front of the Pantheon and taking it all in from the vantage point behind the fountain as pictured above at the start of the post. 

I stood there, madly in love, and I vowed that I will return. 

I already can’t wait.

I Found Love | Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies

I’m sitting here in my hotel room, windows open on a mild mid-February afternoon in Roma. Below me, there’s the dull roar of a large group of people, the piazza in front of the Pantheon the most full it’s been during my visit here thanks to the Saturday crowds. For the first time this week, the peaceful babble of the fountain is nearly drained out.

And I am so very content.

This has by far been the best stop of my journey so far, and it feels an incredible injustice to write only one entry about it so we’ll see if I break it up into a couple or not.

As a skeptic, I know there is no scientific evidence to support the belief in past lives, but if I did believe in past lives, I have a feeling one of mine would have seen me strolling down these streets at the height of the empire. There is some type of known comfort in this place, something I can’t describe but is absolutely tangible.

I also would have been a hippy in the 60s, but that for sure feels like too recent of a past to have already come back.

I digress.

I knew from the hotel description that my room would have a view of the Pantheon, but I didn’t expect that. I mean, it’s right there. Incredible.

After settling in on Monday evening, I walked up a nearby side street that shoots off the square in front of the best-preserved Roman building probably anywhere, and I found my way until a cozy spot that felt more local than touristy where I enjoyed cacio e pepe for the first time ever. I had never even heard of it despite its tasty simplicity of cheese and black pepper being right up my culinary alley.

Tuesday morning I explored the inside of the Pantheon, especially admiring the marvel that is its massive dome, an architectural feat that inspired Michelangelo’s masterpiece across the river and ultimately the US Capitol Building back home. The actual visitable inside area of the building is small comparatively, but there’s plenty to see including the tomb of the great artist Raphael who we’ll talk about more later also.

The dome remains the largest one made of unreinforced concrete in the world, which is amazing considering that it was probably completed around 126 AD after being commissioned by the emperor Hadrian. When built, the oculus was open, and the floor has little holes in it and is built on a slight angle for rain water to drain out. Amazing.

Several nights I have spent dining at a restaurant right on the plaza with a view of the building. The darkness brings on an added mystique, and the ghosts of Romans past coming to worship all their gods seem to be walking among the crowds of passersby in the piazza.

I spent the rest of Tuesday following a guided walk from Rick Steves’ app, and I really enjoyed wandering these cobblestones that have seen so much history as I went from Campo de Fiori to Piazza Navona back by the Pantheon and then up to Parliament from which the walk continued to the Trevi Fountain on the way to the Spanish Steps.

After doing this walk during the day, I’ve repeated it in stages at night, and one thing that I have noticed is the abundance of young people around that just gives off this youthful aura, making this area so rich with ancient history have a modern energy that feels so alive. You can’t walk through any of these piazzas without hearing young laughter echoing through the open spaces.

Nearly every one of these piazzas have a fountain in its middle, and while the Trevi Fountain is a rightfully popular one, I find myself particularly drawn to the Fontana die Quattro Fiumi — the Fountain of the Four Rivers.

This fountain by Gian Lorenzo Bernini is a Baroque masterpiece, and it features symbolically the waters of four major world rivers: the Danube (which I once pronounced to great mocking as Dah-new-bee while hosting trivia), the Ganges, the Rio de la Plata, and the Nile. The various scenes carved into the stone represent these areas with various plants and animals, and the sculpture is topped by one of 15 Egyptian obelisks that dot the scenery in Rome.

Prior to this trip, I had no idea about the prevalence of these obelisks here, but the Romans had a way of snatching things from the places they conquered and displaying them throughout town. So humble.

Nowadays, the obelisks are topped by Christian crosses, a sign of the influence the fifth country of my travels has had since it rose to power. It’s quite the contrast when you think about it. The way the Romans murdered Christians before becoming the world capital of the religion in a practical flip of switch when you consider that a couple hundred years really isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things.

And I think that’s a good place to stop for now. Next time we’ll go backwards in time, starting at the Vatican and working back to the Roman Forum and the Colosseum.

For now, I have to go have more pasta and limoncello. Thank goodness I’ve been walking almost six miles per day while I’ve been here. It all balances out.

Right?

Florence, Italy.

The birthplace of the Renaissance.

A place where times were indeed a-changin’ Bob.

A place that I thankfully didn’t judge on my first night and subsequent morning.

After the day of traveling plus the visit to Pisa mixed in, I decided to stay in on Friday night after settling down in my Airbnb, and at some point while hanging out, there was a flash of light in the window that caught my attention. A few minutes later after turning off the music to which I was listening, I noticed the familiar dull roar of a helicopter, and it didn’t seem to be straying much from its position.

I hopped on FlightRadar (a favorite website of mine now after using it to track which planes were landing in Nice on my plane-spotting day), and it made me realize that the flash of light earlier was from the police helicopter that was according to the track shown circling over the city, with its loops frequently going right over where I was.

Great.

The light shown through the window a couple more times, but with no sirens on the ground and after the helicopter finally returned to the airport, I was no longer worried.

UNTIL THERE WERE WHAT APPEARED TO BE FIGHTER JETS FLYING OVER THE CITY THE NEXT MORNING.

They were flying low, fast, and often. Where in the world have I ended up, I wondered.

As one might do in modern times, I jumped onto Twitter to see if anyone else was talking about this, and indeed they were, allowing me to find out — thankfully — that this was just the Frecce Tricolori practicing for a special flyover the next day where they would be displaying the Italian flag’s colors in the sky to honor some important author’s 100th birthday.

Finally feeling like it was safe to wander out and that I hadn’t ended up somewhere nefarious by mistake, I headed past the Duomo to a pizza place that was somewhat off the tourist drag, and while the pizza was fantastic, the drinks were even better.

I had a limoncello spritz. And then a second. As a thanks for visiting, the owner gave me a shot after my meal.

Woo boy.

I did not need that.

If you know me well, you know that one margarita at Casa Blanca in Huntsville would get the wheels turning for me, and I’m not lying when I say that one limoncello spritz did more to me than any Casa marg ever dreamed of trying.

So there I was, walking through the historic streets of Florence, Italy, grinning from ear to ear with not a care in the world.

Compared to a few hours earlier when I was convinced Italy was under attack, the times… you know the rest.

Changing things up a bit, I decided to utilize an audio tour on my phone for the first time this trip — I have turned into a huge Rick Steves fan through this, and I can’t recommend his stuff enough! — and it really made quite the difference as I wandered… or frolicked… around the Duomo, learning the history of it as I went.

The other good thing about having the tour guide in my pocket as opposed to trying to get in on a walking tour or some other such service is that when I had to expel the limoncello, I was able to pause my adventure, head back to my place for relief, and then pick it back up at my convenience.

The next morning, I had booked the earliest possible ticket for the Accademia, and it absolutely pays off to do this. As I’ve said, when they say go early or go late, it’s so true.

There I was, standing in front of one of history’s most iconic work or art, with three other people.

I was able to take all the pictures I wanted, and then I was able to take it all in. And I learned a great lesson about perspective.

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When viewed from one angle, David appears to be ultra confident. When viewed from another angle, the furrowed brow gives a sense of concern, still prepared but nervous about what is to come in his battle.

All too often we restrict ourselves to only our perspective. Our perspective is truth, and we reject anyone else’s perspective as invalid when really we should be open to having our perspective challenged and seeing things in a different way.

Don’t be afraid to take a few steps around the statue to see what the other person sees.

Thanks to my Twitter search the day prior, I knew the flyover was going to occur at 10:30 on Sunday, so there I was with the windows open preparing to be ready. One thing I hear about Italy is that nothing is ever on time, but I decided to at least be in the general vicinity of the window at 10:25 when OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT. It had been just two planes the day prior, but the roar of nine military jets made me have to pee just as much as the limoncello had.

Not only was the flyover not late, it was early!

I still saw it, but my plans to get a cool video of it were rendered ruined, leaving me with just this really bad picture of the smoke.

Now that I think about it, time in Florence might actually be ahead of the rest of the world. My iPhone time has never been inaccurate. Has yours? And yet, with regularity, the church bells would ring at :58 instead of on the hour. I wish I had realized that before just now while sitting in my hotel room in Rome.

Oh well. At least there’s a picture of the smoke.

Later on Sunday, I picked up the audio tour where I had been forced to abandon it the afternoon prior, and it was a fascinating walk through Florence’s history. I took a lot of great photos, deciding again to take the camera out, but I still have yet to purchase an SD card reader for my MacBook so you will just have to pretend like you can look at them with me. At this rate, I’ll be back in Florida before I’m able to pull any of these pictures off. Hysterical.

Would I have liked more time in Florence? Yes, I think so. That being said, there are a couple positives I see from this more rapid moving between places thing I’m doing now: 1) there are a ton of places to see 2) darn, I have reasons to come back.

Slow travel is fun, if done right but can also be dreadful (my time in Nice compared to, say, my time in Annecy). Maybe if I had felt more comfortable in Annecy or if I hadn’t been in a tiny hotel room when my London time ballooned to 12 days, I would still be casually strolling around as I had originally planned, but I am quite content right now. I didn’t think I wanted to do the whole tourist thing, but that’s actually exactly what I wanted to do.

But I am also open to the possibility that I might fall in love with some place and want to stay there forever.

Spoiler alert: I’m going to keep moving down the line after this week, but don’t be surprised if you have to mail your Christmas cards to Rome at some point.

Stay tuned!

No, I suppose trains aren’t usually steam engines any longer, but I kind of wish they were? Then again, maybe not, because I do like how fast modern trains can get us around. But I still think there’s something to be said about things from the past and how they can be super special compared to things of today.

From Nice I traveled to La Spezia, my home base for a couple nights so that I could spend the day exploring the Cinque Terre. I had never heard of the “five lands” — or more likely in the case villages instead of lands — until watching some Rick Steves videos on YouTube ahead of this expedition, and I am so glad I landed on those and paid attention.

In the summer, I probably wouldn’t have been so enthralled since these places are apparently overrun with tourists, but in the middle of the low season in early February, it was quite literally like stepping back in time.

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These five cliff-hugging villages make up a UNESCO World Heritage site, and they date back to at least the 11th century, surviving Turkish pirate attacks, an economic decline between the 1600s and 1800s, and a further drop in population after a historic rail line bored through the hills and connected them with La Spezia in the south and Genoa to the north.

But then tourists like me started coming in the 1970s, and they have thrived since.

Without too many fellow travelers around and if I ignored the cell phone in one pocket and camera in the other, it truly did feel like I had somehow defied the laws of physics and done some type of time travel.

My day’s journey started in Vernazza at around lunchtime where I could have sat and watched the local who was fishing with the most rudimentary of set-ups that included some bread, a string, and a hook, as he enticed numerous fish over towards him by tossing a few pieces of bread into the water and then unsuspectingly dropping the additional lure on the end of his line. With a snap of a motion more common to something I would have watched college athletes do in my previous life, he snatched one catch after another out of the sea, let it flop around on the concrete for a minute, and then placed it in his bucket before repeating the process.

In my mind in the fall when the trip was just an imaginary future thing, I would have struck up a conversation with him, but I found myself plenty satisfied by simply watching from a distance.

From Vernazza, my trek through my ninth* national park and first one in a country that isn’t the United States continued onward to Monterosso al Mare. If you imagine a curved instead of pointy W, that’s Monterosso, with your choice at the train station to go to either one of the Us. I chose the one to the left which included a little bit of a trek up to a high point with a beautiful view of the U to the right (don’t you love my wonderfully official geographic terms?). I attempted to find a place to eat in Monterosso, but when that came up fruitless, it confirmed for me the smartness of my decision to stay in La Spezia instead of one of the villages where not much is open during this time of the year.

I knew I wouldn’t visit all five, but I definitely had to include the smallest of the communes, Manarola, so I headed to catch the next train there after enjoying all the lovely views Monterosso had to offer. There was a particular view in Manarola that seemed to be the top one offered in any of the five villages, so even when the train was delayed for over an hour leaving Monterosso and with daylight soon fading, I still had to stop in Manarola.

And I’m not sorry that I did it.

Not one bit.

I have seen a lot of amazing sights. Canyonlands National Park offers views of miles and miles of canyons upon canyons that has to be seen to be believed. Watching the day’s first rays of light hit the jagged tips of the Teton Range inside Grand Teton National Park is indescribable. Seeing Old Faithful erupt in the last light of day after all the tourists have left Yellowstone National Park is awe-inspiring. And no matter how many times I stand at the Morton Overlook inside my home park of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it will never cease to amaze me.

I will now forever include the Maranola overlook viewpoint on that list of incredible sights. A combination of natural beauty and man-made structures that have withstood the test of time truly took my breath away.

I’m glad I didn’t start my day there. I would have never gone anywhere else.

It was simply incredible and then some.

I texted a good friend of mine, telling him that it looked like it was straight up plucked out of a movie, when in reality, it is movies that try to recreate these scenes. In fact, one of the latest Disney/Pixar films Luca is said to have been inspired by these places.

I don’t know when, but I’ll be back. And next time I’m staying in one of the villages.

For a long, long nervous moment on this trip, it felt like that might be happening much sooner rather than at some later undetermined time in the future.

When I arrived back to the station at Maranola, there was a train at the platform I could have gotten on that was headed back to La Spezia. This was at 17:00, and though because of all the delays on the line and the short 15 minute or so trip back to my home base, I figured no one would be checking or caring about my ticket, I still felt it was the safe play to wait for my 17:30 train. The train at the platform was departing 30 minutes late, which indicated to me that they were well into catching up from earlier, so I figured at worst I’d watch the sunset over the sea and my train would be there around 18:00.

I was wrong.

That train, however, was canceled, and though there were numerous other folks waiting on the platform headed in the same direction, I started to wonder if my night was destined to be spent in this, the smallest of the five villages with just over 300 residents. Intellectually I knew there were no hotels but I still looked. Nothing, of course. I had decided not to wear a coat since I have some natural insulation and the upper 40s/lower 50s isn’t too bad to me while walking around during the day. Once the sun dipped below the horizon, I was regretting that, and with there not being any real train station and just the platform, I started to ponder what a night in the subway under the platforms — the only “warm” sheltered place — might be like. I also had to pee.

None of this was the making of a good night, but thankfully after numerous refreshes on my phone — which only had a signal in one particular place on the platform — the next train to La Spezia started making its way through the Cinque Terre after another significant delay, and soon enough I was warm and the sound of water not so bothersome.

Earlier in my journeys, I would have stayed two or three more unnecessary nights in La Spezia. This time, I saw what I wanted to see, and it was time to move on to the next on Friday. And so I headed to Florence but not without a stop in Pisa first.

My Momma visited Europe in the mid- to late-90s to be the only person in our family to visit the continent to that point. As an aside to my main point, one of the things that she did was collect pins from many of her stops, and I really wish I had done something similar. Guess I just need to backtrack! Anyways, I only thought about that because of my main point here which is that another thing she bought was one of the souvenirs she brought back to me: a miniature ceramic of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

As I was on the train heading south, I thought about that knickknack, a simple thing relatively, but it fascinated me. Wait, I thought to myself, there’s this old tower over there, and it’s leaning like this?! I could see the miniature model so clearly in my mind’s eye, I could feel it in my hand. That’s how vivid of a recollection I had of it, and so I couldn’t help but gasp, catching my breath when I turned a corner and caught my first glimpse of the actual thing.

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I don’t think Pisa is worth an overnight stay, but it is perfect as I did it (not because I did it, but because I followed suggestions) as a brief stop while traveling to somewhere else. It’s definitely worth it to get off your train, walk around the tower and the nearby cathedral, but then catch another train a couple hours later and keep on movin’ on down the line.

And so that’s how I ended up in Florence. It has been amazing so far with a little bit of drama mixed in that you’ll have to wait to hear about, and I can’t wait for another day of exploring tomorrow.

Until then, I’m off to find some more limoncello.

*I begrudgingly include the Gateway Arch in my total as it is, in fact, an official full-blown national park, but let the record show I think that its inclusion among such giants as Yellowstone and Everglades is an abomination.

Nice, indeed.

This has been the perfect vacation from my vacation, as a saying I’ve heard European travel expert Rick Steves use quite a bit goes. I fell so hard in love with the place at which I am staying, and when you combine that with the fact that so many things in the next place I want to visit — the Cinque Terre in Italy — aren’t open on Tuesdays in the low season, I decided to stay here a couple days longer than I had originally planned. And I don’t regret it at all.

On Thursday, I sat on the terrace of my top-floor apartment with nothing but the Promenade des Anglais between myself and the Mediterranean, and before I knew it, the clock had somehow reached 3 p.m. and I had accomplished nothing but watching planes come in, sweep across over the sea, and land at the nearby airport. I am sure some would find the noise from the air traffic annoying, but I found it fantastic.

That night, I took a stroll down on the Promenade, and this is when I want to address something that I haven’t touched on since I’ve been here but has been on my mind at several different places. It was impossible for me to not think about the 2016 terrorist attack that killed 86 and injured hundreds of others right there where I walked.

I thought about it in London as I recalled the 2005 bombings on the Underground. I thought about it in Paris as I recalled the awful 2016 attacks there.

I go through a range of emotions, from anger to sadness, and then I try to make some semblance of sense out of it. Why on earth would someone have such a radically ideology that would lead them to do such awful things? I can’t find all the answers to that deep question, but I know that doing something like this journey can’t hurt. I think we should all push outside of our cultural comfort zones and really try to understand others instead of simply asserting our own superiority.

Obviously the European culture isn’t too far different from the one to which I’m accustomed, but especially in the larger cities, I have certainly been exposed to many different types compared to those found in Franklin, Tenn., Huntsville, Ala., and Sarasota, Fla. And when this voyage here is complete, I certainly have a desire to push those comfort boundaries further, to learn more about other folks in other places.

But first I have to be able to go to a French restaurant and not totally lose my mind.

And so on Friday, I headed to Old Nice around lunchtime with that objective in mind.

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Old Nice is amazing, with maybe the most narrow streets I’ve walked yet, and with colorful old-world buildings that reach higher into the sky than those in York or Bath. My stroll led me to a restaurant I had picked out, and after doing an additional lap around the outdoor market adjacent to the eatery, I psyched myself up enough to do it.

And then there was the loud, shocking sound of a bottle of glass breaking.

It couldn’t have been more than 10 or 15 feet away from me, and it was much louder than had it simply been dropped or if the older gentleman with a baby stroller in front of me had run over it. He looked back at me, and we stared at each other in silent disbelief. I don’t know what he said to me nor do I know what he said to others around us, but I could tell he was angry and that no one knew where the bottle had come from.

The older guy then looked up to the tall building next to us and started shouting, and I think we all came to the conclusion that someone had thrown the bottle out of a window above us. I have no idea why, and I’m not sure I want to know.

Startled, I for sure wanted to sit down and change the subject quickly, so I headed straight for the terrace of the restaurant, greeted the host with a bonjour and asked if he spoke English. “A little,” he said. That’s totally fine! It worked! I thought to myself. I told him it was just me and preferred to sit outside, and I followed him to the table feeling oh so very proud of myself.

“Bonjour, français ou anglais?” the server asked when she came to greet me, and I have to admit, I was a little disappointed to not put my new-found confidence to the test but answered “English, please” nonetheless.

I have zero idea why I freaked myself out so much about that, but I’m glad to have put it behind me.

I decided to walk back to the apartment from Old Nice along the Promenade, and it was a totally different experience during the day. It was more crowded but with fewer people running or biking along the path, it seemed more relaxed. The sea was calm and beautiful. It simply didn’t feel like a February day, with the temperature close to 60F. Just lovely.

I spent Saturday mostly on the terrace of the apartment again, watching Everton and just relaxing prior to taking my first stroll that evening along the rocky beach. One of the things I was looking forward to about Brighton — a place I had to skip because of the industrial action at the time in England — was a beach made of stone instead of sand, and so I was glad to experience that here finally.

I. Hate. Sand. So this was perfect for me.

With Monaco being so close, I couldn’t resist the urge to mark off my third country, so on Sunday that’s where I headed. After going to look at the Casino Monte-Carlo, I headed down towards the water where I saw yacht after yacht after yacht. And honestly y’all, I just didn’t like it. It was all just way too lavish for me, and I returned to the train station much sooner than I had planned to just wait for my train back to Nice.

I don’t begrudge the individuals, but I do begrudge a society that allows a certain select few to hold so much wealth. There has to be a better approach.

But at least the train station was cool.

At some point on Sunday I also started to notice a bit of a pain in that area of your foot right under your toes, and so with a lot of exploring coming up at the Cinque Terre, Florence, and Rome, I decided to just take it easy the past couple days. Hard to really complain about getting to just sit and look out at the Mediterranean, especially since it’s been quite angry yesterday and today, with some of the biggest waves I’ve ever seen in person.

The first few nights I couldn’t hear the sea over the traffic, but the past two nights, it is the sound of the waves crashing along the shore that has won out. Even with the doors to the terrace shut, the glorious cacophony of water lashing out against land has filled my apartment.

Sure has been… Nice.

Mahgeetah.

When My Morning Jacket’s Jim James wrote that song, apparently it was a fun way of saying “my guitar” or at least that’s what the internet tells me. For me, it’s the song I go to when I am in my absolute best mood as I have yet again never really considered its meaning before now, and so it’s quite appropriately playing in my Airbnb tonight. It is a song that bounces you along playfully, and I think it is physically impossible for you not to smile when it’s playing.

It hits especially strong when you’ve come out of a recent period of struggling.

All apologies to my next door neighbors for the early evening American rock-n-roll concert that’s blaring in here. It’s hitting really strong tonight.

Look, it just did not get any better after Paris. While Annecy’s first impressions were some of the best of the trip so far, it quickly waned and left me regretting the length of stay I had booked.

While the language barrier did continue to be a thing and I didn’t visit a single restaurant in Annecy (to be fair, I did cook quite a bit as I have done for much of the trip when staying at a place with a kitchen), that wasn’t the only thing that had me down. I was feeling unaccomplished, which begs the question what am I seeking to accomplish, and the answer to that is I’m not sure. But whatever it is, I wasn’t getting it in Annecy.

As I mentioned in a lengthy post on Facebook that all but negated the need for this entry, I had a couple of rough moments, full of tears and full of doubts. Here I am an ocean away, having no idea what I’m getting out of this and wondering if the big decisions I made to reach this point had been foolish.

So on Monday, as I neared the end of the first full calendar month on this adventure, I took advantage of a lengthy train ride to reassess. In my mind, I’ve wanted some of this trip to be about living like the locals, but how is that defined? This morning while walking to the train for my next stop, I walked alongside parents walking their rambunctious kids to school. I was only in Avignon for two nights, but that moment alone was exactly what I wanted. I didn’t have to stay there for six nights to experience it.

It was a validating moment for me, that the time spent on the train there was effective. I have enjoyed not knowing where I was going next, but I think it’s also aided in my unaccomplished feeling. So with that in mind, I wrote out a list of stops and dates. Do I have to stick to it? No. Will it feel good as I cross them off? Yes, even if multiple stops have been scratched out and replaced with some other option along the way. Will I be able to have moments that just aren’t touristy in nature? If I’m open to them, for sure.

Another of those moments also came this morning.

I walked up to the platform for my train to Nice way too soon, and it was deserted but for one mother and her small child. “Bonjour,” she says before I’ve even finished climbing the ramp. I greet her in return, and she immediately goes into some long, clearly frustrated question. “Uhhh… pardon… uhh… je ne parle pas… uh… uh… bien francais,” I say. She looks away dismayed. We both have the same idea apparently because when I look up after reaching into my pocket to pull out my phone and open Google Translate, she has beaten me to it, showing me her question wondering if the next train made a particular stop.

I shook my head with a sympathetic look and said I would check to be sure, though I’m sure she didn’t understand that. I pulled up the train’s schedule and sure enough it did not stop where she was wanting to go. She was clearly upset, but she was also clearly appreciative, said “merci,” took her child, and hurried off to another platform.

While it was a disappointing moment for her, I wish she could know that it provided me with a big spark. It gave me confidence that I can for sure communicate with the tools I have at my disposal, and it made me feel for a brief moment like a local.

Before I go on further, let me say that Annecy was beautiful, and I would go back but probably at another time of the year, preferably with someone else, and with a length of stay that was much shorter. The old town was spectacular, as you can tell by the above photo, and the lake upon which the city sits is a beautiful place for a walk, something I can only imagine is even better when the nearby Alps are not constantly shrouded by clouds as they were for all but about 28 minutes of the seven days I spent there.

Avignon was also neat, and two nights — or one full day — was a perfect amount of time to stay there. The city center is full of squares, joined together by narrow cobblestone streets, and I can imagine when the weather is warmer, it is quite the bustling place.

There is, as is pretty standard around these parts, also plenty of history in Avignon, including the Palais des Papes where six different popes lived in the 14th century. Apparently the inside is underwhelming, so I enjoyed it from the outside, which was particularly striking as much of the complex is built into a large rock (Wikipedia describes it as impregnable and I agree), giving the structure an even greater sense of importance and grandeur.

After walking around the stunning Gothic building, and after surprising a couple teenage guys sitting on some out-of-the-way steps where I’m sure they thought they’d be undisturbed to smoke the joint they were rolling, I headed down to the Rhône and enjoyed a nice stroll by the river before wandering around more windy streets on my way back to the place.

I saw what I wanted to see, had the hysterical encounter with the stoners, and I could go back to prepare to pack up to leave the next morning. It felt good.

I’ve rambled on long enough for now, so I won’t go into the trip to Nice and my first afternoon and evening here yet, but just rest assured that I am so gosh darn happy right now.

Mahgeetah, indeed.

WAIT JUST A SECOND.

I want you to experience this as I have just experienced this. I finished penning the post, started to read through it to make sure there were no glaring mistakes, and realized that I left out the funniest thing that happened to me since my last update. I’m just going to throw it in here at the end as opposed to trying to find the spot for it up there.

So yes, I was feeling better in Avignon, but I still wasn’t ready to do the whole restaurant thing. I know, I know… grow up, Taylor. Or at least grow a pair.

Anyways, so I get the notification that my delivery has arrived, and I go downstairs to meet the courier. I push the button to open the door. Nothing. I mean, there’s a noise that makes it sound like it worked, but I push on the door and nothing. I push the button again. This time I pull. Nothing. I think an instant sweat came across my forehead. I try one more time to no avail, so I pull out Google Translate, quickly type “can you please leave it at the door? I can’t get out” and copy the French version to send to him in the delivery app. As I tap send, I try one more time, at which point I somehow figure it out, stumble out of the door, and find the deliverer with the biggest grin on his face.

I. Was. So. Embarrassed.

And I hope you are laughing at least moderately hard at my antics.

I swear there should be a camera crew following me around.

I took three years of French in high school, and while I have never been able to use it practically unlike could have been the case if I had decided to take Spanish instead, those three years gave me a love of this country. I’m thankful for that.

I was fortunate to have three great teachers for those three years, but Betsy Taylor for French III Honors takes the cake. Yes, we learned a lot, but we also had a lot of fun. Once she was telling us a story about one of her visits while commenting on the desensitization to visuals of the human body here, and how she was mortified one night when something resembling what we would consider pornography came across her television. I believe she was staying with a French family, and she was immensely worried about the sounds and what they would think about her for watching it.

“That’s what the mute button is for,” I blurted out.

I have no idea why I said that, and I have no idea why I’m sharing this story now. But I immediately thought of it the first time I turned on my television in my hotel in Paris, so here we are.

I mentioned that I was in Paris at the end of the last entry, but I didn’t really mention anything about the Eurostar, the train that carried me from London to the City of Lights. It felt like we zoomed impossibly fast from England, under the English Channel, and into France. I thought for sure we were traveling through some other tunnel, only realizing we were in a new country when T-Mobile texted me a welcome message.

Train travel is so legit. High-speed train travel is even more so.

We arrived at Gare du Nord — the train station of the north — and after a few minutes of watching others, I purchased a ticket for the Metro and headed towards my hotel. I must say, I did not fully appreciate at the time the ease of using the Underground in London and simply being able to tap my credit card at the gates. It wasn’t a huge inconvenience to have to purchase a physical ticket (they do have some options that aren’t this, to be clear… I admittedly didn’t take the time to learn them), but the London way was more enjoyable.

Making me aware that the hotel walls were thinner even than paper, I was startled awake to an argument in the hallway at around 1 a.m. that first night there, and let me tell you what, there is something incredibly disorienting about waking up to two foreign tongues — one French and one German — shouting at each other right outside of your door.

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One of the things we did in Betsy T’s class was sing Les Champs-Élysées, and with that and the Arc de Triomphe being the closest landmark to my hotel, it was always going to be the first thing I did, and yes, I sang the song in my head the entire time.

My Saturday quickly went off the rails after that.

After casually meandering down the famed avenue having the time of my life, I decided to head back to the hotel and grab lunch somewhere on the way. I immediately learned that something I did not consider at all in advance of this adventure was the language barrier, embarrassingly struggling to order lunch at this delightful-looking burger joint that was off of any main street.

“She’s asking what you want to drink,” the guy next to me said after a couple of attempts by her followed by blank stares from me.

It completely rattled me. Paralyzed me.

I didn’t go to another restaurant the rest of my time in Paris.

The paralysis of fear and self-doubt has continued at my next stop.

As a visitor in their country, I feel like a dum-dum and a burden to my hosts not being able to communicate with them. Intellectually I know this has been an absolutely ginormous overreaction by me, but I am so terrified of a similar experience happening again that I have just settled for cooking myself or ordering delivery.

I know it’s absurd, and unless I want to go explore more of the British Isles, I’m going to have to get over it.

If you have any tips, I’d love to hear them.

I haven’t let this bring a complete halt to the trip or anything, just to my eating plans, and so I was delighted to time the two-mile walk to the Eiffel Tower on Sunday perfectly to the sunset time, and I captured what I think is my favorite photograph so far of the journey (pictured above). It really was magical watching that icon start to be bathed in that orange glow, and the experience only was intensified when the sparkling light show started right on cue at 6 p.m. as I wandered around the base of the tower.

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Go during the day if you must, but make sure you go again at night. You won’t regret it.

On Monday, I jumped on the Metro and headed for the Louvre, and after being herded to a couple different entrances (this time it wasn’t the language barrier’s fault — their signs had English on them, so I’m not sure what was up) and taking longer than I would have anticipated with a pre-booked time of entry, I began a visit of several hours at this incredible museum.

There is obviously no way you can do all of it in one or even several visits, so I decided to focus on sculptures + the Mona Lisa.

I have to say, the latter was… underwhelming. I recognize its importance to art, but I was much more impressed by some of the pieces of sculptures. The same was true of my time at the museums in London, so I suppose it’s fair to say I’m whatever one calls a lover of sculpture.

That Michelangelo was able to create such an impressive work in the early 1500s is such a testament to human creativity and skill. I stood in awe of this and other creations, some of which were particularly striking in their incredible detail, down to the definition of the muscles in a Roman god’s thighs and abs. Without those details, the art would have still been impressive, but the careful attention certainly elevate them to another level.

I know I certainly did miss things in Paris, but the four nights felt like a much better amount of time compared to the 12 nights I ended up spending in London. I want to go back to Paris, and I’m not sure when I’ll feel that way again about London.

One good thing that came from my horror of a lunch on Saturday was a continued conversation from the guy that prevented me from going thirsty, as I told him where I was thinking of going next. He suggested to me that Dijon is probably nice but also pushed me to go towards Annecy instead.

And so here I am, with an amazing view over a lovely a canal in the Venice of the Alps. There’s a positive side to everything, huh?

Another amazing city down on this journey of an indeterminate number of cities. You can also put a checkmark next to England.

Bath was my last stop in the UK for now, and let me tell you what, it did not disappoint. (If it weren’t for autocorrect, I would never spell disappoint correctly.) It’s not as compact as York and I would probably classify it as more fru-fru (highly technical term), but the history was absolutely oozing out of it.

Like really old history. Roman history.

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Owing to my long-time interest in the Roman times, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the Roman Baths is at the top of my list of experiences so far on this journey. The terrace above the main bath that you see in the Reel above is from the 19th century, but the pool itself is original dating back to sometime around 60-70.

While we have made such incredible technological strides, I’m not sure that we give just due to all that the Romans were able to do.

Just last week on a favorite podcast of mine The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, they were discussing how it’s been recently discovered that they created their concrete in such a way that it would basically repair itself and thus, something that was built nearly 2,000 years ago still remains today. What incredible human ingenuity.

The pool is fed by a natural hot spring which was obviously considered quite sacred back in the day, and I must say with the steam rising off of it thanks to the cold temperatures, there certainly was a mystique about the place. At one point, a grand roof was placed atop the site, a covering so high that it would have been one of the tallest buildings folks of that time would have ever seen, and the site included a hot bath, a lukewarm bath, and a cold bath, the last of which now hysterically features video projection of ancient Romans chattering their teeth when they take a dip.

A visit to Bath, and especially the Roman Baths, is certainly worthwhile, even if just a day trip from London.

Bath itself also serves as a great place from which to head to Stonehenge. You can do the trip with public transport if you so desire, but I added up the cost of that plus the entrance fee to the historic site and the total was roughly the same as the private tour company I used.

As mentioned in my last entry, the weather here is normally not great, but on this day I was quite fortunate to have crystal blue skies for an afternoon trip that takes about an hour by coach. Our group was small with just eight of us, and our 1 p.m. departure time from Bath meant that most of the larger tours would be gone or soon leaving by the time we arrived.

So there I was, standing nearly by myself looking upon these stones that truly must be seen in person to be fully appreciated. That aloneness created a perfect environment in which to reflect, imagining what it must have been like to be standing at this place way back when. Say what you will about their practices and rituals, but the feeling of spirituality was absolutely tangible here.

Another benefit to an afternoon trip in the middle of January is the low-angle of the early-setting sun. It created really cool shadows for pictures and then permitted also for great scenes of seeing the stones backlit as pictured above.

I honestly hadn’t planned on visiting Stonehenge, deciding only on a whim the night before thanks to a surplus in my budget that I would fork out the money, and I don’t regret it one bit. (To be clear, it wasn’t super expensive at around 50 pounds, but one of my aims on this trip to extend it as long as possible is to do only a minimal amount of sightseeing that costs money).

One… funny?… thing that happened to me while I was at Stonehenge occurred when a young lady that appeared to be from Asia approached me and asked to take her photo with me. I didn’t need an explanation and agreed, but she continued on in broken English and I think she said I looked like Hagrid from Harry Potter. Or she just thought I was really hairy. I’m not exactly sure.

I produced some humor myself later that same day at my Airbnb when I wanted a warm croissant but didn’t feel like trying to figure out how the oven that was also a microwave worked, so I simply put some butter on the pastry, pointed the hairdryer at it, and there we go. A perfectly warm croissant with melted butter. I’d like to think I have a little of that human ingenuity I mentioned earlier…

So that concluded my time in England, as I packed up, caught a train to London, changed stations to head south where I can now say bonjour from Paris!

If you’ll excuse me for now, I need to go find a baguette. Au revoir!