Italy marked a sharp improvement in caffeine and an explosive increase in second hand smoke. Have to take the good with the bad, right? I choke as we tell the kids, yes! when they ask if their lungs will ever recover from the secondhand cigarettes they are smoking. We will drink our heavenly coffees quickly, anticipating the next question will be when can we leave this ashtray? Too many weeks of dysfunctional caffeine intake has made us a bit cavalier, what cigarettes?
We left Switzerland by way of a high alpine scenic train, the Bernina Express. The thinking was that it would help offset the fact that we had forgone a hiking hut-to-hut experience. It efficiently moved us out of the alps and got us over the Italian border. Just like that, we stepped off the train into Tirano, Italy.
+ The Bernina Express runs through gorgeous territory and has a Unesco world heritage designation for following the exact ancient route (from the bronze era) that early man used in traversing the alps from the lowlands and the Adriatic and Mediterranean into the northern lands of what is now Chur, Switzerland, and ancient Europe. The highest point of the journey stops at a (quickly receding) glacier for photos. We passed slowly through unbelievably tiny villages with scattered ruins and had a nice relaxing time without harrowing transfers and connections. Two out of six Reichels surveyed loved it. Not a ringing endorsement but too small of a sample size.
– It was the same scenery we’d been living amongst for the previous week in Switzerland. Saturation is possible, it turns out. The kids were unimpressed by now. It was long and slow moving, hot and sunny and pathetically boring for four point five tedious hours.
All true statements.
Tirano, Italy, is a tiny town seemingly formed around the Bernina Express train station although Tirano was there first. The kiosks on the sidewalks closest to the station selling miniature maroon Bernina Express train magnets give an impression of Disneyland. Like which came first, Anaheim or the Magic Kingdom? isn’t a question that’s even asked anymore.
Like everyone else on the streets of Tirano, we are passing through. Streets swollen with tourists on their way to somewhere else. I feel a little guilty about that. We try to be extra non-American.
We had made plans to collect a minivan at this point in order to drive through northern Italy to Venice, flying out from there to Croatia. This Hertz minivan was arranged for us by our wonderful Spokane travel guru. We were prepared that it required a little 20-30 min bus ride to a neighboring town. No worries.
Famous last words.
After over three hours of “worry,” in varying degrees, we were all reunited, all members of the VonReichels, with a vehicle. I will name this little chapter “Fiasco” in The VonReichel Family’s Summer Travels. Fiasco is Italian for cluster$?&@. It was a lowlight. Low as in the opposite of a high, but anything but dim and boring. It was a scene twisted out over an afternoon with always the question of our welfare a little hazy. I will scale it for you: much lower pleasure rating than the Nuisance Bernina Express with occasional shades of will-I-ever-see-all-my-children-again.
Not one phone number for Hertz seemed to work. We were 30 minutes from our bags back in Tirano, had an address that didn’t exist (not in this town anyway), were kindly aided (?) by a young Morrocan named Nadim (newly arrived and hating Italy for its lack of hospitality), for close to two hours until he suddenly asked me and two of the kids to “wait here,” directing Taylor and the two other kids off with him. Separated the herd. Just like that. So formulaic. Why didn’t I see this coming? This is the moment where it all turns south. How badly do we want a minivan, anyway? But he really really seems so sincere. Heck, I have totally thought the same thing at times, thin the herd, yes, Nadim, it’s too much to carry! Can’t it be possible that his intentions are pure, that it’s all just about to sort itself out? that he’s helped us so earnestly, not slowly lost us walking around town and back streets. We were in the edge of suspicion.
The twentieth person Nadim asked for address help (was he really asking them or were they discussing the weather?) provided him with a polite way to exit our suffocating Hertz vortex. We were frequently trying to let him off, we would figure this out, but he persisted. Nadim, you’re too kind, thank you for your help. He discovered a bored man sitting in a car with time on his hands (or was this part of the scheme?). Nadim suddenly says his hasty goodbye and puts Taylor and the two kids in the hands of this rough-looking, heavily tattooed young Italian guy driving a brand new, fully loaded Rover. There are NO car like this in Tirano. Taylor observed that in spite of a few of those tattoos being in English, and the two of them even discussed this, he spoke not one word of it. I’ll call him Guido.
During this fiasco we lost one of our daypacks twice, two times setting it down and walking away. Recovered it both times. It was hot with zero breeze and both mine and Taylor’s cellphones were nearly out of juice. We were out of water.
We were starting to feel the fraying of sensibilities. Do not raise your voice, stay cool. Kids need the big people to stay cool. I tried to play 20 Questions with Ian to kill time but couldn’t concentrate and was afraid he could sense it. Just then, a tall, tan, Roman-looking woman and her two children came by on bikes where Ian, Piper and I were waiting (on a random corner in Sondrio, Italy, for the hopeful return of the other half of our family). We jumped as she suddenly and loudly eviscerated her son for beginning to ride his bike across the crosswalk ahead of her. This seemed to go on a long time, more loudly, and seemed to have covered topics beyond his intelligence, bikehandling skills and manhood at what looked to be 7years of age. Although I wanted to scoop him up and protect him from this, they rode off peacably, in organized formation. We were in a new land where contradictions compete with one another. This woman gave me a little shake. It was going to be whatever it was going to be, this minivan story, and then we would ride off peacably.
The “Hertz agency” existed and miraculously so did our reservation – in a neighboring town not far away. Just like that, the kindness of others was just that, no more, no less. Guido refused any offer of gratuity or gas money, leaving us stunned by his generosity. What might have looked like impending disaster was merely a slowly teased-out, unconventional adventure that was no one’s fault, the kind you know you’ll laugh about later, peacably.
The van was anything but mini and ultimately did not fit through the castle gate the next night at Castle Pergine but we didn’t care. We walked up the hill to our beds that night, in awe of the castle (or totally creeped out, depending on who you ask).
Air Serbia, from Venice to Belgrade, Serbia first. A layover in the Belgrade airport then on to Dubrovnik, Croatia. Sound like an adventure? Felt like one but the Turkish coffee midflight seemed so right.