We took a break from #vanlife for five weeks in Europe starting in late August. Willie stayed with my aunt and uncle in Kentucky while the van stayed at Leena’s parents in Illinois. We flew to Lisbon and spent a couple of days enjoying the city. Leena introduced me to my first Aperol Spritz.
We rented a car and headed south to the Algarve where we enjoyed beach days, hiking, and the gorgeous scenery. We got to spend a day with our friends Brian and Jen in Faro and saw the in-progress renovation of the house they recently purchased. The house will be ready in October.
Next up: Valencia, Spain. We loved Valencia and it’s now at the top of our list for a potential future home base in Europe. Valencia is a city of about 800,000 residents. We loved the size, we loved the walkability, it was clean and safe, and the waters of the Mediterranean were a bit over 80 degrees. (The Atlantic only reaches the high 60s in Portugal.) The Spanish was also very easy to understand, which is not the case in every part of Spain. Barcelona and Girona, for example, prefer Catalan and will often communicate in English rather than Spanish.
We took in a La Liga game. Valencia netted three goals in an electric opening 20 minutes to break out of an early-season scoring drought. The first two were beautiful. They cruised to a 5-1 win.
We took a train to Girona. It has a beautiful old town, a huge city wall, and lots of churches who stagger their clocks to not ring the hour at the same time. So, lots of church bells around the top of the hour.
We next flew to Florence and spent some time exploring the Tuscan countryside. It took a lot of work, but we found good wine, good food, lovely hilltop towns and castles, and a few good views.
We stayed in Siena for a few nights and climbed the tower.
We headed to the coast for a couple of nights in Piombino. We took a ferry for a day on Elba. The island now has more meaning to me than just crossword fill.
We spent three nights in stunning Florence. The Duomo is a remarkable engineering feat. It was started in 1420 and completed in 1436. It remains the largest dome of its kind in the world.
We took the high-speed rail from Florence to Rome. Ugh, USA, get some high-speed rail. Seriously. We spent four nights in Rome and put in many miles walking to see so many historical landmarks.
The Aperol Spritz became a daily refresher. We called them ”spritz-stops” to give us a break from walking all over Rome. Leena ventured into the Cynar spritz – not as sweet as Aperol.
For many years, Italy has been #1 on my list of countries to visit for the first time. And it did not disappoint! The food was amazing.. How is cacio e pepe not a staple in the US? It’s great to order the house wine everywhere and get consistently good (not great) wine. Almost all of it is Sangiovese. The bottle with dinner tonight? 10 Euro. Sure, service usually lacked urgency. But we seldom had a schedule. We did get rushed out of a table in Florence when they had a dozen folks waiting. No problem.
We did have a funny (to us) experience in Rome. After an hour’s walk to start the day at the Spanish steps, we next had a half-hour walk to the Colosseum. We had some time to kill before our ticket (sold for a specific entry time), so we stopped in a little Trattoria with outdoor seating. We were seated and ordered two Aperol Spritz – spritz stop! These were delivered and we were asked for our lunch order (it was about 12:30p). We declined to order food. ”This is a restaurant, not a bar” we were told by a very annoyed waiter. Without missing a beat, Leena replied ”Do you want us to leave?” We hadn’t touched the drinks. He was trying to shame us into ordering some food, but we’d had a big breakfast at 9:30 at the hotel. He just grabbed the place settings and left in a huff. So we had our drink, paid quickly, and moved along.