A Little Luxury Can Mitigate Worst Aspects of Traveling Abroad

As I write this, I’m sitting in Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome, waiting for a flight to Los Angeles. My wife and I have just spent two weeks more or less in Italy, and now--suddenly--I find everything foreign to be irritating.

Italian prices, which were almost humorously high, have become outrageous. (A few minutes ago, after paying $4 for a cup of coffee, I priced an American paperback novel that costs $1.95 at home; at the airport newsstand in Rome it cost $14.) Italian charm has turned into irritability. Tour groups wending through the airport behind leaders holding aloft silly pennants are now more irritating than quaint. Trying to deal with people, especially vendors, in another language has become a Gargantuan chore instead of an intellectual challenge. Why, I am thinking in a glowering cloud, don’t they speak English as normal people should?

I’ve just decided that this kind of churlishness is the natural order of things for returning travelers--a kind of psychological conditioning process that makes the transition easier. When the trip is over and we must return home, two metamorphoses take place. First, natural irritations we express at home and suspend while traveling for a whole complex of reasons--for example: We don’t want to be ugly Americans; we must adapt cheerfully to unfamiliar cultures; we’ve paid all this money and we’re by God going to enjoy--come back into play. And, second, a necessary return to mundane activities for what is likely to be a long spell is easier if it doesn’t look quite so green on the other side of the fence.

Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking as I sit in the airport waiting to fly home--that and reflecting on the fact that the older we get, the more important it becomes to plan a vacation trip that avoids the excesses both of being herded mindlessly about in a group or experiencing the stress of the kind of adventurous travel that turned most of us on when we were younger.

We got a touch of both extremes the past two weeks--just enough to make the point without seriously moderating the pleasure.

We spent the first week of our vacation driving a rented car from Venice to Rome, and the second week on as spectacular a cruise as I ever expect to encounter. The contrast was instructive.

Driving in Italy is rather like a 24-hour drag race with adolescents. In the cities, Italian drivers observe no driving lanes, ignore center dividers and insert themselves into any crevice large enough to accommodate their cars if the crevice is 6 inches farther forward than their previous position. On two-lane highways, they pass on hills and curves, ignore speed limits and tailgate with such enthusiasm that the driver behind seems perpetually to be sitting in your back seat.

This leads to a certain amount of stress. My wife navigated from frequently inaccurate city maps while I tried to fend off local drivers. We got better at it. Florence was a disaster, but we got to our hotel in central Rome with only a handful of wrong turns--both a moral and aesthetic victory. Experiencing the magnificent Italian countryside by car made up for the stress in the cities. But when we arrived in Rome and fell into the arms of our cruise ship, we didn’t want to build any more character.

We didn’t have to. For the next week, our every need was not only attended to but anticipated. We were ready. The people who run this particular ship have done away with all the shibboleths of cruising--the amateur nights and bingo games and jostling for position on shore trips and general hype. The recreation director told us what was available and then got out of the way. It was glorious.

And now I’m waiting to go home and wondering what I learned from all this. And I guess the answer is that seniors no longer need to prove anything by the way they travel. Whatever we can afford to buy in the way of creature comfort, we probably should.

That’s going to mean different things to different people. I have almost as tough a time with the regimentation of traveling with a tour group--the eternal getting off and on buses and being herded about and scheduled--as I do finding hotels and restaurants and places to park a car on my own in countries where I lack both the language and the culture.

Two types of vacation trips--and I’m talking about foreign, not domestic--seem best suited to resolving these problems. The first is a cruise that allows you to unpack once, then use the ship as a base from which to explore places you want to see without feeling required to dip into shipboard life any more than you want. The second is to go to one or perhaps two places where you have made all the necessary prior arrangements and put down for a spell of time. In neither of these circumstances do the logistics get in the way of pleasure.

If all this sounds like creeping senility, so be it. I just know that when we boarded our cruise ship, all the tensions of traveling disappeared--until we arrived at the Rome airport a few hours ago. I suppose the contrast contributed to the irritation I’m feeling now, along with the knowledge that I’m going to be sitting uncomfortably for 11 hours on a airplane, then feel washed out for a couple of days after I get home.

These, of course, are the prices of travel--and they are small prices, indeed, when contrasted with the mind-blowing exhilaration travel can bring. But how much better it would be if somehow the trip home could be eliminated. And yet, it probably serves a useful purpose--a gradual coming-down process from a high that has to be tucked away, now, until time and money permit thinking about it again.

I’ll try to remember that on the plane ride home.