The excitement is starting to build, the basic itinerary is all planned, flights have been booked, some places to stay have been found; but still we aren’t sure we are going to see what we want.
Earlier this year Celine and I returned from a road-trip vacation in Australia, telling everyone including ourselves, that we were going to Italy in the autumn. The world may well be our oyster but we are fairly sure now that the pearl we seek therein is somewhere close to the Mediterranean. You see we love Europe and all things European, and Italy always seems to be the country that has a stronger pull on us than everywhere else in the Old World. We have already spent altogether the best part of a year, scouting out France, the Basque Country, a wee bit of Liguria in northern Italy and a fairly unspoilt old fishing village on the Costa Brava in north Spain. We have even made a few visits back to the lands of our forefathers in Poland and England, but nowadays neither has the magic force needed to make us pick up sticks, pack our bags and build a new nest. What is lacking in one place, we find by the bucketful in others, and what we love about another place lacks that which we found in the first place. Dangerously for us we can be very impulsive; consequently we very nearly made three or four extremely rash, instant, house-buying decisions, but luckily our nerves got the better of us and our money still sits, safely we hope, in the vaults of England’s ancient high-street banks.
So we made the decision to satisfy that inner longing that both of us have for La Bella Italia, did some fairly basic research, and decided to make our base camp in an area of the country, the region of Abruzzo, of which neither of us has any prior experience but which seemed to have great potential for various reasons. But all the time, nagging thoughts rattled around in the back of my mind, that perhaps Portugal should also be given due consideration before we allowed ourselves to fall in love with yet one more location, which may or may not be as ideal as it seems at that moment. And that is where good fortune started to provide us with the bare bones of an itinerary that may, perhaps, put nagging thoughts to bed forever and give us good cause to pursue just one road along which to find our new home, well for a while at least!
For several years now I have been an avid though occasionally cynical reader of the outpourings of a couple of organisations that specialise in giving advice to wannabe emigrants such as my wife and me. The cynicism arises as much as anything the result of the constant flow of copy aimed at my wallet more than my heart. Nevertheless, I have continued to read much of this material in the belief that basically both companies care for the well-being of their readers and the aspirations of those readers to find better lives for themselves; the constant barrage of letters and articles advertising this or that new publication, conference or special membership, I trust to be simply the means by which these hopefully philanthropic publishers can continue to thrive. Thus our, or rather initially my, choice of Abruzzo had been influenced not inconsiderably by their enthusiastic writings. Celine and I began to delve more deeply into the offerings of this Italian province that we understood as being, in effect, the poorer man’s Tuscany, the undiscovered part of Italy that was every bit as beautiful as its neighbour to the west, and more affordable to the average person trying to make the best of their meagre pension. Taking our research beyond the aforementioned outpourings, we began watching videos on YouTube and, worryingly, realising that the poverty of the region might be more depressing than we were willing to live with. But the charms of the Italy that we had both been seduced by in the past continued to sway our thoughts and then, lo and behold, we read that one of the two organisations was arranging a conference to be held in Abruzzo during the time we were due to be over there. This seemed an ideal chance to both glean loads of useful information about everything to do with a new life in Italy, and to put to the test my sometimes waning faith in the organisers.
At last our travel plans had a focal point and we could get on with the nitty-gritty of planning in more detail. We booked our flights between Los Angeles and Rome and suddenly we were past the point of no return. But there is always a fly in the ointment and this time the fly was Portugal, for no sooner had we fixated our thoughts on Italy than we received details of a ten-day tour being promoted by “the other organisation” to give people like us a taste of the delights of living in Portugal and Spain; and the dates fitted in ideally with our eastbound flight to Rome. Of course we soon discovered that the cost of changing our flight to make our first European landfall in Lisbon was astronomical, and we chose instead to back-track from Rome to Lisbon, allowing ourselves to first of all luxuriate in the former city for three days. So now we have the best of both worlds before us. We will have a chance to experience to varying degrees, the two remaining countries on our search list, Portugal and Italy. We will get to compare the abilities of the two organisations whose publications have been so instrumental in keeping alive our desires to find a better place to live, and with luck we will return to sunny, overcrowded Southern California at year’s end with an even clearer idea of what the future holds for us.
Now all that we have to do is to reserve a few more accommodations, rent a car suitable for the vagaries of Italian driving and the narrow streets of the many hilltop towns we expect to visit in Italy, add a few basic phrases of Portuguese to our linguistic “skills”, and enjoy yet another stage in our search for the future. But who knows what we’ll be thinking by the time we get home again!
