Legends of This Fall

Don’t be offended, but you seem to be one of those people who just attract accidents like a magnet.
~Stephenie Meyer

Before I even set foot on a plane last month (August 2025), I had a feeling that my fall trip to Italy was going to be a little challenging. Without going into detail, let’s just say that the signs were there, and I might have been better off hiding under a blanket at the back of my closet instead of crossing the Atlantic eight weeks ago.

Now, you might think that something always happens to me when I travel (or even just breathe, for that matter), but let’s be honest. We all have things that happen that test us on a daily basis. Maybe you forgot to buy cream for your coffee or to take out the roast to defrost for dinner. Perhaps your iPhone fell in the toilet or your husband threw his indigo jeans into the wash with your new white silk blouse. Maybe your toddler saw the dog’s biscuit on the counter and decided it was a cookie. How about the time you went to work wearing two different socks….or shoes. It’s always something, isn’t it?

My point is that, yes, I do have these mishaps a lot, but so do you. I just try to entertain—and maybe educate—with my misadventures. While this is a little long, let me tell you about my fall (as in autumn).

The Game

I posted the above photo to Facebook to see if anyone could guess which of the mishaps had NOT happened to me this trip. While I usually post a little something about what has gone askew in my life, I avoided doing so this trip since, to be honest, because this has all tested me.

It’s been a few days since I posted the “quiz,” and no one has correctly guessed the answer. I threw in a ringer (A—Fell getting off the plane in Milan) because that happened in April, and I had mentioned it then. But, no, I did not fall at all during this trip. I think I deserve a medal for this alone since most of the flights I took included embarking and disembarking via stairs on tarmacs instead of walking onto jetways.

But, I digress. Everything else, as many people guessed, all did happen.

The Excursions

Honestly, I have come to expect excursion cancelations. Weather and insufficient participants are the most common reasons for this. One vendor, however, texted me the day before our food and wine tour from Cagliari and told me that he was not going to drive into the city to pick us up, which was part of our tour. What irritated me most about that was the fact that I had made the reservation about four months before, and he knew where he had to pick us up at that time. I usually have back-up plans, so we were all right, but I was not too happy.

Two members of my last group lost out on going to Assisi to visit the basilicas of Saints Francis and Clare due to a nationwide transportation strike. Trains, subways, buses, and taxis all had a work stoppage on September 22 to protest the genocide in Palestine. While there was a possibility that their outbound train would have taken them to Assisi, the return most likely would not have been running. They did make the best of it by going to mass in St. Peter’s and then exploring the basilica.

Venezia and Rain

An extreme heatwave hit much of Europe this summer, and it made for an uncomfortable few weeks in August. My second group ended their trip in Milan, and I headed to Venezia to meet the third group. As I always do, I made sure I was at the train station early so that I would not miss my train. Fortunately, I decided I needed coffee, and when I went for my wallet, I discovered that I had left it in the safe at the hotel. Even more fortunately for me was the fact that the hotel was a five-minute walk from Milano Centrale.

I hauled my luggage out of the station and yanked it back to the hotel as fast as I could. It was drizzling, and the pavement was very slippery, so I had to be careful. I got my things out of the safe, ran back to the station dodging what was now real rain, and made it back to the platforms with about five minutes to spare before departure. As luck would have it, the train was delayed, so I was able to get my coffee and wake up before having to board.

By the time the train arrived in Venezia, what had started as a light rain was a downpour. I waited in the station for about 30 minutes until the rain let up and hauled my bags down the steps to the vaporetto (water bus) stop. I bought my ticket, put it away quickly, and headed to the vaporetto that the woman told me to take. Because of the rain, the boat was quite crowded, and those of us with luggage had to stand in a well at the bottom of the steps.

As soon as the vaporetto pulled away from the dock, I realized that I had taken the wrong one. Instead of heading to the Accademia area, I was on a boat speeding to the islands of Murano and Burano. When I asked the deckhand how to get back, he told me to get off on one of the Murano stops and head back. I yanked my luggage up the steps of the vaporetto, and my shoe flew off. In order not to fall, I had to put my foot down on the step right where dirty water had puddled. It took me a few seconds to get my balance and re-shoe my foot, and by that time, my sock was soaked.

A security guard working at that dock helped me figure out which vaporetto I needed to take, and I looked for my original ticket so that I could re-validate it (They are good for 90 minutes). I could not find it, so I asked a couple if they would watch my luggage, and I went to the automatic machines and bought another ticket with my credit card. I thanked the couple for watching my luggage, put the card back into my billfold, and walked to the platform to board the next vaporetto.

Almost two hours after I got to Venezia, I finally made it to my hotel. When I went to pay, I noticed the card I had used to buy the last vaporetto ticket was not in my billfold. I was sure I had put it there, but I wondered if it had fallen into the nether regions of the bag in my haste to put it away. I got into my room and frantically turned my tote and purse upside down to empty them on the bed. I have a mental picture of myself wildly throwing everything in the air in an attempt to find the card, but that didn’t happen. I simply picked through each item and discovered that, no, the card was not there.

I called Mike, and he immediately called our bank. I knew what my last charge was, and it showed, as did over $5500 worth of charges to some place I had never heard of let alone been. And, whoever had my charged all that in about 45 minutes. Luckily, the bank canceled the card immediately after. Since I always carry two cards, I was okay.

I want to point out something that I always preach (and sometimes do not follow): When you travel, you have to be extremely careful especially when you are in a hurry or are stressed. I have no idea what happened to that card. I thought I put it back in the billfold that was in my tote; perhaps I did; perhaps I didn’t. There is no use stressing over what I did or didn’t do as the card was gone. The incident did, however, remind me to check twice (or three or four times) to make sure I had secured the remaining card each time I used it.

MANIC Panic

If you know me, you know I do not like crowds. In all honestly, the main reason I do not like to go to Rome, Firenze, and Venezia is because of the hoards of people who roam those cities daily. After a few days in Venezia, my last group and I (There were five of us) headed to the lovely Tuscan town of Lucca.

Lucca is not a major train stop, so to get there, we had to take a regional train to Pisa from our connection in Firenze and then catch another regional train from Pisa to Lucca. Regional trains do not have assigned seats, so the first train was packed, and two of us had to stand from Firenze to Pisa. Since we had only 10 minutes to make our connection in Pisa, we hurried to the next train only to find every car with standing room only.

We boarded a car that had room enough for the five of us and our luggage to stand somewhat comfortably. Unfortunately, parents with a baby and her stroller decided to push on after us.

“There is no room,” I said.

“Mia madre! Mia madre! (My mother! My mother!)” the woman kept yelling as her husband and an older woman pushed the stroller into the car, jamming it into my leg repeatedly.

“There is no room!” I yelled again as I tried not to fall. The couple got themselves, the baby, the mother, and the stroller into the opening, and they were not moving…neither were the rest of us.

Suddenly, five large men appeared in the car doorway. “NO!” I yelped. “NO ROOM.” They just looked at me and pushed their way into the car. Honestly, two weeks after this happened, I still have no idea how they crammed themselves in there. Nor do I have any idea how any of the other people who insisted on pushing and cramming into that car were able to wedge themselves in it. I was beside myself. The mother kept shoving the stroller into my leg; one of the large men positioned himself behind me and was elbowing me in the back; and I was trying to breathe and keep my balance. My heart was pounding.

More and more people tried to push their way onto the train that was already about 15 minutes late in departing. Suddenly, a Trenitalia employee appeared at the door.

“This train is not going to move because it is too crowded,” she announced. “Some of you have to get off. There is another train you can take soon.” No one moved, but I looked at the four women in my group.

“Let’s take the next train,” I said. Even that turned into an ordeal because we then had to fight to have people make room to let us off. One guy in particular had positioned his suitcase right in the doorway, and he would not move it so that we could get ourselves and our luggage off of that train. “MOVE THAT THING OR I’M GOING TO THROW IT OFF,” I yelled at him in Italian and then English. He would not do it, so I pushed my own bags into it so we could push past him. (I won’t repeat here what I said as I passed him, but you can imagine it was not the most polite thing I’ve said in my life.)

By the time the next train left, my heart had stopped throbbing and I was no longer shaking. We arrived in Lucca a little later than we originally planned, but we got there safely. We checked into the B&B, took showers (I didn’t even dry my hair), and went for dinner….and drinks. If you look carefully at the photo above, you’ll see that one person’s drink is almost empty. I’m not saying whose it was, but suffice to say it calmed me down.

Wine Not

Montepulciano, another small Tuscan town, is full of wineries within its historic city walls. When visiting, you can walk from one winery to the other without ever leaving the historic center. Not only can you tour the underground cellars, you can also have guided tastings that include Montepulciano’s famous Vino Nobile.

I’ll write about DeRicci Cantina at some other point, but suffice to say we took a tour of the underground and then had a tasting of six of their wines. The underground cellars are dramatic, and one resembles a “cathedral” due to its high ceilings and pillars. Its oldest part is the round, Etruscan cellar which has a well at the center.

As you might imagine, someone who doesn’t like crowds is probably also not too thrilled about tight, windowless spaces. At the end of the tour I was itching to get to the tasting simply because I wanted out of that underground. Usually tastings are pretty quiet, private affairs, but DeRicci offers them to multitudes of guests at once. Each group has its own table filled with three or six empty glasses depending on which tasting it has bought. We had the six-glass tasting.

This was probably the weirdest tasting I’ve ever done. Someone sat us at our table, and waiters brought us a plate topped with bruschetta, cheese, bread, and meats. A guy brought over wine and started pouring as he told us about the sparkling white wine he was giving us. He then left and returned with a red and continued this until he had poured all six. While he told us a bit about the wines, he neither explained them in detail nor suggested which would be best with the snacks in front of us. The wines were okay. As I don’t drink much and prefer whites over reds, I shared my reds with the others in the group. They, too, preferred the wines we had tasted at Tamburini Winery a few days before.

Because there were over 50 guests in the tasting room, it was getting hot and very loud. We could barely hear each other as we discussed the wines, and we decided to leave. I stood (a little too quickly, maybe), and my arm brushed a glass over the edge of the table. The crash brought the room to instant silence and then applause. I bowed and made my red-faced exit through the door as the clamoring increased in volume again.

The Rest o’ The Stress

Without going into any detail, let me say that I did have a few things happen that I will not mention here but that caused me so much stress that I developed disseminated shingles. If you don’t know, disseminated shingles is a form of varicella-zoster virus that causes lesions that resemble chickenpox. Unlike with regular shingles, disseminated shingles appear as a widespread rash and appear on multiple areas of the body. I had lesions on my legs, arms, and back. Luckily for me, they were more itchy than painful.

I was lucky enough to be able to see a doctor who started immediately me on Acyclovir, an anti-viral medication. By doing that, we were able to prevent possible spread to more serious conditions. My luck held out in that I never had the pain that some describe with regular shingles, and I had cream that helped with the itching. It took about two weeks for the lesions to start to fade, and while I can still see some of the residual scars, they are disappearing, too. (I’ll save you the horror of the photos. Urg.)

After talking with the doctor, I knew I could continue with the last group, but I decided I had had enough. I changed my airline ticket to come home a week early.

As the last group and I enjoyed our final few days in Napoli, my right eye started bothering me. Let’s just say that five days later, it is still a bit swollen and red, and I have no idea if it is an erstwhile shingles lesion, a stye, or a bug bite (Something did fly into my eye shortly before it started bothering me). At this point, I don’t care. I’m home.