I feel a lot better about our recent trip. We saw some cool stuff. And we spent some nice time together. The latter part of it was exhausting, but that was also expected.

After a week of reflection, I realize that the trip was something of a closing, not opening activity. Which means, I’m in the opening of something right now.

We openly embraced this trip as something of a “last chance” to all go on a vacation as a family. Knowing people with older kids, that isn’t exactly true. We still vacation with Amy’s parents and my dad so I guess it can last your whole life. But, Nathalie will be making her trip to her college next summer, barring some radical shift in her life plan. This time next year, I’ll be trying to talk myself into driving across country or whatever. If she goes to school in Boston, then she and her stuff will need to get there, as opposed to what monument to see in Rome. Nathalie really enjoyed the trip, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear her plan her junior year abroad in Rome, Milan, Turin, or wherever. Seriously, she could learn Italian in 6 months of serious study, knowing that she would be immersed for a school year following.

A thought on my own Italian study. I knew a lot more Italian than I needed to know for a trip. I think I might continue to take courses because I enjoy it. It’s a great exercise for my particular brain. And judging from Nicole, Mike and Christine, our familial brain has a “knack” for it. I’m not saying we are idiot savants but clearly there is something in the wiring that allows us to not be intimidated by the prospect of stumbling along with the language. As well, there seems to be a higher than average ability to internalize vocabulary and phrases in the short term. And, while it might be easier for me than, say, Amy, it is still exhausting at times.

I didn’t get many opportunities to speak Italian, which surprised me. My neighbor is a Columbian woman and she asked me about this yesterday, as we exchanged pleasantries. I told her that I was surprised that in one place, I walked to the counter and the server said, “What can I get you?” Never even a pause before completely flipping the bit to English. My neighbor said, “Really. You don’t even look like a gringo,” which, oddly, made me feel better. Apart from hello, good-bye, thank you – you can feel pretty good that English will be okay. I could not say what it might be like outside of the tourism industry because we were squarely in the middle of that.

So closing this chapter is a theme for me. I realized some of this as I spent the week back at work. My team has been dysfunctional for a long time. That’s harder and harder to take. I just don’t want to be there. That’s not as simple a conclusion as it sounds as the Catholic guilt (you’ ought be thankful you even have a job) and the Puritan work ethic (work harder at it) combine with the more visceral conclusion that this is not a sustainable position.

At the risk of going to deep here, I hardly ever think about my heart. It works fine. Apart from a yearly check up, I go about my life like everyone else. But there is a part of my sub-conscious brain that is aware that my time could be limited. Orthat my normally functional time might be limited. I know people who literally cannot fly because of the risk of blood clots, for example. And lots of people get through life with bigger, more difficult handicaps. For me, I am literally unaffected. However, I know that I have 8 years of 15-20 year ticket punched before I have to become medically unconscious and wake up, intubated, with an incision on my chest.

I think that weighs into my thinking about things like “toughing out” another year in a bad job.

I also think that we are living in a time where there is no concept of “retirement”.  I’m not talking politically here. I’m saying that we, or I , do not have a good mental picture of what it’s like to be 60 or 70 years old in the future.

What does this sea change mean for me? I don’t know yet. I know that my job, even apart from my present team, is in jeopardy. Software development is not bound by political borders. There is nothing to say that American-made software is even distinguishable from Chinese or Indian software. Who makes the software you are using right now? If it is IE then I guarantee you that it is in part Indian-made.

In the middle of writing this, I spoke to my homeboy, Mark. He shed some light on my predicament by asking a simple question. What do you want to change the most? Or something like that. And the answer, after a little bit of thought, was clear. I want more control. It’s not that my job is bad. I’ve liked similar jobs. The difference was that I had more control. I had bosses that said things like, “you just do your thing and you let me worry about reporting it to management.” The uncertainty in the industry is less about predicting the next twist and turn in the software development road. It is more personal to me to know that I am not some kind of flotsam in water being affected by the changing current and crazy, unpredictable weather, later washing up on some beach as little more than debris, unwelcome pollution.

In the past, lack of control lead to two things, often, simultaneously: Consolidation and research. I can live with both those things. In particular, I love consolidation. I love having less stuff. That’s a bit harder to envision as a father of nearly grown up kids and a husband, but not impossible. And research is what I do. At the close of this week, that is not a bad place to be.

I usually spend a good deal of my vacations in a somewhat reflective state. I sometimes know that it will be introspective and other times it is more of a surprise. For me, a vacation is a way to escape the grind of daily life so that my mind can go places that it doesn’t normally go. I don’t expect a vacation to be an educational experience or a physical challenge to make a contrast. I expect it to be a more introspective experience.

This vacation to Italy did not deliver that. It was not completely without reflection but instead provided something other than reflective moments in the main.

I don’t own a camera. I never have owned a camera and really never wanted a camera. I consider site seeing to be a strange experience. I realize now that this is a bit odd. I remember my first trip to Europe. I was 18 and just finished high school. I brought a camera because it was expected that I take pictures to share with my family and as a remembrance of the trip. I’m sure I have at least some of the photos but I don’t know where they are. And I took all the photos in one day of a 10 day trip. I remember thinking well I better uses this camera so I walked around and took a bunch of pictures. One was the price of gas in litres, which I found fascinating.

In short, I really suck at being a tourist.

In some ways, I was trying to push my internal limits by not writing in a journal on this trip. For one, I wanted to try and be more externally focused and less internally focused. This was a good experiment for a couple reasons but before I spell those out, some basics. The main purpose of this trip was to do a fun “last” vacation with our kids before they move out of our house.

Nathalie will finish high school next year and, if our neighbors are any guide, next spring and summer will be all about her graduation and future college plans. We know that Nathalie is highly independent minded so it could (though probably will not) be her last summer at home. Amy likes to “take vacations” too and we have gone on big trips in the past. Going on a trip was never a big part of my life experience prior to meeting Amy. Marc is good compliant company on our trips, too, so it is not hard to imagine him tagging along in Italy. This proved to be true, too. Marc, in contrast with Nathalie, has always been the tagging-along kid, flexible and compliant with the any of the big ideas of any trip. If someone on the trip says, “I was thinking of bungee jumping and then eating some poisonous blowfish,”Marc, who previously had never spent a minute of time thinking about either thing, will say, “Can I come?”

I appreciate that because I’m not like that at all. My reaction would be (and Nathalie’s too), “WTF? Why?” Or, “Isn’t it like 95F outside?” Or, “I didn’t bring the right underwear for that.”

Amy, as some of you know, is a planner. This vacation was well planned and went off without a hitch. She will have an itinerary that includes research. Research will be absent from my planning, and to be completely honest, my planning will and did amount to scheduling the vacation so that I am not at work.

I performed this task spectacularly by delivering a 20 minute presentation to 50-75 customers visiting from around the world on Monday, two days before we left. I spent Tuesday fixing everything else that I had been neglecting to sustain itself of 20 days and then spent Wednesday, the morning of our departure, packing my suitcase and washing any clothes that I was supposed to take with me. I’m not one for chaos so this is exactly what I expected to happen and it was fine. But, and this is the point, I had no idea what Florence or Tuscany had to offer other than broadest of outlines: beautiful countryside, and religious art. I can read more about it on the trip, right?

Amy had a very good itinerary planned. We went to a bunch of cities and had tours, which I have learned to love on trips. Tours are great because, a) they are in English; b) are opportunities to let someone else figure stuff out; and c) a great way to compress some of the backstory for a place into a short amount of time. Sure you can get stuff on Ipods or whatever, and you can use self-guided stuff for less money. But both suffer on several levels: Hard to do with more than one person; cannot change on the fly which a good tour guide can do (oh you play the tuba, let me tell you about the Venetian Tuba quartet – which is not a real thing); and go at your pace not the pace of the recording.

The tours on this trip were good-to-excellent. Amy also knows that I like tours so as she has honed her planning skills to the point of planning to address our multiple quirks as a people. This proved to be another solid win.

Cell phone side-bar

One responsibility of mine before the trip was to figure out the cell phone thing. Amy really wanted us to be able to have 2 working phones. Her thought was that whenever we split up our party, we should be able to contact each other. I did the research and even bought a special phone and SD cards for the trip from National Geographic. This is the short version of the story.

In short, don’t waste any time with this. You should just use your existing phone (infrequently) and know that it will be fairly expensive. Just ask your provider how to minimize the expense and do what they say. They know better. My buddy, John Kennedy, had said this to me before the trip and I tried this other thing. He was right and I owe him an I-told-you-so bagel. He only does this every six weeks or so, moving from the UK to USA, what could he possibly know that I can’t figure out? Well, plenty. Let me make this perfectly clear: every penny and second I spent on this other than going to ATT (which actually Amy did) was a waste. We ended up turning on that World Phone option on Amy’s Iphone because the experience of our National Geographic phone plan was complete shit.

Mike and Nicole both had much better experiences with their phones and providers.

Time spent in our apartment in Tuscany was very relaxing: Beautiful scenery, laid-back attitude. We spent a week doing this after our arrival in Rome (where we spent the first two nights). Rome was very hot when we arrived, and the first couple days of 9 hour jet lag are tough.

From Thursday to Friday the following week (8 days) was with Mike, Charlene, and Nicole. It was great. I don’t know what I expected, but it was really cool to see my little brother and his wife completely throw themselves into the experience. Mike had a real knack for it, not shy about throwing Italian words around where he could.

Nicole and I have done this before. She (and Derek, Doug and Christine) were with us in France so I had the pleasure of seeing her navigate similar waters before. I don’t really know why I find that so fascinating, but I do. And it was very cool to see everyone stumble through some initial obstacles and quickly see them master the experience to a point of bending it and themselves to a point of enjoyment.

Perhaps, as the big brother figure of this crew, I have always taken a more avuncular (means like an uncle – I looked it up) view of my siblings. This is the source of some pain at times, but far more joy. I realize now that familial pride that I felt seeing my younger siblings succeed in various endeavors was a pre-cursor for the same feeling I have had as parent. Indeed, it has often surprised me that the emotion was so similar.

Let me try to be specific about this. There have been few times in my life when I knew exactly what I would do in an uncertain situation but there have a lot more ambiguous ones. I was not a “tough guy” growing up, but when I met any prospective boyfriend of any of my sisters, I knew that were any of these guys to do the “wrong” thing, I would fix that situation with very little concern for life or limb. This kind of clarity of purpose to an emotional stimulus is rare – for me. I feel this same way when I meet any of Nathalie’s friends too. It’s exactly the same thing.

To see Mike and Nicole completely owning the experience of making their respective ways in this uncertain environment, I get a familiar positive emotional charge. You might say this, it makes me happy. Which of course, confuses me at first but on the whole, I enjoy.

And, in Tuscany, we had a great place to spend some quantity time together. Going to the pool, going to the market, going to the beach, going site-seeing. I know that everyone does not have the desire to cast the scene in such broad relief. Saying good-bye at the end of the week was tough, but I think we all can look back on the week as a fun time.

Traveling around on trains to the big cities was the objective in the second week. We managed that well. I’m not going to lie to everyone and say I loved this. It had its moments. In the spirit of trying to be flexible and not torpedo anyone’s experience retro-actively, I can say that I liked the first week more. Seeing the sites in the big cities was interesting. In the long run, I will appreciate it more than I do right now.

I guess the trip is more introspective in hindsight (I could say retrospectively introspective but that’s too much word play, right?) I’ll be thinking about it for long time.