Happy New Year!

As the title says, "Happy New Year" to you all! And may the coming year be as good to you as you want it to be. As for us, I think it will be a very good year indeed.

We returned from Italy just before Christmas and Susan’s brother Dick picked us up at Boston’s Logan airport. We then spent three nights with Dick and his wife Dorothy (they live just south of Worcester) since we had a second appointment with the Italian consulate for 23 December.

Everything went swimmingly I might say. It was a beautiful day and there was virtually no traffic going into the city. We parked and had a cup of coffee at a nearby Starbucks and arrived a bit early for Susan’s appointment. There were quite a few college students with their parents there this time and many seemed to be confused about what they needed to have in the way of documents and what the actual process was. Needless to say the Italians don’t make it easy and their websites are really quite confusing.

Anyway Susan got called early and after a couple of minutes she was told her visa would be approved and that it would be ready in about a week or so. Our plan is to return on 4 January to pick it up.

And now for the kicker.

Now we had returned on our unplanned trip in mid-November to apply for a student visa at which time Susan’s application was rejected for lack of complete documentation. (The Italian bureaucracy, like bureaucracies everywhere love their documents.) So we rescheduled for late December as we were planning on returning for the holidays and then left to go back to Italy the next day, Well we come to find out that when you get a visa they keep the passport in order to attach the visa to it. Sooooo since we had tickets to return to Italy the very next day if Susan’s application had been accepted in November we could not have left the country!

Whoa was that bizarre good luck or what?! Plus we learned some valuable bureaucratic lessons to boot. Was it worth the extras plane fare for the November trip?

You decide.

So after the fiasco at the Italian consulate in Boston we returned to Italy and had a wonderful time back in Siena enjoying the coming holiday season. We took a day trip to Florence to see the lights and window shop of course. In early December we flew up to Frankfurt to see a niece and her husband (he’s a captain in the US Army) and although the weather was lousy we enjoyed the festive lights and Christmas markets which seemed to be in every city and town. Our last night in Italy was spent in Rome wandering the city streets and spending some quality time in a few of our favorite haunts.

Anyway after we left the consulate on 23 December we drove to our house in Vermont and began the daunting task of packing things up for long-term storage all the while trying to decide what to bring back with us when we return in early January and what to ship to Florence for next year.

As of Friday afternoon (30 December) we are officially homeless and will be out of our house completely by Tuesday.


The house is pretty much a mess right now but that will all change within the next 48 hours. While much of our stuff has been sold, given away or packed up we trust the movers when they come on Monday will finish the job in quick order. The new owners have been extremely gracious and generous in not only waiting so long to close but also in letting us stay several days after closing. They are very nice people who seem to fit right in with here in Vermont and we hope they will be happy here.

As for us all that remains now is to sell our car. Once we leave Rutland we will spend three nights with Dick and Dorothy down in Massachusetts and will spend Wednesday and Thursday trying to sell the car at a nearby Audi dealer. We are not terribly sanguine about getting a good deal but at this point we pretty much need to unload the thing. Sad. It is a damn fine car.

So come early Friday morning (and I mean early) Dorothy will take us to Logan airport in Boston for our morning flight to Heathrow. We then spend the night in London and Saturday morning (7 January) catch a Ryanair flight out of Stanstead airport for Pisa. From there we take the train to Siena and hope to be back in our apartment there by early evening.

After that we relax for a couple of weeks before we have to move all our stuff up to Florence on 24 January. In fact we will probably schlep our stuff by making several trips on the bus. Hiring a moving service is too costly as is renting a car so we figure we would just make a few trips on the bus and do it ourselves the awkward way. But it’s good for us to be flexible and willing to be more self-reliant.

In any case we will be settled in (we hope) by the time Susan has her orientation for school on 26 January and classes begin on 30 January. And let me tell you that girl is so excited! Imagine, two semesters in Florence, Italy, studying to become a pastry chef! Now is that too cool or what!? After spending more than 20 years dealing with so much human pain and suffering this will come as a tonic for both her mind and spirit.

As for me I will continue to take my photos and in fact just finished one commissioned series for an enoteca in Siena. I will also continue to work on my Tuscan Voices project of interviews, which I began last March and April in collaboration with Roberto Bechi of Siena. I hope to get the first of several of these out into cyberspace in the form of podcasts sometime in the next couple of weeks.