The Truth Behind Our Happy Travel Photos

Since we met in 2018, Dan and I have traveled to Europe together six times. Our first to Italy was the most disastrous I have ever taken. Those smiling poses on Facebook don’t tell the whole story. Our Italian trip began well enough. We landed in Ancona and were spending our first days at a gorgeous hotel/spa located on a mountaintop high above the swimming pool blue Adriatic.

My ugly jetlag personality surfaced in the first twenty-four hours when I could not find my Benefiber, a substance essential to my well-being. I tore through all my stuff, throwing things willy-nilly, wishing aloud that we had never come on this journey until Dan found those little green sleeves of individual Benefiber. The next morning sitting on the gorgeous terrace high above the sea, delicious latte in my hands, all was well with the world.

Soon we joined a group of Road Scholars for a bus tour up the Adriatic. Our first stop after the lovely mountaintop hotel was the hot humid seaside town of Senigallia, which reminded me of Ocean City, Maryland. Ugh. On the way to our room in the family-owned, but not family-friendly hotel, we noticed the dank smell of backed-up drains. The air conditioning in our room did not appear to work. Before we checked in, Dan and I had been walking on the beach. His face was flushed with heat. He was hot and angry about the A/C when he had his meltdown. I volunteered to go to the front desk and let them know that we needed air-conditioning right away.

The desk clerk said they had not turned on the air-conditioning in our room because we had opened our windows. “Of course, we opened the windows,” I said louder than necessary. “It’s 90 degrees in there.” Guido, our kind guide, interceded with the desk clerk, told him to cut on the A/C, and I went back to the room to close the windows. Dan and I left the room when we heard the whoosh of air conditioning turn on. Later we returned to find that the room was still not cool enough, and it was noisy, so they moved us to a more remote as well as quiet room with adequate A/C.

Every day we were supposed to eat breakfast and dinner at this hotel, where the food, and worst, the coffee, was dreadful. Dan said the coffee tasted as if their espresso machine had never been cleaned, a criminal offense in Italy. We found a charming café down the block where we could get my necessary lattes, Dan’s double espressos, so we were good to go touring when the bus pulled up.

The rest of the journey up the Adriatic was pleasant and uneventful. Dan was disappointed in our quick stop in the mountaintop Renaissance city of Urbino, a place he had longed to visit. Our visit to the Ducal Palace, which contained paintings by Raphael, Piero della Francesca, and Titian, was hurried. Naturally I was interested in what happened to Urbino during WWII, but unfortunately our local guide’s English was limited to the phrase: “Beautiful, yes?” In the end, I concluded: Urbino is a gorgeous almost inaccessible city, so we should quit whining and be glad at least we got to see it.

For two weeks we traveled with other American “turons” as Dan, a professional tour guide, refers to tourists herded around with whisperers in their ears. Once our tour ended, we set out on our own by train to Venice, where we had an AirBnB in Cannaregio. Alas, Venice, crammed with tourists, especially when the giant cruise ships disgorged thousands every morning, was not for me. Venetians, who deal with tourists, are the rudest I have ever witnessed. We were staying near a well-reviewed restaurant. The wait staff scoffed every time we asked if they had a table free, even though at the time we asked the restaurant was completely empty. We overheard these same waiters inform a table of eight Germans, who had a reservation, that they were allotted an hour and fifteen minutes to eat and drink before they must leave their table. The only part of Venice I enjoyed was the Giardini della Biennale. We got there by a vaporetto, a tugboat designed for passengers. On the vaporetto, we met a friendly American expat, who had coffee with us and recommended a place for lunch that turned out to be excellent with pleasant staff. We continued to travel around by vaporetto, which were always crowded with tourists, many of whom were coughing to the point that they sounded like they were about to hack up a lung. When we left Venice for Rome, I felt unwell and feverish. Dan’s sinuses started to clog. We weren’t prepared for what we had signed onto in Rome.

There we discovered we’d made a terrible AirBnB mistake. Our place in Old Town required climbing fifty steps and was neither comfortable nor clean. I became sicker by the day. Neither of us went down those 50 steps for a few days. We missed all the reservations Dan had made at the Vatican, etc. I began to cough like the tourists on the vaporettos. Twice we went to a tourist clinic. The doctor there listened to my chest wheeze and suggested over-the-counter medicine. I decided these Italians wanted me to die. The good parts of all this: 1. I didn’t die; 2. I lost more weight than I ever had on a vacation. We left the AirBnB and checked into a hotel, where I coughed so hard at night that the people in the room next door banged on the walls.

I coughed my way across the Atlantic Ocean. The kind stewardess kept saying I had a cold and brought me copious cups of hot tea. The couple in front of us gave me nasty looks, and I didn’t blame them. Nowadays a passenger coughing as hard and frequently as I, would not be allowed onboard.

When we arrived home, I fought the urge to kiss the asphalt at the bottom of our driveway, so glad was I to be home. Early the next morning Dan took me to the ER at Virginia Hospital Center, where the doctor and nurse considered hospitalizing me. Instead they put me on a nebulizer, where I got the first restful sleep I’d had in over a week. When we finally left the hospital, I was given an inhaler and antibiotics. Dan got an antibiotic for his sinus infection.

Getting sick in a foreign country opened our eyes to the perils of travel. Not that it stopped our wanderlust. As soon as we felt better, we began planning our next trip across the pond.