Italy Trip Retrospective

[canyonwalker]

I haven't even caught up with my backlog of blogs from our trip to Italy last week (they're held up on my time to deal with touching up photos) but already I'm ready with a retrospective. Here are Five Things:

1. Despite a few frustrations around the edges of the trip and a few things that went wrong with the parts my company planned, I very much appreciate being named to Club and getting to go on this trip. There were times I grumbled (privately), Maybe I should skip this trip and plan my own. Well, that would've been expensive. Just the flights alone would've cost us $5,000. The three hotel nights that were included plus the food and misc. expenses were worth another $2,500.


2. The highlight of the trip was our 2½ days in Rome. This was a side-trip we planned— and mostly paid for— on our own. (The Company let us book a stopover on the flights they paid for.) We hired private tours for the Colosseum, ruins of Caesar's palace, the Roman Forum, and Vatican City (the part that's still in my backlog), and augmented that with trekking to the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, and the Pantheon (also in backlog) on our own.


3. Hiring private tour guides was expensive, eye-wateringly expensive in the case of the Vatican tour, which cost us over $1,200, but there's real value in it. With guides we saved the time of having to do lots of research and planning ourselves, we avoided waiting in lines and wandering around trying to figure out where to go, and we had someone who helped us ensure we saw the best things we could. Yeah, we could have cut the costs maybe in half by booking group tours instead, but we've had mixed experiences with even smaller, 12 person sized group tours. When time's limited, when it might be years, if ever, before you go back to that place again, go big.


4. Our "beach" resort stay, the part paid for by the company, reminded me that when you're at the beach there's an enormous different in really being at the beach. If you can't just walk out the door of the building, across a pool area, and be on the sand, you might as well stay a few miles away and drive to the beach. At the resort in Chia, Sardinia, it literally was a drive; the beach was 4km away from the resort hotel! As a consequence we went to the beach just once. We could have had more fun going back to our favorite splashy pool resort in Phoenix instead.


5. As much fun as visiting Italy/Rome was, and as little a fraction of the whole as we saw, we're kind of done with it. We're definitely not feeling, "Ooh, let's plan another trip to Rome!" Partly that's because we saw the highlights we cared about; partly it's because there's so much else in the world we want to see, too! I could see returning to Italy specifically for Pompeii, to see the ruins; Venice, for its unique canals; and maybe Florence, for its Renaissance architecture. But I don't think I'd want to spend more than a few days in each.