Comedy of Errors

Our trip and first day in Italy were a reminder of the challenges of travel and the virtue of patience.  We left Richmond on Sunday at 2:30 p.m. after having been chauffeured by our son J.D. (who took the picture of us at the airport not noticing that Shelley had her eyes closed), who also happens to be my colleague on the faculty at St. Christopher’s School.  He will be joining us for a week right after July 4. 

(Late breaking news—we’ll apparently see J.D. in Paris as well.  He was going to visit Maury Hancock, the theatre director at St. Catherine’s School, at his summer place outside Paris after leaving Lucca, then had to return home to teach a summer class.  The class didn’t make, so he is thinking about staying longer in Europe and then joining us in Paris.  That news alone made the events chronicled below easier to take.)

The trip was largely uneventful until we arrived at Galilei International Airport (named for Galileo) in Pisa after changing planes at JFK (named for President Kennedy) and Rome (named for Leonardo da Vinci). 

In Richmond (where the airport was formerly named for polar explorer Admiral Richard Byrd, who featured prominently in the first chapter of the book I started reading last night, Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America 1927) I was pulled aside for “individual screening” by the TSA, but then no one did any screening other than asking me to walk through the metal detector in my own private line.  Not sure why I was pulled, other than the fact I look pretty suspicious.  On a school spring break baseball team trip to Disney World one of my students whose father worked in national security could look at the ticket and know who was being randomly pulled.

JFK was JFK, in that we had to go outside to a different terminal (Terminal 1).  Of course there were no signs directing anyone to Terminal 1 until we arrived at the terminal itself.  Once inside Terminal 1, we had to go through TSA screening again, but were informed that we first had to have our Delta boarding passes reissued at Alitalia boarding passes.  That ate up a good part of our two-hour layover.  I held my breath as we went through security but no special attention the second time.

We left JFK at 7 p.m. EDT (or 1 a.m. Rome/Lucca time) and flew through the night, arriving at 8:30 a.m.  We were in Pisa by 11 a.m.

That’s when the fun began.  The first issue was that while we arrived, our bags didn’t.  We packed relatively frugally, but a lot of important stuff (such as plug converters we need to be able to recharge electrical devices) is in those bags.  If we go too much longer without a change of clothes, Lucca may suffer from a new form of pollution.

All of the travel guides and websites I had consulted had recommended taking public transportation (bus or train) from the airport in Pisa to Lucca, and we (I) had chosen the bus because you have to change trains at Pisa Centrale station, while the bus delivers you inside the walls of Lucca.  We found the ticket booth (on the right as you come out of baggage claim) after reporting our missing bags, and I even did a passable job of saying “Due bigliettos per Lucca,” but then we couldn’t find the bus where we had been told it would be.  Buses are supposed to leave hourly, but I read somewhere that in the middle of the day there is a couple hour gap, and I suspect we had just missed the final morning bus.  We retraced our steps, found out that the bus we were looking for was blue, and at the bus stop were told that the next bus would leave in an hour.  40 minutes later, we had no sooner stepped on the bus then it pulled out.

We made it to Lucca by way of downtown Pisa and route 12 connecting the two cities.  By the time we arrived we were tired and grumpy, and about to get grumpier.

In preparation for the trip we had long discussions about how to communicate once in Italy, and until the last day or so the plan had been to buy Italian cellphones in the airport at Rome to avoid expensive data roaming charges.  At the last minute something we read in a guidebook convinced us that we could get by with our own phones as long as we kept them on airplane roaming and used them in Wifi hotspots.  Part of that discussion came about due to J.D. (our technical consultant and a damn good one) finding an app (Viber) that would let us call and text each other over the internet and our sense that we would probably not call or text anyone but each other.

That sense was quickly tested.  I had rented the apartment through VRBO (Vacation Rentals By Owner), highly recommended by several friends who travel regularly, and I had been in touch with the owner of the apartment by e-mail and he had given me a number to call him once we arrived in Lucca.  As soon as we got off the bus at Piazza Giuseppe Verdi I looked for a place to sit down I could pull out the number and call.  I couldn’t understand why Shelley seemed disgusted with me more than ususal until she informed me that we couldn’t make any calls using our phones but had to call from the public phone we had just passed.  And, of course, when I tried to call there was no answer.

I had also been given walking directions from the train and bus stations by the apartment rental office so we began to walk.  On the way we stopped on the steps of a church to see if Shelley could contact either the owner or the rental company by e-mail, but she couldn’t get internet access despite having bought a data plan for her phone right before we left.  In addition, the directions we were given were wrong, telling us to turn right when we needed to turn left.  When we finally found the apartment we got no answer when we rang the doorbell.

Close to panic, we decided to enlist the help of someone at a local business (the apartment is right off Via Fallungo, the main shopping street).  The first person we asked didn’t speak English, and the second just shook her head.  But we found a heroine at a little café around the corner.  She spoke English, understood our situation, and tried to call the owner for us, but had no success.  She then found the website for the rental company and called there, and learned two valuable pieces of information.  They had a different phone number for the owner, and he had called the rental place looking for us.  That was the first bit of positive news at a point when we were starting to wonder if the owner existed or we were victims of a scam.  Shortly afterward, as were having paninis for lunch at the café, the owner showed up and found us, and took us to the apartment.  It turned out that the phone number he had sent me was missing a digit, and the doorbell to the apartment building doesn’t work.

That’s our first day in Lucca, a little more eventful than anticipated.  We felt at times like minor characters in A Comedy of Errors, at times like the tourists Mark Twain described in Innocents Abroad, and at times like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire, relying on the kindness of strangers, but finished the day more like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Tomorrow’s bound to be a brighter day.