Every journey begins …

This journey started out in 1985, took a left turn somewhere around Florence, and ended up in Nice before we ever got to Rome. That was an unavoidable disappointment to all of us, but we vowed that the family would make it there some day. Year after year that trip had to be postponed. Judy and Jim took a couple of tour groups to vist and play pipe organs in Germany and France. And to be truthful, one of their European trips that they made just for fun started out in Rome. But those weren’t family trips.

In 2006 we celebrated Judy’s retirement from teaching with a family trip to Scotland, and we all had a great time. By then we had another family member, and we discovered that Mark, KC’s husband, fit right in with our travel habits. We had a wonderful time, and Scotland was a great place for us to visit together. In 2009 we all went on one of those Southeast Alaska cruises, visiting the Northwest for the first time. But going to Scotland or cruising through Glacier Bay wasn’t the same thing as taking a family trip to Rome. That trip remained on the drawing board for more than a quarter century, but it was only a sketch. The opportunity to fill in the whole picture was never there, year after year.

Finally the time was right, and if we needed an excuse, we wanted to celebrate Jim’s retirement from teaching. We planned a trip to Italy for the fall of 2013, and this time we would get to Rome and Vatican City.

That’s when the fun began:
“If we’re going to make that long flight, we should stay longer and visit more places.”
“Hey! We’ve never been to Spain!”
“Does anyone else want to go to Pompeii?”
“Isn’t Nice between Italy and Spain? Can we go back to Monaco and check on the turtle?”
“I’d like to see Orvieto. I hear it’s beautiful.”

The old saying tells us, “Every journey begins with a single step,” and our first step was a good one, because we relied on the services of Jan Cordell and Earth Journeys Travel to make most of the arrangements for the trip. Jan had made travel and lodging arrangements for us in the past, but this time we wanted things to be a little different. In the past Jim had missed a lot of Europe driving from England to Italy, around the Arc de Triomphe, and over the river and through the woods, concentrating on the road to avoid causing an international incident through careless driving. This time he wouldn’t have to drive but would be driven. Judy had been the practical tour guide in past trips, studying museum catalogs, maps, and travel guides, and leading us through one wondrful place after another as our personal guide. This time we would have the services of professional guides, with their local expertise filling in the gaps in a way we could never duplicate. And after years of making trans-Atlantic flights “in steerage,” we managed to fly in the front cabin.

So the trip to Rome finally happened, after 28 years of dreaming and 12 months of actually planning the details.

Before we move on, you need to know one thing about this web site: Jim is wriitng it as his personal journal, so it’s all from his point of view. Expect a shift to first person on the other pages. With any luck at all, and enough time on their hands to get it done, there will be additions on each page from the rest of the family. We might even add extensive photographs from all the cameras and smart-phones on the trip. This could end up being a cross between a family album and a family free-for-all — who knows? Maybe in this day and age it’s just another a blog. And because Jim is writing, it’ll be a little wordy. Maybe a lot wordy.

We hope you enjoy making selections from the list on the left and following along with us on this “trip of a lifetime” to Italy and Spain, with a short stop in Nice in between. On all the pages that follow, just click the map at the bottom of the menu to return to this page. We wouldn’t want you to get lost. Or you can use the big menu at the top of the page to get out of this trip altogether.