30 June 2015

Home once again; we arrived yesterday evening. Shawn picked us up at SFO and brought us home! Way to Go Shawn & Thank You.

With a nine hour difference in time between here, Hercules, and there, Florence where our biological clocks are set, we both were up every hour from about 2AM until we gave up and got up around 7:30AM. We walked to the only local coffee shop that might compare with Italian coffee, The East Bay Roasting Company in Pinole. It was a short walk, or it seemed that way to me. The machiado and cappuccino were good. We walked back along the bay to check in on “Li’l Beast”. She was sitting just as we left her, hibernating with her cover in place.

The walk back along the bay was quite peaceful at 8AM, we passed a few people out for a morning walk. It is different being home, but then it was different being in Florence after Venice, or being in Santorini after Mykonos. Travel is like being a child again, the responsibilities of day to day life are gone. Traveling is living in the moment. Being home, we have our daily mundane “chores” to deal with along with a truly surprising stack of mail.

It is good to be home, and it is better to be traveling. I suppose we could travel year ’round, from a logistics point of view. Family and friends are important too. It’s a bit difficult keeping in touch with people when calls can run $10.00 per minute.

Home. Unpacking food shopping, cleaning out the refrigerator, doing laundry, and settling back in; these are today’s issues. Tomorrow we will start planning our fall adventure, looking into options for our spring 2016 Galapagos trip, and advanced planning for a return to Tuscany in the fall of 2016, this time for two months.

We’ve asked ourselves what did we enjoy most these last four weeks, and no one thing rises to the top. Each day, each port of call or city we visited has its own charm and is not easily compared with another. It was surprising how different each of the Greek Islands was, one from another.

We had one guest aboard the Odyssey say, “Yes all the people seem similar, but they are really very different from you and me.” It is very difficult to assess the veracity of this statement when visiting a country or city for a few days. It is impossible to penetrate the veneer of newness, language, and culture in a few days time. To drop our tourist goggles and see through to the nature of the people and culture requires time. Learning colloquial Italian is no small undertaking, but worth the effort (I hope).

Ron

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