A European Odyssey: Pazzo 2

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As we continued with Christmas dinner, pouring more holiday wine, the questions came in rapid succession and with excited voices: “when to go? where to go? how do we get passports? what about medicines? travel insurance? etc.”. The question of when to go would not be as much a challenge as where to go. Now that I had opened the proverbial can of worms, the suggested places to visit stretched across the entire European continent from the Danube to the English Channel. My English Literature professor mother-in-law, Alice, had her heart set on Shakespeare’s England, or perhaps Shelley’s Rome or even Lord Byron’s Venice; any will do. My High School principal mother, Gwen, thought it would be grand to see the Louvre in Paris, or the Uffizi of Florence, but “England would be nice too”. My recently retired yet adventurous father-in-law, Rus, yearned to see the majesty of the Matterhorn or Michelangelo’s Florence or the WWII cemeteries of France. More wine please.

I asked myself, how do we see 2,000 years of history and 2,000 miles of landscape in a fourteen day timeframe? Oh yes, the senior members of our family decided it had to be at least two weeks. What the heck, they had plenty of time on their hands, why waste an opportunity to delve into the old world culture if I am offering to be the tour guide.

Norma retrieved the world atlas from the study and we moved all the dishes to one end of the table, poured more wine, and swarmed over the maps of Europe, measuring distances between destinations with a nearby, uneaten string bean. After much bean positioning and stretching, we decided that the farthest we should travel in one direction was 1,000 miles or three string beans. Thus was born the rule of the haricot vert.

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