Genealogy and Gastronomy

Forgive me, friends, for I have slacked; it has been 3 months since my last blog post.

Having left off as we arrived home for our unscheduled three week 'vacation' from our travels – which was filled with wonderful reconnections with friends and

family for me and plenty of much-needed 11 year-old buddy-bonding for Colin
– we set back out at the end of May with our batteries fully recharged to finish our European travels. After Asia, India and Africa, our two months in Greece, Italy and Switzerland had been a cushy and gastronomic delight, and we were looking forward to completing our tour of Switzerland and spending a nice long summer month in the south of France. We arrived in Paris, where we had leased a car, and drove for two days to my brother's house in Zug, Switzerland, after spending a lovely night with our French couchsurfers from the summer before.
This time they were the hosts and we were the surfers, enjoying a homemade salmon dinner and walks around the neighborhood and through the palace grounds a few minutes walk from their apartment at the edge of Paris. Having slept off the worst of our jetlag, we set out through the rolling countryside of Champagne, Bourgogne, and Franche-Comte, landing for a night in Montbelliard, where my great-grandfather may (or may not) have been born (more on this later...), before crossing back into Switzerland and arriving in Zug two hours before my nephew's 3rd birthday party.
The kids spent the afternoon bouncing off all manner of padded and spring loaded padding at the gym hosting the party before consuming cake and super-sweet juice and various other sugar treats. Suffice to say, these things always end badly, but in the meantime great fun was had by all! ;-)

In the morning, Colin and I headed south in search of sun, which was nowhere in evidence in northeast Switzerland – nor in fact in northwest, southwest or central Switzerland this particular end of May. We did find a small pocket of the bright stuff, though, in the far southeast, along the Italian border (I was loving the independence of movement our car brought!).
We arrived in Lugano and scouted for a campground, finding a friendly family-owned site right along the river separating Switzerland from Italy, complete with pizzeria, giant chess board and pool.
We stayed a week, exploring the local castles and mountaintops, and found a a falconry, which had been a goal since being disappointed by a canceled demonstration in Italy before our visit home.

Highlights included a trio of castles that formed the backbone of modern-day Bellinzona and a trip to the top of Mount Tamaro, where bobsled courses and a cave-like church with majestic views ruled the roost.
After immersing ourselves once again in the rythym of travel, we set out over the gorgeous Simplon Pass for a small village outside of Vevey near Montreax (of the famous jazz festival), where an until recently long-lost cousin lived. My mother had located her some years ago, and with the help of friends and neighbors we hosted her teenage son in Seattle for a semester of high school a few years earlier.
We spent the night with her before picking up my mother at the Geneva Airport to continue her quest – more family research in Switzerland, France and Germany, which would occupy us for the next two weeks. We returned to cousin Marion's for a lovely dinner on her deck overlooking Lake Geneva and another night's sleep before setting off.....

Next stop: La Chaux de Fonds, home of also recently-found cousin Marc, owner of La Semeuse – a fabulous Swiss coffee and chocolate company: my personal version of 7th heaven.

Our visit included an incredible introduction to “puppet therapy” and Marc's wife's puppetry workshop, where she works with children suffering trauma through creation and role-playing with puppets that represent the children's hopes, fears and challenges. Then on to La Semeuse headquarters and factory, where we got a full tour of the facilities and left loaded up with enough coffee, teas and chocolates to last us a year! From there the next several days would take us into less familiar territory – looking for records of family not yet found or long deceased, to finish putting together the family history.

We headed north and across the border to Strasbourg, into the countryside in Alsace, France, and to Kronau, Germany, searching for the missing pieces of a puzzle that my mother had been slowly assembling over the past decade.

What we know so far (to the best of my abilities to follow it all):

My mother's name is Moch, pronounced “mock.” All Mochs with the same pronunciation and spelling come originally from Alsace – no exceptions. Moch means “tailor,” her family's long-ago profession. Later Mochs were horse-sellers in Switzerland and (when the law permitted) watchmakers in both Switzerland and France. My great grandfather – the second generation of Mochs to emigrate to America – was a watchmaker and set up shop in 1904 in Montesano, Washington.

The Mochs were Jewish, and took a variety of different paths in their efforts to avoid persecution in Europe. In 1808, a contingent of Mochs went to Russia, recruited by Catherine the Great as farmers with the promise of free land and a market for the fruits of their labors. That worked for about a hundred years, until Stalin came to power and executed nearly all of them. Some Mochs stayed put in Alsace, where Hitler later placed the only concentration camp built on French soil. Still more converted and moved to Germany – several dozen Moch families have lived as Christians in and around the border town of Kronau for at least five generations (this we discovered in the town records when we visited). Yet another contingent went from Alsace to Switzerland, and some continued from there to America.

Two generations of our family arrived separately in the new world from Switzerland and headed west, settling in the Pacific Northwest – the first in the 1850s and the second in the early 1900s. The latter was my great grandfather. When he arrived, I can only imagine that he was scared for his life and/or liberty, worried that government-sanctioned anti-semitism would follow him to the Americas. He married a fiercely anti-semetic woman, presumably without her knowledge of his past, and hid. In 1949, following Hitler's era but on the cusp of the McCarthy era, family members in Switzerland wrote to him requesting help settling in the U.S. He refused. In the 1970s, a European relative traveling in the U.S. knocked on his door. His wife answered and immediately slammed it shut (so maybe she did know). My grandfather only learned of his own father's history as he was packing to leave for the 1936 Olympics in Germany, where he would compete as coxswain for the American crew team from the University of Washington. My grandfather planned to bike around Europe with some buddies following the games and would drop in on a few family members en route, so his father decided it would be best if he knew they were Jewish, “but dont tell your mother.” Despite this revelation, my mother was raised pure wasp, and didnt find out the “family secret” from her father's father until she was a teenager. Hitler would have been so pissed if he had known who was competing in his Olympics, for sure. My grandfather's crew team brought home the Gold.

My mother ran into an interesting side note as she sorted all this out. The first generation of Mochs to arrive in America came in the form of two cousins. One headed west, and was joined a generation later by my great grandfather. As a result of a chance encounter with a surprised-looking man named Moch at a social workers' conference in Chicago a decade ago, my mother learned that the other Moch cousin settled near New Orleans and shacked up with a woman he wasn't allowed to marry – not because he was Jewish, but because he was white and she was black. She was a free black woman (a bit of early American history most Americans don't know anything about) and they had a long life and a child together. As a result, there is an extensive family of African American Mochs in the southeast U.S. who are part of our extended family. My mother has been attending their semi-annual reunions for eight years now. She has also found a branch of the Mochs in the Dakotas, where two of the Moch cousins landed after escaping Stalin's pogroms.

Anyway, to make a two week story very short, we traveled through the ancestral homelands, digging in city hall archives and chatting up records clerks, finishing up in Bern back in Switzerland where we had a wonderful lunch with the parents of friends from home (John and Rosemay, our neighbor Fiona's parents), and ultimately came away with one or two possibly significant new leads to more of the family history.

In the next few days, we fit in a visit to Gruyere, attended my cousin Anthony's military school graduation, and danced late into the night at a fabulous lakeside party at the Geneva Dive Club in Montreax, before returning my mother to the airport. She was on her way to England, to meet the cousin who my great grandmother slammed the door on, who lives in Sherwood Forest – boy was Colin mad not to be going along! Instead, Colin and I headed south, once again looking for sun. We overnighted in Besancon, back in France, and found the sun a day later, in Provence. Oh darn, we thought, guess we'll have to stay a while.....

Up Next: A Week in Provence

P.S. Despite the title, I realize I entirely neglected to include the “gastronomy” part – believe me, I'll make up for it in the next entry, as the delights continued and only got better as we ventured further and deeper into France......

"Awestruck," by Colin

Southern France is well known for its summer thunderstorms....

Awestruck

Boom! Crash! Bang!
The sky is illuminated by a blanket of light,
the rolling thunder close behind.
A jagged bolt briefly bridges two clouds,
and we stand as it begins to rain, awestruck.

-Colin Diego Sackett

Travel fatigue in paradise

We woke on our first morning at Lake Como in Italy with oddly little motivation to explore. Tom had just left us to go back home, the weather was dreary, and though we hadn't noticed it yet, travel fatigue was beginning to set in.
Lake Como is reputed as Italy's home to the rich and famous – George Clooney has a vacation home here, the lakefront town of Bellagio is known as the high-roller capital of the jewel-wearing elite, and paparazzi make a living scouting the scene from intimate cafe tables on sun-drenched plazas.
We, however, were bored. We wandered down the lovely lakefront trail to the village center, had a pleasant lunch and perfect gelato, then passed the afternoon reading and staring at the water. The second day was much of the same, but our lunch neighbors at the cafe surprised us by being from Seattle. They were a honeymooning couple in their 50s, and he turned out to be the manager of Seattle's West Point Sewage Treatment Plant, so we knew many of the same people. The encounter also made me realize I was a wee bit homesick.


Determined to get my but in gear, I amped myself up for an afternoon hike up the steep hill behind our pensione in Varenna to see the small castle perched at the top, and discovered a beautiful little stone village adjacent to the castle. The castle also had its own falconer, so after talking to him and learning that he had a morning show the next day, I decided to drag Colin back with me. We returned the next day, arriving at the top panting and sweating but thrilled to see the show, only to have the falconer tell us his morning show was canceled because a school group had called to say they were coming in the afternoon. After trying to soothe Colin's disappointment, we decided to wait, have lunch in the village, and return to see the afternoon show with the school group. The falconer had retreated inside the castle, so we turned to the ticket-taker with a cell phone to her ear behind the counter: “What time?” we asked. “I don't know,” she replied, returning to her cell phone call. “Soooo, how will we know when to come back?” “I don't know,” she replied again, clearly annoyed. “Well, can you ask the falconer?” Not understanding Italian, we're pretty sure she then pretended to call the falconer, but really only continued chatting with her cell phone buddy, before telling us once again that she had no idea what time the school group would come. Sigh. Colin was pretty much beside himself by this point, but we did our best to let it go. We enjoyed the view, visited the small cemetery next to the castle, had a very wonderful lunch when the small restaurant in the village opened, and were more or less contentedly walking down the mountain when the school group passed us on their way up. “Forget it,” Colin said. “I don't want to see their stinking show anyway.” Good – we would find friendlier venues somewhere else along our journey, I was sure.


Earlier in the week, we had contacted a cooking school up in the hills above Varenna. The following morning, the chef/owner of the restaurant offering the class picked us up at our guest house and we wound our way up to the very small village where the restaurant – housed in a 1,000 year old stone house – has been run by his family for eight generations. Two other couples joined us in the cozy timber-beamed dining room, facing a large wooden table where our chef and mentor rolled out fresh pasta, chopped asparagus, and formed perfect round pork meatballs, inviting us to pitch in and take turns folding raviolis, slicing and tossing long ribbons of tagliatelli, and peering over his shoulder as he sauteed and seasoned and generally made magic. The meal was incredible, the company excellent, and both the culinary and cultural experience fantastic! -- easily the highlight of our week at Lake Como.



Full of food (and, for me, wine), our host dropped us off at the ferry terminal, and we ventured across the lake to Menaggio, where we were booked into the a hostel for the next couple of nights and again succumbed to sluggishness before catching a bus into the mountains and across the border to Lugano, in Switzerland. From there, Colin and I caught a train to Zurich, then a connection to Zug, where my step-brother Brian and his family were waiting for us.

Brian had moved to Zug the year before, following a brief stint in Luxembourg, and after nearly 20 years in Moscow. He works as a CEO and financial advisor to international corporations, and Zug is the center of Switzerland's “free-trade” zone – the epicenter of “Swiss bank accounts,” as I understand it (which is not very well). Colin and I were still were functioning at half-mast, but being with family – especially the very energetic 2 and 4 year old cousins/nephews – put a bit of a spring back in our steps. We spent the next day exploring the many levels of the nearby “Techno-rama” - a giant of a science museum on the outskirts of Zurich - and running around and around the living room couch with the boys (it was pouring rain out - nonstop). When the boys went to nursery school on Monday morning, the rest of us piddled around Zug, wandering along the lakefront and exploring the shops. We had tickets on the overnight train to Budapest the next evening, and Colin and I had decided to spend that day in Zurich, visiting the National Museum, the Observatory, the Old Town, and if time allowed, taking a boat tour across the lake. We said our goodbyes to Nate (4) and Marty (2) in the evening, and to brother Brian and sister-in-law Irina in the morning, and set off on the commuter train from Zug to Zurich. We stashed our bags in lockers at the central Zurich train station and wandered off in the direction of the museum.

The Swiss National Museum is housed in a beautiful old castle, less than a five minute walk from the train station. We spent a pleasant hour + exploring the rooms and exhibits, before Colin – doing his usual acrobatic moves down a flight of stairs – fell and twisted his ankle. We limped around the museum for a while longer before realizing that he wasn't going to just shake this one off, so we hobbled back to the train station to find a seat and give it a rest. It didn't help. We had 7 hours to go before our night train to Budapest, and it became clear that we were going to spend every one of those hours sitting in the Zurich train station, popping anti-inflammatories, with Colin's foot iced and elevated. At hour 6, we finally had a revelation – despite our best efforts, we'd been dragging for over a week now, and needed a break. We took a look at what a plane ticket from Budapest to Seattle would cost us, and were surprised to find that they were cheap! If we went home for a visit, we'd spend less on airfare than we would on our travel budget for the same period. Hmmmmm.....

Before we could rethink it, we were booking a flight. Halfway through the process (I'd selected our flights and just gotten to the payment part), I glanced at the clock and realized we had less than 5 minutes before our train to Budapest was leaving!! Our bags were still in a locker downstairs, the train was leaving from the upper level, and we didn't even know which track it was on. Yikes! We aborted our booking and raced down to the lockers and up to the tracks. We made it with at least a minute to spare (there must've been some kind of time warp involved), and after catching our breath, completed our booking via a cell phone call to my mother in the U.S. She got online and wrapped it all up with a bow, including a promise not to tell Tom what we were up to. We then settled in for a night of sleep aboard the Zurich-Budapest Express, waking to a distinctly different, and subtly austere, farmscape outside of our window. Arriving in Budapest, we stopped in at the rail station tourist office, booked a hotel just a block away, and dropped our bags before setting out to explore. We had just under 24 hours before our flight home – as a result, one day in Budapest would be the entirety of our “eastern” European visit, and we intended to make the most of it.

We sought out a pleasant, shady plaza I had read about in our guide book, settled into a table at a recommended restaurant, and enjoyed a feast of “deer shoulder” (Colin) and duck (me) while people-watching all the foot traffic along the tree covered promenade -- perfect intro to Hungarian food.
We then took a very long walk (slowly, due to Colin's still aching foot) to the Szechenyi Baths – a complex of luxurious outdoor soaking and swimming pools of various temperatures set in the central courtyard of a beautiful historic palace, plus saunas, steamrooms, cold plunges and even a snow chute churning out chunks of the crumbly cold stuff that you could take into the impossibly hot sauna with you to drip over your head. We stayed for three hours, plunging and soaking, until we were weak in the knees.
As we were dressing, a monster thunder storm hit, sending us running from the baths to the nearest cafe – set aside a lovely lake in the neighboring park. We eventually called a cab to take us back to our hotel, got a good night's sleep, and woke early in the morning to head for the airport – and our date with home.


24 hours, one canceled flight, one rerouting through Canada, one late arrival and subsequently missed connection, and one extra layover later, we walked in the door just as Tom wait awaiting our (falsely) scheduled skype call. Surprise!!! Hugs, some tears, and a lot of laughing, then collapsing, once again, into bed before beginning our three week visit home. My own bed had never felt so good!

Up Next: Genealogy and gastronomy... on wheels

Vistas & Vino

We landed in Milan, after starting the European leg of our trip in Greece, and headed straight for the main train station - and on out of town. We only had Tom with us for another 12 days, and our priorities were (1) the Cinque Terre, (2) Tuscany and (3) Venice. We were headed south to Genoa, jumping off point for entering the Cinque Terre the next day. Our first night in Italy was spent in a beautiful (and inexpensive) suite in an old Italian boarding house near the train station, complemented by a fantastic meal of pasta and pizza in a simple trattoria. Good start.



In the morning, we took the train to Vernaza, the second of the Cinque Terre's five villages, and Tom and Colin settled in at a cafe with a view of the village's castle overlooking the small harbor while I scouted for a room.
We decided on a pair of rooms in private rental apartments (one for 2 nights, and another for our 3rd night) and after hoisting our bags up the many, many stone steps required to reach ANYplace in in Varnazza, we enjoyed the rest of the day clamboring around the harbor rocks, lounging on a small pocket beach, and drooling over all the local produce, cheese, wines and salumis beckoning from every shop window and spilling out onto the cobblestone streets. There are practically no cars in Varnazza, as the villages of the Cinque Terre are 5-10 minutes apart via the frequent trains connecting each of the towns. Alternatively, you can walk from one to the next via the cliffside trails – breathtaking views and heart stopping drops in 15 minutes to one and a half hour hikes each. I decided that a couple of those hikes were at the top of my “to do” list while we were there.

The next day, I started off early to hike to Monterosso, encountering a very wild dog or possibly a wolf, in the mountainous forest along the way.
Fighting off my vertigo, I oogled at the views from the trail, which hugged the cliffside, with only token wooden barriers providing a false sense of security. In fact, at the one place where my foot slipped on the slick stones that formed the trail, the lower wooden railing had fallen away – right where my fall sent my leg over the precipice! It wasn't too wet, and I didn't slide far, but it took me a good 10 minutes sitting on a rock at a wide point in the trail to slow my heart rate, regain my confidence, and continue on. I met Tom and Colin getting off the train in Monterosso, and we beelined for the Farmer's Market I had seen at the trailhead when I entered the village.
We browsed through all the yummies and came away with bread, cheese, salami, fruit and wine to enjoy as a picnic lunch along the waterfront, and visited one very bizzare church dedicated to the dead.
Tom returned to Varnazza via my hiking trail – in reverse – while Colin and I hopped the 5 minute train back to town.


Buoyed by the beauty of the previous day's hike, I took off again the following morning to hike in the opposite direction to Corniglia – again an hour and a half hike along steeps cliffs. This time, I encountered a pair of wild boar along the trail – I was apparently a magnet for the local wildlife.
Again, I headed to the train station upon arrival to intercept Tom and Colin and save them the hassle of climbing the steep steps leading up to the town where we had agreed to meet – Corniglia is the only of the Cinque Terre villages perched high on the cliffside, rather than snuggled down in the harbor. Unfortunately, this time they had arrived on an earlier train and we freaked each other out by not being where we were expected. Two hours later, we were finally reunited in Varnazza, after frantic searching on both sides, and after calming down I had to do a “mea culpa” since I was the one not at the agreed meeting spot in the town square. But seriously, when is Tom ever early?!?

Determined not to let the mix up ruin the day, we hopped the train to Manarola, the fourth village in the chain, and enjoyed a late lunch at a quintessential Italian cafe while a rainstorm scoured the town and left the cobblestones gleaming.
Then together, we all walked the trail – an easy and short one – from Manarola to Riomaggiore, the last of the villages, timing our walk with the sunset and passing through the trail zone known as Lover's Lane - where local couples affix padlocks as a symbol of their love (or lust) along the fencing installed to prevent rockslides from barricading the trail or knocking smooching couples on the noggin.


Reluctantly, we left the Cinque Terre the next morning, continuing along the rails to Pisa, where we took a picnic lunch break on the lawn at the Field of Miracles, shadowed by the Tower of Pisa, before continuing on by bus to the town of Volterra in the Tuscan hills.
We hiked from the bus station out of the Volterra's fortified castle wall to the Monastery overlooking the valley below, where we had booked a
room.
After a walking circuit around the beautiful old stone town (where, incidentally, the Italian part of the Twilight trilogy is set), we settled in for some food and wine at Vena di Vino, a hole-in-the-wall cafe/wine bar with dozens of bras hanging from the timbered ceiling and a rock cave basement boasting a home-made karaoke machine crafted from a personal computer and a dentist's chair (it's one of Rick Steve's favorite stops in Tuscany). It was love at first sip, and I knew that even though we only had a few days in Volterra, we'd be back, again, and again, and again....

.... starting with lunch the next day.
We returned to Vena di Vino after visiting the Duomo (cathedral square) and original Estruscan Arch forming one of the entryways into the village. The entire town is surrounded by the old castle wall, with an impressive Roman ampitheather and bath ruins set into the southern section. We also visited the archeological park within the walls on day three, and Tom and Colin toured the archeological museum while I stole some quiet time for myself.
Our last dinner found us back at Vena di Vino, because we couldn't bear the thought of leaving the next morning without one last visit. Each day that we went, the owner brought us more gratis snacks with our chosen wines, until on our last visit he gratised us so thoroughly that we had an entire dinner for free. Gotta love a place like that!


Early the next morning, we had to catch a bus for Florence, where we had a simple room for one night near the open market and an easy walk to the Cathedral and Leonardo da Vinci Science Museum. Then it was on to Venice – perhaps the only remaining city in the world that I can honestly say was on my “bucket list” (mostly filled by visits to wild and remote places). It was stunning.

From the moment we stepped off the train, I was smitten. Instead of the usual bustle of traffic and cars outside of the train station, there was only the quiet gliding of boats on a wide canal and occupied the corridor which in any other city would have been a noisy, horn-honking street.
We boarded the public ferry “bus”, disembarking ~50 meters from our guest house and settling in without even breaking a sweat. Our room overlooked the city's produce and fish market, with a view of the grand canal itself. We needed only to cross the bridge or follow the narrow walkways along the canals to find fantastical pockets of old Venice, tiny cafes, inviting shops (for Colin – he's the shopper in the family), and gelato stands.
We started with a visit to Piazza San Marco, fed the pigeons, and felt like we were in a classic Italian film. It only got better from there. We spent three days indulging all senses in the wonders of Venice, walking everywhere, and having some of the best meals during our entire year of travel.

Highlights included a visit to the Jewish Ghetto and – for Colin – Venetian mask browsing, in shop, after shop, after shop.... It was wonderfully romantic, but also bittersweet, as it was Tom's final few days with us before he had to return home.






On day four, we retraced our steps (and the canal) to the railway station and boarded a train back to Milan, checking into our hostel with no great expectations. Dinner that eve, however, took an unexpected twist....

We asked at the hostel desk for a recommendation for an inexpensive dinner nearby. We were directed to an Italian pizzeria a couple of blocks away. When we arrived, we were bustled to a table along the back wall by some very frantic waiters, who immediately asked us what we wanted to eat. Saying, in our rudimentary Italian, that it would be nice to see a menu first, a waiter brought us one, but shouted out suggestions before we had a chance to look it over. We had to repeat three times that we'd like a minute to think about it before they left us for two(!) whole minutes to decide. They then came back and shouted suggestions again, but this time in a more demanding tone. The waiter was certain that we couldn't read a single item on the menu and asked where we were from. When we said “The United States” he said, “Oh, I'm from Iraq! I kill you! Bang, bang!” with his fingers in the shape of a gun pointed at our heads. “Ha! Ha!”

We had stumbled into an Iraqi owned and operated Milanese pizza house, and were clearly out of our cultural element. We finally managed to ask for three items that looked good – linguine con vongole (clams), a pizza, and spaghetti bolognese. I also asked for a small pitcher of the house red wine – a failproof strategy for a decent vino throughout our travels in Italy. The wine came first. I sipped. It fizzed. Fizz??! I tried again, and it fizzed more. Uh-oh. Reluctantly, I called the waiter – who was now bustling and shouting at a half dozen other tables – and said that I was very sorry, but I didn't expect the red wine to be fizzing. Could I please have a decent bottled red instead.... um, Please?

The waiter was suddenly struck dumb – dead silence. And the evil eye. Oh, crap. He recovered himself, rolled his eyes, shouted something I'm pretty sure was offensive (about me) to his colleagues, and strode off with the fizzing pitcher in a huff. But he did bring a nice bottle of red wine, and miraculously, a friendly attitude with him when he returned. And a free platter of flatbread. And a few moments later, the largest platters of food I'd had ever seen. The vongole could easily have feed four, the pizza took up an entire table, and the bolognese would feed our whole family for dinner and lunch the next day. Instead of cold-shouldering us for the rest of the meal, he kept coming back to our table for chit-chat, back-slaps, and an offer of a job in the kitchen for Colin.

The capper came when we stuffed all we could of the feast on the table into our bellies, and quietly asked the waiter if it would be alright if the stupid Americans took some of the leftovers with them, though we know its not usually done in Italy. We could see take-away pizza boxes stacked up in the kitchen, so thought it was worth a try. “No problem!” he said. He arrived at the table with boxes, and prepared to take the whole shebang into the kitchen with him. Not wanting to be any trouble, and generally preferring to box up my leftovers myself, I told him to just leave the boxes and I'd take care of it. With a little hesitation, he did so, and I – stupid American – proceeded to box up our leftovers with the blessing of the restaurant staff.

We hadn't asked the neighboring tables, though. Through my entire proceeding, the woman seated next to me stared vehemently with shock and disapproval. Conversation stopped. Eyes were averted. I finished, we left an inappropriately large tip, and the three of us shuffled out with our hands full of boxes. No regrets, though: after taking Tom to the train station first thing in the morning, Colin and I got both breakfast and lunch out of our take. And we returned for dinner again the next evening – sharing just one pizza and a salad. We still couldn't finish it all, and once again took the remains for our morning breakfast, heads held high.

Prepared for several days of low spirits after saying goodbye to Tom for the next three months, we aimed next for a quiet place to lay low, landing at a small rooming house above a cafe in Varenna on Lake Como - a short train trip out of Milan. But without Tom, our travels had lost a bit of joie de vivre, and so as not to spoil a perfectly good blog entry, we'll pick up again in the next installment....

Up Next: “Travel fatigue in paradise.”