Trip to Europe

 

Tuesday, September 29^th – Saturday, October 10^th

 

The first and last part of our trip was all business – 3 days in Germany, Cologne and Walhstedt (near Hamburg), and then 3 days in Italy, outside of Milan.  Everything went exceptionally well during the business phase of the trip and the 6 days were extremely productive.  There was only one evening of a tourist/social nature, and this was more than we even expected.  Our host from Grundfos Italy took us to the center of Milan via the Metro.  We walked up the steps from the station and were awestruck by the Duomo, the cathedral.  He arranged for a one-hour guide to explain the history of the area to us and then we had a wonderful dinner.

 

In between Germany and Milan, we took a long weekend and went to Sicily.  We flew into Catania and rented a car.  Fortunately, it had a GPS, but we still drove around Catania for ½ hour looking for a highway entrance that was not blocked off!  We drove about 45 minutes north of Catania to Taormina, where we stayed for 3 nights.  I was holding on for my life as Roger was speeding up the mountain on two wheels in our rented Alfa Romeo, RED of course.  Geez, does he always have to drive so fast?!

 

When we arrived in Taoromina, the streets were - narrow - one way -  and full of pedestrians.  The GPS told us we’d arrived at our hotel, but it wasn’t right.  No hotel.  We drove around and around.  Once we found ourselves on this REALLY narrow street, and here’s the conversation in our car:

 

Karen:  “Rog, you can’t go down this street.  It’s too narrow.”

 

Roger:  “Karen, I have to.  There’s 3 cars behind me.”

 

Karen:  “Oh my God, our car won’t fit, we’re scratching the side!”

 

Roger:  “Pull in the mirrors, we’re going!”

 

We ended up in someone’s private driveway, down a steep hill, and had to back out.  It was kind of funny, even when the nun came out and yelled at us in Italian.  I had a feeling that this was going to be an expensive rental return!  I was seconds away from calling the hotel to ask them to send a driver to pick us up.  We finally asked a policeman for directions – surely, he would know where the Hotel Carlotta was!  And he did.  The hotel was great, situated on the mountain facing the Ionian Sea.  What a beautiful view.  We loved Taoromina, and we walked and walked and walked.  (There was no way we were taking that car out again, well, until the next day.)

 

The next day was Sunday and we had made arrangements with a cousin, Giuseppe Sorrentino, that I had never met, to meet us at a highway exit near Piazza Amerina, Sicily.  That is the town where my paternal grandmother grew up, and where the majority of her family still lives.  We met Giuseppe and his father and uncle and joined his mother and aunt for a visit to Villa del Castale, a Roman ruin that has mosaics dating back to 300 A.D.  It was amazing – the artwork and sophisticated infrastructures of this development from ancient times.

 

Then we went to a restaurant out in the country to meet the rest of the family.  They were so excited that they kept calling Giuseppe on his cell phone to ask about us.  When we arrived at the restaurant, everyone was outside waiting for us.  Giuseppe introduced us to each person and we kissed everyone – twice – once on each cheek.  Roger said he has never kissed so many men in his entire life as he did on this day!  My cousin Lino Sorrentino who lives in Venice helped set this up but couldn’t be there and warned Roger it would be like “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”!   Ha, ha, he was right!  

 

We were completely taken aback by this family of mine.  There were about 35 people there and everyone wanted to talk to us, but only 3 people spoke English and I could only pick up a word here and there of Italian.  Roger actually picked up quite a bit, and poor Giuseppe had to do the translating and was starting to speak Italian to us and English to the family!  They showed us pictures of when my parents visited 16 years earlier and when my brother Bill visited in 2001.  It struck me that my grandmother got married (in an arranged marriage), left Sicily in 1931, pregnant with my father, traveled alone on a boat to New York to join my grandfather, never to see her family or her home country again.  How sad.  But her family seemed as if they had seen her only yesterday and they loved her, even though they didn’t know her.  And by extension, I felt the love from them too.  

 

We had an incredible Sicilian FEAST.  You have no idea how much food there was -- antipasto, pasta, another kind of pasta, 4 different kinds of meat – lamb, chicken, veal and sausage – potatoes, vegetables, salad and rum cake for dessert.  (Rum cake was my mother’s favorite dessert.  So between seeing the photos of my parents and enjoying the rum cake, I had happy and sad moments.)  Roger and I were also served some special cannolis as the guests of honor.  We had to take them with us because we were so full!  After this 4-hour lunch (!!), we went to the house where my grandmother lived and visited a beautiful church in Piazza Amerina.  The streets here were not designed for cars either.  Luckily, we followed Giuseppe.  We had several invitations to stay there at family’s homes, but we had to get back to Taormina.  Next time we will speak enough Italian to be able to talk to my family and will plan to stay there longer so that we can get to know them.  What a joy they are!

 

The next day, Monday, was our last full day in Sicily and we made the most of it.  We left the hotel early and went to Mt. Etna.  It is an active volcano, and erupted as recently as last year, 2008.  We took a tram part of the way up the mountain and then took an off-road bus up to about 3000 meters.  There we were able to walk around the rim of one of the craters from a previous eruption in 2006.  There were no fences up and it was completely barren.  In fact, steam was still coming up through the ground and when we picked up the rocks, they were warm.  It was a fantastic experience and we were so glad we did it.  

 

On our way down the mountain, we stopped at a small family-owned winery, the Gambino family.  The guy from our hotel said they were not related to the crime family, but aren’t all Italians related?  The very handsome son gave us a personal tour of his winery and then 2 tour groups arrived and we joined them for a tasting and some antipasto.  What a delight!  

 

Next stop that day was Giardini Naxos, a town along the Ionian Sea.  We walked along the beach and wished we had 3 more weeks here.  What a great trip – business and personal!   To top it off, we had accumulated so much dirt from the trip to Mt. Etna, that when the rental car guy inspected the car, he said, “Bene, bene!” and waved us on.  He never even saw the scratches on the mirrors and side of the car!!

“The Move”  --  Now that it’s over….. I can talk about it.

 Monday, September 14^th – Monday, September 28^th

 

We left Green Turtle Bay in Lake Barkley, KY and got back to Indianapolis around 1:00 in the morning (Tuesday morning).  We had exactly 2 weeks to move before the closing of our Indy house.  For the entire 5 hours’ drive from the marina, I searched online for a place to rent. It’s been 15 years since we last moved, so the whole thing was a frightening task.

 

It took us 2 days to find a place, and we settled on renting a townhouse for a year in Carmel, in the Bridgewater development.  We found a place to live, found a storage unit, set up a mailbox at the UPS Store, lined up a mover, packed most of the house ourselves, and let the movers pack the rest.  Roger took 9 pick-up truck-loads of things to Goodwill, and 7 more truck-loads to the dumpster behind our former business, Flotronix.  I was awake every day by about 5:00 a.m. and Roger was coming up with any excuse he could to leave the house because he “had to do some thing or another”.  One day early on, I caught him standing in the unfinished part of the basement, just staring into space.  He was completely overwhelmed with all “the stuff”.  It was so funny!  But I knew that whatever we didn’t do, the movers would handle.  

 

In the meantime, our Hilton Head villa had sold and we had to deal with both homes at the same time.  Two inspections, repair estimates for two houses, two more negotiations, emails back and forth and back and forth.  One of my friends, Jodi Tibbett, came over to help me pack.  I offered her a cup of tea and wouldn’t let her stop to drink it – I was a slave-driver, but we had so much fun catching up and working at the same time.

 

The movers took 2-1/2 days to finish packing us, move a truckload into our 2^nd storage unit and then move the second truckload into the townhouse.  We did it! 

 

On Saturday, the day after we moved, we went to an engagement celebration for Brett, and his fiancée, Kelly Murphy.  It was a wonderful day!  They have tentatively set a date for next November.  Wait until you meet Kelly; we couldn’t possibly be any happier to have her in our family!

 

We spent the next day getting ready for our trip to Europe.  We knew that we wouldn’t be able to unpack until we returned in about 2 weeks.  It wasn’t a good feeling leaving the townhouse in such a mess, but we really had no other choice.  When we boarded the plane on Monday afternoon for Europe, it was almost a relief.  

 

We were amazed that we actually accomplished as much as we did in literally 1-1/2 weeks.  The boat was a million miles away for the time being.

Kentucky Lakes & Catastrophic Fire   

 

Thursday, September 10th

 

After clearing out of the Kentucky Lake and Dam area on Thursday, we got a call from Rae & Steve on Barefoot Shoes that they were slowing down so we could come by to pick up some homemade bread.  You can see the picture where they are passing bread in a bag on their boat hook to our other friends on Potest Fieri who were ahead of us.  Rae bakes while they are underway and she has treated us to lots of homemade chocolate biscotti, flatbread, and now homemade bread.  Lucky us!

 

That night we stayed at an anchorage on Kentucky Lake, and Roger and I hosed off the shad flies and continued to battle them for a good part of the day.  I do not ever want to do that again.  Even Roger who takes bugs and stuff in his stride said, “This is something from an Alfred Hitchcock movie!”

 

Friday, September 11^th

 

The sunrise was beautiful.  I have not been able to sleep past 5:15 a.m. even on our easy days.  We headed over toward Green Turtle Bay Marina, which was an easy ride through the Barkley Canal over to Barkley Lake.  This is a resort community, with a huge marina, 3 pools, condominiums, health club.  And the price per foot was the same as Hoppie’s (that beat-up old barge on the Mississippi!).  We planned to stay for 3 nights.

 

We went to the pool in the afternoon and that night we went to a theater and listened to 2 Storytellers perform.  That was more entertaining than we expected.

 

Saturday, September 12^th

 

The guys were cleaning our boats that morning, and the girls went shopping in the really small town of Grand Rivers, KY.  While we were in the one of the shops, we heard sirens and someone said it was coming from Green Turtle Bay.  We decided to go back to the marina and as we got closer, we saw that smoke was coming from the docks.  I parked the car along the road, and we started running toward the docks in a near panic.

 

The short story is that a power boat had just blown up about 100 feet behind our boat.  Apparently, the guy and his girlfriend had fueled up, pulled away from the dock and had some engine problems.  Something ignited and there was a huge explosion.  It blew the top of the boat up in the air and it fell back down onto the hull.  Roger and some other guys heard this, saw the lady on fire and were yelling at her to jump into the water.  She was screaming about her boyfriend being on the boat, but she finally jumped in, and our friend Steve from Barefoot Shoes jumped in and swam her away from the burning boat over to the dock.  She was severely burned and her boyfriend died on board.  It was just awful.

 

Then Tow Boat U.S. got involved, managed to hook a line onto the burning boat and moved it over to the other side of the marina.  More bad news:  their lines got wrapped around one of their props, and incapacitated Tow Boat U.S. while it was towing the burning boat.  So Roger and Danny from Potest Fieri got into our dinghy, tied a line  onto the Tow Boat U.S. boat and moved both boats away from the docks.  They let go of the tow boat when one of the engines got free and started.  As if things weren’t bad enough, the tow boat lines got tangled again, they lost both their engines and THE TOW BOAT CAUGHT ON FIRE, so the two guys on that boat jumped into the water.  The original burning boat and the tow boat floated toward the docks again, and caught a houseboat, dinghy and 2 jet skis on fire.  The volunteer firemen were doing what they could, but it wasn’t looking good.  Their hoses weren’t long enough, equipment malfunctioned and there was chaos.  Roger used our dinghy anchor as a grappling hook to tow one of the burning jet skis away from the docks and it eventually burned itself and sunk below the water.  

 

I was with the girls as watched from shore and were panicked that the whole dock would catch or there would be more explosions.   Somehow all the fires smoldered into the water or the firemen put them out.  People were in shock, including all of us.  Susan and I nearly killed our husbands for getting so close to the fire, but we were at the same time proud of them for being so brave and helping in this situation.  Not to mention Steve, who brought the woman to safety.  

 

Sunday, September 13^th

 

We hoped that this would be a boring day.  Thankfully, it was somewhat.  We cleaned the boat in the morning and sat by the pool in the afternoon.  In the meantime, we had received an offer on our Hilton Head villa over the weekend and found out that we had reached a deal on that.  In the afternoon, we also received an offer on our Indianapolis house and were in the negotiation process.  What was the chance that both homes would sell within a couple of days of each other? 

 

Monday, September 14th

 

So we are at the crossroads.  We were planning to leave Green Turtle Bay Marina today anyway and head south for one more week.  But now that has changed, and we will head home today!  We agreed to sell the Indianapolis home this morning, but here’s the clincher…. we have to be moved out by September 29^th.  We are leaving for Europe on the 28^th, so it will work out okay.  We have to really scramble to find an apartment or condo to rent, and line up movers.    

 

We are leaving the boat here with a list of items for the service department to work on, and for that we do not have to pay for dock space for the 5 weeks that we will be gone.  After we get back from Europe on October 10^th, we will spend a week at home (wherever that might be) in Indy and then head back to the boat around October 19^th.   

 

So the 5-week hiatus for our blog “Living the Dream” begins now, and the 5-week hiatus from Happy Hour with our boating friends also begins.  If all goes well, we will be back on the boat by 10/19 and continue on down the beautiful Tennessee River.  The timing will work out well, because we cannot be south of the 32^nd parallel until November 1^st, after hurricane season.  This is dictated by our insurance company.  

 

Wish us luck ---  there is a lot to do in the next 2 weeks!  I’ll miss writing this, and I already can’t wait to be back on board.  That says a lot, doesn’t it?