Pleasant Living: ITALY SPRING 2022 - DEPARTURES AND ARRIVALS

WTF

When a vacation entails more than one destination the restorative benefits of that vacation can vaporize on the spot into mass panic and the uttering of vile words toward inanimate objects, "Where the f*#k did you put my f*#king power cord. We're not going anywhere until someone finds my g@d damn cord!"

This time around our packing and unpacking, double checking of every nook and cranny and getting everything loaded into the car went off without a swear word uttered or a loss of dignity by any one of the three of us. I checked our bedroom and our bath, Rick did a visual assessment of the kitchen cupboards and frig and Emmy took care of her bedroom and bath. When all the bags had been zipped shut and loaded into the car it was time to say our good-byes and drive out the gates of Armena one last time.

We all hugged, promised we'd all be back, turned over the opener for our private gate to Alessandro and drove away kicking up a final cloud of dust turning Armena into a memory. As we bounced along the rutted gravel road, Emmy seated in the front and playing the role of navigator asked, "Papa can I have your leather bag ?"

I asked Rick, who was sitting in the back seat, to pass the bag up to Emmy, the bag with all our itinerary information, the bag with all our money, the bag with our CDC cards and the bag with our F*#KING passports. The g@d damn bag that was still sitting on the couch in the living room back in Armena. Not all departures go smoothly.

Our return to Armena was much sooner than we had expected. We hadn't even made if off the dirt road so we turned around and sheepishly retrieved the bag, our passports but not our dignity.

Once calm was returned there was one more thing we needed to do to make our journey to the Amalfi Coast complete: we needed to clean the car of the dust of Armena by getting it washed.

No one wanted to arrive at our new hotel looking like a bunch of rubes.

Now with the GPS set for the four-star Hotel Club due Torri on the Amalfi Coast we were ready for the five hour drive ahead of us. The first part of the drive took us back through the familiar scenery of winding Tuscan roads and fields of red poppies.

With nothing to rush us we stopped along the way at several points to seal in the memory of the breathtakingly beautiful vistas we would be leaving behind.

Once we reached the A1 autostrada the driving became more of a speed rally where I was pushing 140 kph and there were still cars seemingly appearing from nowhere their lights flashing at me in my rearview mirror to move over so they could pass at speeds I believe levitated them off the pavement turning them into flying machines driven by pilots with incomprehensible death wishes.

The Adams-Kings had warned us of the drive along the coast as being a nail biting experience but for some reason we had managed to take a different route avoiding all those hairpin turns on the edges of cliffs with no more room to save oneself between a crushing stone wall and an eminent death plunge into the sea below.

Rick had booked our hotel through hotels.com and it was the address they had included with our reservation that both Emmy and he had loaded into their Mapquest apps. Let me tell you hotels.com is going to get a real big bitch slap from Rick once we get back to the US. We all started to feel a bit queasy as we got closer and closer to the final destination Mapquest was taking us to. The areas we were now going through seemed a bit seedy and not at all what we were thinking would be a place we'd find a four-star hotel with private beach access. When our female robotic voice purred, "You have arrived at your destination", we were at a back alley driveway with a forty-year-old delivery van parked in it. There was no way or place for me to stop. I had to pass by while the bitch on Mapquest or whatever navigational app we were on rerouted us to ge us back to that same driveway. Emmy and Rick were both furiously punching keys on their iPhones checking and rechecking the address they had been given via hotels.smucks to make sure they had done it correctly. All this was happening as I am trying to figure out were I can pull off of this street we've now found ourselves on so we can sit and reorient ourselves as to what to do next. Somehow I managed to get us turned around. I barely avoided putting us back on the autostrada with no exit for miles and pulled the car into a bus stop. God help anyone telling us we would need to move from this designated bus stop. They were going to have to get a tow truck to do it because I wasn't moving.

I suggested that I should get out and walk back to the place hotels.a$&holes had told us was the address for our hotel and see if there was an entrance on the other side. The area we were in was a warren of alleys filled completely with ceramic stores. The facades of all the buildings were covered with tiles and the dingy shops were filled with all sorts of platters, pitchers and plates, oh my. It was a bit like having arrived in Oz. Emmy had me write the name of the hotel and the street address down. This is what I was hoping to find on one hand and hoping was completely the wrong place on the other. I finally asked one of the shop owners if he knew where the Via Diego Taiani was. He pointed me down one of the pedestrian only streets and told me to turn right. When I asked him if I could drive there his face contorted in a way that answered my question without having to use any words. There were no cars allowed in here at all.

I walked back to the safety of our car illegally but safely parked in a bus stop where Emmy and Rick had been on the phone with the hotel where the concierge was telling them this had happened before. A real woman with a real voice gave us new directions to our hotel, another twenty-five minutes away. We were still skeptical. Emmy and I were ready to abandon ship and just leave for the safety of a cheap hotel anywhere but where we were.

But then we all did our best to put on happy faces and to give it one more try. Off we went now to conquer those hairpin turns balancing on the narrow roads and risking certain death on an unfortunate drop off the side of a mountain. I was surprisingly calm. Rick was furious at every hotel.com employee and every robotic voice on any GPS app. Emmy was just scared $h!tless as she clutched the car's sissy bar fearing our impending doom.

By luck and diligence we ended up at the correct hotel in a beautiful small town with a valet who would park our car for us, a car we had no desire to get into again until we had to leave and return it to the car rental office at the airport in Rome.