No Regrets!

At Rome’s Termini station, we got on our Trenitalia (rhymes with “genitalia”) train and chilled out for 4 hours. We all got to know each other a bit, and Nader pulled out his Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey to loosen things up a bit. My iPhone playlist was judged to be weird but good. Except by Maddy, who made some snarky comment about it but later quietly sung along with one of the songs. Outside, we were treated to the Italian countryside with the occasional glimpse of the Mediterranean.

Pisa is a charming little town with the the leaning tower, of course, as the main attraction. After quick pizza lunch, we walked over to the famous tower.

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Got off the train and took to the streets in search of my B&B. It was cloudy and humid, and I was dripping with sweat before even getting to the place. It was a challenge finding it, with no signage on the outside and no address numbers for reference. But when I finally got inside, I was greeted by the flamboyant and friendly Laura. She seemed like a great host, but I didn’t stick around. Jet-lagged but buzzing on the adrenaline of being someplace new, I set off to explore Rome.

Rome is about how I imagined it, hubbub of commercial strips, duotone police sirens, giant billboards, graffiti, gummed up sidewalks, and scooters. One thing there’s a lot of is fountains. I don’t know if it’s something that goes back to the aqueduct days of the ancient Romans, but there seems to be a fountain of fresh, drinkable water every few hundred meters. Romans are never thirsty.

Italians have certain sense of style, with seemingly random combinations of clothes and colors that they wear with confidence. Everyone’s thin (so much for low-carb diets) and good-looking, but a bit part of that is their attitude. Everyone is flamboyant and confident and happy. There are also nuns everywhere.

Some pigeons and I visited the Spanish Steps. Kind of cool, I guess, but not much to it.

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So I’ve been scrimping and saving up my vacation time for a couple of years to go on another big adventure. After a decade of amazing New Year’s trips, I’m starting to run out of good places to go that time of year, so I decided to start looking at suitable trips to take in the fall.

I consulted my bucket list and cross-referenced it with tours offered by my two favorite small group travel companies, G Adventures and Intrepid, and came up with some great options. I briefly considered taking advantage of the economic struggles in Greece or taking a tour around Iceland, but in the end, I decided I could hit Italy, Barcelona, and Lisbon, all ranked quite highly on my bucket list, with the G Adventures Rome to Madrid on a Shoestring small group tour.

But who to go with? My usual travel partner, Doug, didn’t have the vacation time. My other friends are busy having babies and working. I looked into some of the “find a travel buddy” websites like triptogether.com and travel-buddies.com, but they all seemed a bit sketchy to me. Do people really commit to spending several days with strangers? Is it just a global hook-up network? I don’t know if I could ever take a chance like that.

So I decided to go solo. About six weeks ago, I sat at my desk at work and felt that familiar little buzz of adrenalin as I clicked the PURCHASE button on the G Adventures website.

My trip starts in Rome and skips along the Mediterranean coast to Pisa, Genoa, Monaco, Nice, Barcelona, Valencia, Granada, Seville, Algarve, Lisbon, and finally Madrid. That’s 5 countries in 16 days. I haven’t been to any of these places before. Some of them, I’ve never heard of. I haven’t been this excited about a trip in a long time.

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Caught my plane out of Juan Santamaría International Airport at the crack of dawn.

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Woke up feeling a bit rough today, with a headache, unsettled stomach, and a desire to do nothing but lay in bed. But I rallied for my city tour of San Jose with a company called Expediciones Tropicales.

Our guide, Alberto, took us around the city in a small bus and told us about the history of coffee magnates, Costa Rica’s best and worst presidents, the abolition of the army, the architecture, pretty much all the things you’d expect to hear on a city tour. To accommodate our mixed group, he seamlessly flitted between English and Spanish.

We drove around in our little bus, stopping a few times to walk around. It was an absolutely perfect day to be outside, with a warm sun, fresh breeze, and happy birds chirping everywhere.

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We headed into central San Jose for dinner. Always a weird feeling when you’re with folks for the last time, knowing that you’ll probably never see them again.

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Last night, we headed into Quepos for dinner. The meal was decent, but the town is sketchy as hell. Aside from the odd restaurant or convenience store being open, the town is dark and silent. Drug addicts and dead or very sleepy dogs lay on steps next the bus station. I definitely don’t want to stick around here for New Year’s. Might as well head back to San Jose with the rest of the group this afternoon and hope for the best.

After returning to our resort hotel, we popped into the bar for karaoke night. Marie and Chedine (sheh-deen) blew away everyone away with their rousing rendition of “Zombie”. I hit everyone with the 1-2 punch of “I’m Too Sexy” and “The Girl from Ipanema”.

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A long drive out of the mountains, past fishing towns and industrial ports, and a stop at a bridge over a family of crocodiles. Marie rubbed her pregnant belly like a Buddha for pretty much the whole trip.

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Our morning consisted of a boat ride across the artificial and somewhat scenic Lake Arenal, a natural lake that was greatly expanded by a 1979 hydroelectric project of the Costa Rican government.

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Another early morning. A few of us joined another group of tourists for the bus ride out to Caño Negro. Our guide for the day, this one also named Jorge, picked us up and did his best to coax some enthusiasm out of a sleepy group of tourists that don’t know each other. I hate being forced to be cheerful at 7am.

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