We went to our first “post Italy trip” social event last night.  Lots of folks wanted to know about the trip and what our favorite things were or weren’t about it all.  This got me thinking about just those sort of concepts.  So I thought it might be interesting to make a list of trip statistics and unrelated ‘stuff’ along with the promised map which shows the extent of our travels.  So, in no special order and without any sort of coherence here are our thoughts and impressions of the trip.

Length: 124 days on the ground in Italy

Distance traveled:  14,604 kilometers which converts to 8,762 miles!  This is a heck of a lot further than I would have guessed before we set off.  The highway distance from Lake Como to Palermo, Sicily is 942 miles so it begins to fall into place when you look at all the red lines on the Google Earth image.  Still, it did not seem like a long road trip by any means.  The longest single drive was probably 5 to 6 hours.

Click on the image and it will enlarge. This is obviously not every little trip and drive that we took but it will give you a good idea of where we went during the trip.

I did not keep direct records of how much gas we burned but if you assume the car got 30 mpg then it calculates out to be 292 gallons of gas.  There was quite a bit of up hill climbing so that probably is a good number and offsets the better highway mileage.  The shocker in this number is that gasoline costs right around $8 a gallon!!!  Doing the math that works out to $2,330 worth of driving without the rental costs worked in.  Total driving costs were approximately $1 per mile.

I took 9,537 photos which eats up 67.3 gigabytes of hard drive space on the computer.  I know you all can’t wait to come over for the slide show!!!  Bring a ton of popcorn.  Of that total, 1,774 images are posted in the blog posts.

Total bottles of wine consumed.  Maybe we shouldn’t post this.  Most days (read all) we had a bottle at lunch and one at dinner.  So we are looking at right around 250 bottles of wine.  We tended to drink the regional wines of whichever area we were in.  Laura really liked the Nero d’Avola wines of Sicily.  They are quite good and a bargain for the price.  In Tuscany we stuck with better Chiantis, Vino Nobile, and of Brunello.

Try some. You won’t be let down.

Food.   Yeah we ate a lot.  Though on the whole the quality of the meals was not all that fantastic.  I ate lots of mussels.  And, I had some very good examples of them.  I also would order cianghiale, or wild boar, if it was on the menu and most of the time it was a good, hearty, slightly spicy meal.  One meal of venison was fantastic.  There was the occasional very good tortellini in a sage butter sauce also.  And on one fateful lunch in Florence I unknowingly ordered fried brains!!  No it did NOT taste like chicken.  On a one to ten scale I would rate the overall eating as about 7.5 to maybe 8 for the trip.

One of Jerry’s great little lunch spots to visit. Thanks so much!!!!

Biggest social difference:  We Americans gather in large numbers and go to events.  It is either a concert, ballgame, rodeo here in Texas, or some similar single time event.  In Italy, the people are the event.  In the evening, the passeggiata, or the stroll or walk, is where they go out and walk, look, show, and socialize.  There is nothing “happening” to bring this about.  It is adults, children, strollers, grandparents, men and women.  All walking and talking and gesturing.  Then it is dinner starting at 8 or 9 to end the day.

Favorite landscape:  Without a doubt the countryside of Tuscany.  This land is an absolute quilt work of multiple uses which has created variations in color, texture, patterns, and vegetation that changes throughout the day and year.  The landscape was often shrouded in daily fog in the low areas with what look like a fleet of ships made of the red tile roofs of buildings and the domes and bell towers of churches floating along.   We were fortunate enough to be there during the season when the vineyards were changing color from green to vibrant yellows and reds.  The fields in between were either freshly plowed rolling canvases of brown and tan or rich vibrant greens of newly germinated winter wheat.

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Total unexpected surprises:  We were constantly surprised.  Some large and others small.   1. Fashion Night in Venice on the second night of the trip!  Nothing like 50,000 Milanese dressed in anything they thought would turn a head all out on the street going from one boutique to another.  2.  The Christmas fire in the piazza in the village of Pienza and having the girls there to share it with.  3.  Leaving my passport in Genoa the night before we were to leave.  4. The Italians LOVE their dogs.  They take them everywhere.  It is so common to go into a restaurant and there might be 2 or 3 absolutely well behaved pooches sitting next to various tables.  You might be in a clothing store or grocery and it is the same.  No big deal.  Happens every day.

Lunching with the ladies.

5. Traveling the back roads of Sicily.  There is nothing quite like rounding a very curvy road and finding a couple of horses  or a flock of sheep in the road.

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6.  When you are zooming along the autostrad and all of sudden your car starts to beep for no apparent reason.  What the???  Then you realize that you had just passed a rest stop and the dash board has a “take a coffee break” message lit up.  What if you went past a brothel???  Hmmm?   7.  That there have been just over 5,530 ‘visits’ to the blog by family and friends.  I started out to do this so that we would have a record of what we did and where we went.  Thank you all for your kind words and  I am so glad that you have enjoyed it.  8.  It may be last on this list but the best surprise was the phone call from Nash and Andy saying they were coming to Lake Como!!!   What a fantastic few days.

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