365 Memories

In 1983, I made my one and only trip so far to Rome, Italy. I was in the eighth grade; at least, I'm pretty sure this was the spring of '83, not the spring of '82, when I would have been a seventh grader. It was one or the other. My parents and I visited Rome ( click here to read the " Bambini !" post about our initial experience in the hotel), then we went down to Brindisi to catch the ferry boat to Corfu, Greece, and finally we ended the trip in Athens. I remember many things about our days in Rome, but for all of us I think the highlight was not so much a museum or other physical location that you'd find in a guidebook as it was our human guide, John. (Here I beg forgiveness for the abbreviation and the Americanization of his name. The original certainly began with the Italian prefix Gi -, but he was only ever "John" to me. I don't know his actual, full given name. Giovanni, perhaps.) John was everything you'd expect him to be—everything

My father is a seasoned, sophisticated traveler. This is true now, and has been for a while, although of course it could not always have been the case. There was a first trip, sometime (a boy from Alabama battling fear and loneliness on a Protestant mission trip to Mexico in the 1950s). As long as I've known him, though, he's been the consummate travel planner. After working out flight routes well in advance and anchoring any trip with carefully selected accommodations, my father would stop at his favorite bookstore for guidebooks and other titles of local interest (whether "local" meant one state away or across an ocean), then he'd hit any store or stores that sold convenient travel items, including but in no way limited to: passport holders and money belts (for the traveler's checks he'd get from AAA), power cord adapters, pocket rain ponchos, protective bags to shield film from airport X-ray machines, mini plastic bottles for shampoo or lotion, "W.