Living a Dream

Italy is so full of wonderful things and places that I've written about 20+ different places that we visited without getting to one of the most iconic structures in the entire country. I'm talking, of course, about the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I don't actually remember our train route to Pisa from Milan, but I do know that I took a photo of the toilet on the train. It was the first time I'd ever seen a train-toilet that didn't even pretend that the waste was going anywhere other than the train track below.                                   (That's the ground) We hopped off the train at Pisa and started wandering, not really knowing where we were going. We sort of assumed that we'd get off the train and immediately see the Tower somewhere off in the distance and just walk that direction. We were wrong. Basically we left the train station and walked straight ahead in a 12:00 direction. The Tower was ...

Dear Mr. Dingman, I made a little stir a couple years ago when I wrote a letter to your wife. Sorry if that made it to your dinner table and caused any stress. Also, I addressed her by her first name but I know that your brother was the vice principal and I can only remember one of your first names so I'd hate to address the wrong one. Double-also I know your brother was the VP because I visited his office after I pantsed Dan Butters in gym class.   Anyway, this time I’ve come back for you but the tone is going to be very different. You were my history teach in 7 th  grade. While that's a formative time in a human’s life I didn’t necessarily expect to retain a lot of what I learned because, well, it was 7 th  grade history. However, you said something that has stuck with me forever. This is a crude drawing of the lesson. You challenged us to look at this undulating wave with its crests and troughs and determine what it represen...

I've written before that we host people on AirBnB as a way to help us feel connected to the travel community. We still go places but not nearly as often as we did in Europe, so it's fun to have people come and go from all different walks of life. As you might expect, we meet some interesting people. We also meet some strange ones. An experience last week, however, was an entirely new thing for us. We had a guest who had booked a stay with us for Monday night. We'll call him Dave. Dave was a pilot and was coming to town for an interview. Dave booked our room and sent us messages about what time he expected to come and go during his stay. He was to arrive in the afternoon on Monday and I was off work, so I had him call when his flight landed in case I wasn't home. As luck would have it I was leaving home right as he called so I offered to pick him up (our house is about three miles from the airport) because I'm a superhost/was incredibly bored. Dave told me that...

Jenna had the idea that we should go to Verona for Valentine's day of our year abroad. Thanks to Romeo & Juliet, Verona claims to be the city of love and pulls out all the stops to make Valentine's day extra special despite the fact that Shakespeare had never been there and Juliet's balcony is a sham. In any case, this was our third stop in Verona but this one was on a mission. The city hosts something called "Verona in Love." They basically set up chocolate stands everywhere and put hearts on almost anything in the city that draws people. This is great if you like chocolate and even better if you know, unequivocally, that chocolate is the best thing in the world. We fall into the 2nd category. There's more than just chocolate though: They have photo-ops, rose gardens, markets, entertainers, and much more. A walk through the city is somehow even more alive on Valentine's day than it is on any other day, which is an accomplishment. There's ...

Bardonecchia was not on our "must go here" list in Italy. It was a matter of circumstance, however, as we'd heard it was a very beautiful area in the mountains and we could go quickly and inexpensively. As an added bonus, the tourism website for Bardonecchia showed snow-tubing at the ski resort as an activity. Sign us up. Neither of us really knew what to expect from this small town, but we knew it had hosted a few Olympic events in the 2006 Torino games (photographic proof at bottom). Our hotel was inexpensive and overlooked a small parking lot which turned out to host a market during our snowy stay. This was perfect, because I needed boots and got them for cheap...after I wore them walking around the wet, snowy pavement, effectively buying them without realizing it because you're not supposed to wear shoes outside when you're testing them. The "city" has a bus system that stops in 2-3 places in the town and then goes to the bases of the main ski...

People who don't fly much want to know what it's like to fly on budget airlines. Currently, the biggest budget airline in the States is Spirit, which operates largely how you'd expect: Everything costs extra. You pay to choose seats, pay to check a bag, pay to take a full-size carry-on, pay to have a glass of water, etc. Some other ways that they pinch pennies is by making you print your own boarding pass ($10 or something if they have to do it for you at the airport), baggage fees are way extra if you don't order them online beforehand, and they seemingly shrink the plane - itty bitty leg-room, seats that don't lean back, and more. So let's dig in. Wife and I decided to save $150 per person by taking the redeye from LAX to Cleveland on a Saturday night after a Friday wedding (which was a delight, for the record). The savings, we reasoned, would be worth the flight that we knew would be a nightmare. Our Sunday would be a waste of a day as we'd be too e...

Everyone wants to be like the Spurs, right? They've been the model of everything for the past 20 years, and only recently has anyone come up with a style of play that San Antonio has had to adjust for, and theoretically, the Warriors can't sustain this for several years. One of the best things San Antonio does is rotate players. Greg Popovich is a master of getting guys minutes, balancing rotations, and creating/finding matchups that work. The Spurs have 35 lineups that average 4 minutes together per game, and frankly it feels like a lot more than that. They rotate their guys early and often, keeping people fresh and keeping starters on the floor at almost all times. What Pop does so well is pull a starter about 5 minutes in and reinsert that starter earlier than his opponents. Imagine if Cleveland tried this. The way they're currently going, LeBron and JR Smith play the whole first quarter, with Kyrie, Love, and whoever's at center often playing about 9 minutes in ...

Back when we spent a weekend in Madrid , we stayed with my college roommate, Parker. It was awesome. Since we both were living in Europe, it was just a matter of time before Parker came to us in Milan. As luck would have it, his train wasn't scheduled to arrive until about 9:00 on a Saturday evening, so Jenna and I decided to spend Saturday north of the city in a place called Bergamo. Bergamo only existed as an airport to us, as that's where the airport is which Ryanair flies out of (side note, they should've spelled "air" with a Y and made themselves a palindrome). We'd been there plenty of times, but never left the airport. The town - small city, really - is at the foot of the mountains and signifies the start of the massive valley that Milan rests in. We took a train to Bergamo and walked through the lower part of the city - Citta Bassa, in Italian - which is mainly modern. Many things are older than those you'd find in the States, but that doesn...

They say that light is the only constant in the universe. I disagree. The continuity of how stupid our species can be is indisputable. I'd like to give some examples that illustrate my point. Helmets. Why do helmets exist? They exist to keep our brains safe from traumatic injury. Do you know what else keeps our brains safe from traumatic injury? Not doing things that cause traumatic brain injury. We race motorcycles, play football, go mountain-biking, ski, snowboard, do construction work, and so many other things. All of these things require helmets because they've caused death by head-trauma. Only now, with the ongoing saga of NFL concussions, has anyone even considered the idea that - hey, maybe we shouldn't do these things that cause massive head trauma? Maybe helmets are a band-aid over the axe-wound that these things are causing? Just me? OK, fine. Watch any prime time TV show and you'll see a commercial for a medication. My favorite one starts with "tir...

I teased this a little about two weeks ago, but now we're here and ready to talk about a little road trip that we took. The plan was simple: Get a place to stay near Florence (but not in Florence), have a good old-fashioned Italian farmhouse meal, and drive around Tuscany, mainly looking for hill towns. In practice, it was at least that simple - maybe simpler. You can't end up in a bad place. Everywhere is beautiful, even if it was a little hazy at times. It was February 28 when we left, so it was supposed to be cold, but we were going south without much knowledge of the elevation at-play on this trip. Our first stop answered some questions. A sign on the highway pointed toward a (maybe) national park of the lakes Suviana and Brasimone. I don't know which on this actually is, but it was beautiful. We had a nice time tossing  rocks into the lake and watching the ice spider-web. Quite a setting. We hopped back in the car, periodically pulling over to take photos, a...