A Big Birthday in Italy! East Coast Puglia, West Coast Amalfi

Sixty is a big number when you are talking about years lived.  It gets even bigger when you are reminded by your now almost 83 year old father that there are only 4 family members alive who have known you since birth.  (Well, only 4 we know are alive–a few cousins on my father’s side and maybe one aunt might be out there somewhere but have been lost to the family feuds that festered decades ago into gangrenous relationships and eventual amputations.)

As monumental occasions deserve, memories were favored over diamonds and emeralds for me and perhaps a piece of art for my husband Saul, who doesn’t do the jewelry thing.  As has been our traditon for the last three big ones, we travel to Europe and take in the culture and the food.

At 40 it was France–Paris and Provence.  At 50 it was Spain, with Saul’s brother Michael and his wife, Meira for part of Barcelona and Madrid.  And now at 60, we are biking our way through Puglia in southern Italy with Backroads, and then taking another 5 days to recover the more than 250 miles, on the Amalfi coast visiting Positano, Ravello, and Pompeii.

When we originally contacted Backroads, a travel adventure group, our plans were to bike Sicily, rated 2-4 on their scale.  A short conversation later, the perky guide convinced us that we might be ”miserable” (I told them we didn’t want to be “miserable”) some days as it was quite hilly, a challenge for the hard core cyclist, which didn’t apply to us. We were steered to Puglia, a place we never heard of.  Unspoiled, authentic, and less hilly, we switched.  We didn’t own padded cycling shorts for the trip, so obviously we didn’t fit the hard  core category.  (I had to buy 2 and the right shirts, too.)

So, as I sit here, again “Up In the Air” on the final leg of our approach to Roma, in preparation for our flight to Bari (where the trip begins),  I am anticipating the excitement of our first big trip of the next decade of my life.  I don’t think, “Where has all the time gone?”  I only think of the adventures that await us in Italy.

Foot note:  We did travel to Italy in 1980 b.k. (before kids), just 29, not yet 30, so it really cannot count as a “big birthday trip”.  But those 3 weeks (we were residents and stayed at hostels and ate a lot of bread and cheese) was the typical Italian trip–Roma, Tuscany, Florenzi, Venezi, Lake Como, Milano, and Bologna (for an ENT conference).  The memories of staying in a Dutch Convent with the nuns on the Piazza Navonna and the first glimpse of seeing Venice rising up out of the sea, like the Magic Kingdom, are as fresh in my mind as what happened yesterday.  Perhaps even more so.  Ciao for now.