Everybody's in Italy
It's a Hot Tomato Girl Kind of Summer
I may be oversaturated with new social media apps. I started creating little videos of our vacation images on my iPhone and posting them on TikTok — a fun way to while away the hours when waiting for trains and planes. And then today, I was pressured into signing up for Threads (@laura11d), which is supposed to be some new happy place for the Twitter crowd, but really looks like the same thing.
So, this morning, I’m overwhelmed with jet lag, too much social media, and a thousand pictures of Italy on my hard drive that need culling. That means, this week’s newsletter won’t be a coherent essay on an important thing. Student loans and affirmative action will have to wait until next week.
First some links with a vacation theme:
Where Gwyneth Paltrow stayed on her Italian vacation.
Our Spectrum Adventure is a charming newsletter by an autistic dad and his daughter who are hiking through Scottish countryside.
I read this really bad essay about vacations in the New Yorker before we left, and it still annoys me. The author really needs to get over herself.
I am obsessed with videos that show people packing all their worldly belongings in tiny suitcases. So crazy. I think I need a new set of packing cubes.
And now a few pictures with some explanations:
This is me and my husband, Steve. We travelled to Italy for 12-days with our 21-year old son, Ian.
Traveling with someone on the spectrum can be somewhat challenging, but Ian did great. He only complained when the museum trips lated more than 3 hours and when we exceeded 20K steps on the Fitbit. He’s an A+ kid.
It is extremely crowded in Italy right now. You must book your tickets to the Uffizi, the Colosseum, and the Vatican museum a month before your trip. If you can’t find tickets at the museum websites, then you have to get them through Viator, because the tour companies are basically ticket scalpers who have all tickets. That said, our tour ladies were very nice.
The food. Let’s talk about food, because that’s basically 50 percent of the reason that people go to Italy. Truthfully, the food in Rome and Venice was so-so. Lots of places geared towards tourists with low standards. Good street food. The food in Florence was better. Our meals in the Tuscan countryside are among the top ten food experiences that I had in my life.
It’s plenty hot in Italy right now. I spent a lot of time thinking through a wardrobe that was appropriate for European city wear and would pack well and would be cool. So, linen pants, dressy shorts, moisture-wick athletic-leisure clothes, and hat, with a coordinating color scheme. (Instagram pictures here.)
Meanwhile, Substack is yelling at me for posting too many pictures, so let me squeeze out a couple more favorites. Find more at Instagram.
