The Milan Cathedral
Carolyn retires at the end of June. For 20 years, all our vacations have been planned around her school schedule. Now for the first time in a long time, we get to go where we want, when we want. We are planning to make the most of it.
Both of us are Formula One fans. We have been to the Canadian grand prix in Montreal three times and to the US grand prix in Indianapolis twice. A lot of Formula One races today are held at new tracks in places like Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai. But there are still a few on the schedule that take place at historic tracks like Spa and Monaco, places where Formula One has raced since the end of World War II and even before.
One of those historic tracks is Monza. Located outside the city of Milan, it has hosted Formula One races every year except one since 1922. Monza is known as The Temple of Speed. It is famous for long straightaways where modern cars can get up to speeds of 200 miles per hour and more.
In its original form, it featured a banked corner at one end that let early race cars slingshot around a 180º turn that linked two parallel straights. Later, tracks like Daytona in America adopted the idea of banked turns to let race cars corner faster than they could ever hope to do on a level surface.
Today, the banked section is no longer used, but race fans can still see it just outside the margins of the current track. It has been replaced by one of the most famous turns in all of racing, the Parabolica. That’s it in the picture below. We will be seated in the grandstands on the outside of the track where the cars brake for the turn. Those black marks you see at the entrance to the corner are from the tires on the race cars scrubbing off rubber as they struggle to slow the cars by more than 100 mph in less than 250 feet.
Monza is under siege. Formula One management keeps ratcheting up the fees it charges to bring the series there. Local residents complain about the noise and congestion race weekend brings. New tracks in Russia, Mexico, and Azerbaijan are crowding onto the schedule.
There is a feeling in the sport that soon, Monza will get pushed aside in favor of newer tracks with more amenities for well heeeled race fans. We decided over the winter that if we were going to see a grand prix at Monza, we better do it soon. And that’s where the idea for our Roamin’ Holiday began.
The Italian grand prix takes place the first weekend in September. The whole of Europe goes on vacation in August, so our journey will begin when most people are going back to work.
We started by searching for airfares to Milan. Flying out of Providence, the cheapest flights were about $1,400 for each of us. Doable, but still a lot of money. Then on a whim, we searched for flights leaving from Logan airport in Boston. TAP, the Portuguese national airline, said they would be happy to fly us over and back with just one 90 minute layover each way for $790 a piece. We latched onto that deal immediately.
Lake Como, Italy
Next, we booked a modest hotel in Milan for race weekend. After that, we will stay at the vacation home of a couple we hosted last summer. They stayed with us for 3 days and so now we get to stay at their vacation home for 3 days on the shores of Lake Como, regarded as one of the mos beautiful places on earth. We may even get to go sailing on their boat while we are there. We love home exchanges!
The Bernina Express through the Alps
From there, we will take the Bernina Express through the Alps from Milan to St. Moritz, Switzerland where we will stay one night. Then its back to Milan and off to the shores of Lake Maggiore northwest of Milan for 4 nights at the vacation home of some friends from Wellesley.
The Ferrari Museum in Maranello
The balance of our trip involves a visit to Maranello and the Ferrari factory, where we will get to see some of the most famous racing cars in the world — almost all of them painted Italian racing red. We also will get to tour the nearby Fiorano race track where Ferraris have been tested by racing drivers for generations.
Cinque Terre on the Italian coast
From there we will take the train over to Cinque Terre on the Italian coast, a collection of five towns where most tourists never go. There we will laze our way through one of the most beautiful parts of Italy before taking the train back to Milan and then home. We will be gone almost three weeks.
They say that things don’t make us happy; the experiences we have along the way are what enrich our lives. We are looking forward to starting this next phase of our lives together with a journey that will give us a lifetime of treasured memories. We can’t wait!
Most people don’t know that those who wrote the United States Constitution never expected it to last more than a decade or two. They thought it was more of a rough draft, a framework to get the new nation off on the right foot. They assumed the country would write a new one after it had acquired some experience with the original.
With that background, it makes those “originalists” who tie themselves up in intellectual knots trying to divine what the original authors meant by this word or that phrase look pretty stupid. The Constitution was not meant to be a “living, breathing” document, either. It was meant to be replaced and fairly quickly, too.
The level of hatred against the Patriots is truly astonishing. New England fans who traveled to Buffalo reported threats and intimidation that went beyond the bounds of human decency. One Bills fan told a female Pariots fan he hoped she got sexually assaulted before she got out of the parking lot.
The day was spectacular — in the 80’s with a 15 knot breeze. Just enough puffy white clouds to syncopate the blue of a late summer sky. We set sail about 11 a.m. and headed south past Castle Hill into Rhode Island Sound.
Pete started selling real estate part time in a sleepy little California town called San Jose in the 70’s. Back then, they wrote songs about how hard it was to find the place; that was before the term “Silicon Valley” was invented. Once the tech boom started, land values exploded and Pete was there to help put the buyers together with the sellers. The Swan 56 is one of the fruits of his enterprise.
We spent the night in New Harbor on Block Island, eating pizza garnished with some cole slaw Pete found in a bag at the back of the refrigerator. We talked far into the night, connecting the dots that became the way points along the charts of our separate journeys. We spoke of former classmates and those associations sparked memories long since forgotten that we thought had been lost forever.
In the next few days, we took a boat tour of Lake Annecy and explored the old part of the city, the center of a former French dukedom before Napoleon united the country. We ate tartiflette, a version of potatos au gratin quite popular in the area. We saw a film crew from Poland making a TV commercial for Chinese tourists.
When I got back to Annecy, I found myself smack in the middle of rowdy political protest. Hundreds of union members were marching through the city to express their displeasure with something or other — I never figured out what. But I got to see firsthand how another society treats protest.
We spent the day climbing into the clouds on roads that could hardly be called cart paths. We made videos along the way, in which we can often be heard laughing like fools. We saw scenery few people have ever seen and it took us 13 hours to get to Nice. It was a great day, one of the most cherished journeys of my life. And of course, it was all due to Alex and his willingness to go on an adventure. If not for him, this trip would never have taken place.
His first most favorite thing was sliding down the Alps on a monoski, which is a lot like a snowboard except the skier faces downhill instead of across the hill. From October to May, Alex’s Facebook page was filled with pictures of him riding his monoski somewhere in the Alps. Between June and September, it was filled with plans for the coming ski season.
Please enjoy the photos of this latest blue moon, taken from my deck overlooking the lake. Spend a moment contemplating its beauty and how important it is to our daily life here on Earth. After all, it is responsible for the tides. We think of them as normal and ordinary, but they involve trillions of gallons of water sloshing around the globe twice a day. That’s quite an accomplishment, don’t you think?
He asked me to write for him and I agreed. Now, I am up to doing about 100 posts a month for him and still writing for all those other sites. He recommended me to another website that specializes in all things having to do with Tesla Motors. Suddenly, I find myself with as much work as I can handle and sometimes a little more.
I have known people who were born before there were airplanes, televisions or spaceships. I marveled at all the changes they saw in their lifetime. I was born before the invention of the transistor. I thought “high tech” meant stereo sound. My last year of college, incoming freshmen were required to learn some basic computer skills. I considered myself lucky that I didn’t have to get involved with all that nonsense. Computers? Phhffft. Who cared?
Amazingly enough, there was a time before digital cameras when we used to take actual photographs. Over the years, I took thousands of photos with my beloved Minolta SRT 101 camera. I always preferred slides, because you could project them onto a screen and see your pictures as big as life.
A quick trip to Amazon.com revealed several devices on the market that convert slides to digital files. After reading the reviews, I settled on the dbTech film scanner, which handles slides and those strips of negatives we used to get when our prints came back from Kodak.
Rhode Trips 