Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

I'm back on my own again. It's an odd feeling, because I've been travelling with others for pretty much the entire past month. On the one hand I'm looking forward to the solitude and the autonomy, but on the other hand I've definitely gotten used to going with the flow (aka letting other people worry about the details). It takes a lot of self-motivation to leave a city you've just gotten familiar with in order to move onto a completely new place where you're starting from scratch again. Ah well, this is what I signed up for, right?

Sorrento turned out to be quite the pretty town, if not a little touristy. Its main draw is the isle of Capri which is just a short ferry ride away. My dad and I visited the island on our second day there and it was beautiful. There isn't a whole lot to do there besides enjoy the scenery, which is what I did. My dad got more adventurous and wandered off to the other side of the island, but I was still feeling pretty weak from the food poisoning, so I just kinda chilled for a while on a bench overlooking the sea. We ended up bussing around the island, which was a great way to see the sights. The roads there reminded me of pretty much every James Bond car chase scene I've ever seen, with sharp turns, roads built into the cliff, the Mediterranean right next to you.

The following day we left for Amalfi. If you've heard about the Amalfi Coast, it's all true. If you haven't, it's stunning. The drive there is the main attraction. I'm definitely not eloquent enough to describe the scenery along the way. Go get a thesaurus, look up beautiful, imagine a comma in between each of those words, and add “super” in front of all of them...that'll give you a small idea. The towns along the way are all built into the cliffs, which are several hundred feet high. The narrow road was built along the cliff, so again, you drive with the Mediterranean to your right, several hundred feet down. And above and below you are houses that leave you wondering how they ever got built in the first place. The road itself is very old, so it is very narrow. The bus honks as it goes around every corner to let oncoming cars know it's coming, since there's only room for one of them. If two oncoming cars meet and it's too narrow, one of them (and all the cars behind it) has to back up until there's enough room to pass. The curves are the best part, because it gives you a great view of the next set of cliffs jutting out over the turquoise water, a few miles away. If you're going to be heading to Southern Italy, it's a must see. Amalfi itself is one of the towns built into the hill, so as you can guess, it's a lot of climbing. Luckily this was the first day I was feeling like I had most of my strength back (I'm back to normal now if you're worried), so this was good timing. Again, aside from admiring the views, there's not a whole lot going on in Amalfi. There's a couple things to check out, but in the off season, there's not too much to do other than wander around. Well there's the lemoncello. Since it's so warm there, they have orange and lemon trees growing everywhere. So what a lot of people do is turn their lemons into the liqueur and sell it in bottles of all shapes and sizes. And thankfully, due to the wonders of supply and demand, it's usually pretty cheap. Very tasty stuff.

We took off from Amalfi to Salerno in order to catch a train up to Florence. The original plan had been to keep moving south to Sicily, but we had been enjoying ourselves too much along the way and kept booking extra nights in the different places where we stayed. Ah well. Aside from the drastic drop in temperature, I'm really glad we ended up in Florence. It's the perfect sized town for a backpacker... small enough where you can pretty much walk everywhere, but big enough that there's plenty to do and see to keep you busy for days. Plus, it's got butt-loads of culture. Sorry for the vulgarity, I just figured that phrase had never been written before, and I wanted to be the first. But it's true...lots of history as the former unofficial capital of art, philosophy, and wealth in old Europe. We did another bus tour of the city which was a good way to get acquainted with it. We saw and did most of the major sites, such as Ponte Vecchio, the Piazza del Michelangelo, the Uffizi art gallery, Il Duomo, and the Galleria Academia (most famously known for housing Michelangelo's David). Our second night in Florence, I did a bit of research online and found a good restaurant to eat at. Il Latino is an interesting spot...most people make reservations, but still “line up” (I use this term loosely...Italians don't so much line up as try to get in front of as many people as possible by any means necessary) at 7:30 when it opens. We showed up without a reservation, so after waiting a few extra minutes, we were seated at a table for 4 with an elderly Italian couple. There's a small chance they were from Naples. I don't know what I was doing wrong while eating my appetizer, but I do know the lady sitting next to me did. Every minute or so she'd mutter something in Italian, look over at me or my plate (not subtly) and give me a dirty look. I didn't help my cause when I went to take a slice of the bread from our shared basket and had to maul it because it hadn't been sliced all the way through. Surprisingly, they didn't take any bread after. My dad was having a good laugh at all this, because for once it was me screwing up and looking like a dork. This lasted for about 2 minutes until he went to uncork the bottle of wine and the cork went flying onto the floor, hitting the man on its way down. What can I say, we Wright men are some classy folk. The meal itself was great...we stuffed ourselves silly, as they brought out course after course. Even the after-dinner drink had an after-drink drink. My favourite part of the meal was when the old couple ordered a couple of steak florentines. The looks on their faces were priceless when the waiter brought out what must have been at least 40 oz of meat. It was Fred Flintstone size. Our turn to laugh at them!

My Canadian friend Liz had dropped me a line earlier in the day saying she was in town, so we ended up meeting after dinner for some wine and beer. It was great catching up with her and hanging out a bit more, since this will probably our last time seeing each other on this trip. All in all Florence was great.

I'm currently on a train, heading for Venice. Not sure when I'll be able to post this, since my hostel doesn't have wifi apparently (this was written on Saturday afternoon). I saw my dad off yesterday in the evening. It was harder saying goodbye than I thought. 2 weeks was definitely the right length for his visit, but it was hard seeing him go, knowing that's the last time I'll likely see family for quite a while.

A few words about my dad. Normally I wouldn't write about somebody like this specifically, but I'm pretty sure he wants to read about himself (because he told me so), so here it is. Travelling with him was great and lots of fun. It wasn't all roses though, and we both knew that would be the case coming into this. We've got similar personalities (including hard-headedness), but our travelling styles are very different. I'm all about trying to blend in as much as possible (as much as a 6-2, heavyset, pale guy with a 2 month ginger beard can blend in), whereas my dad...not so much. He has no problems walking around with a map in his hand, looking around to admire the sites while at the same time gazing for the next street name, looking confused. He's kind of a dorky tourist, but he knows it, and to his full credit, he simply doesn't give a shit what other people think of it. I'm being completely sincere when I say I admire that about him. Haha what I didn't admire was the travel pouch. This is one of those strapped pouches with a couple zippable pockets for stuff like your passport and wallet, to defend against pickpockets (Rome and other parts of Italy are notorious for pickpockets in his defence). He would wear it around his neck, under his tshirt, which made for a nice obvious square bulge. This quickly became known as the purse, and again to his credit, he took my ribbing with good humour. The most admirable part of his attitude is that he would always see the upside of everything. This is another way of saying he was easily impressed. Every other meal, he would declare the sandwich or pasta he was eating to be the best he's ever had in his life. Imagine taking a vacation where everything you experience is the best ever....that would be awesome! Me, I'm not so enthusiastic all the time...something I should probably work on.

So our differences in personality led to a bit of friction at times, but nothing more than any 2 people who travel together for 2 weeks would experience, and quite frankly much less than I was expecting. Dad, thanks for letting me join you on your vacation, I'm so glad we got to do it together. I appreciate everything you did for me. Love you pop, see you in the summer!

Here are some pictures from the rest of our trip. Again, they're off my dad's camera (I didn't even see some of this stuff because I was sick). Sorry if a bunch of them are sideways, I'll fix them as soon as I can.

Spoiler alert: It's Tuesday now and I'm already in Eastern Europe. But I'll bore you with those details another time. Also, ironically, I had the best gellato I've ever had yesterday...no joke

When in Rome

I hate to brag, but I'm pretty much at the peak of awesomeness on this trip. How, you may be asking, could I possibly reach such a peak? Well, it's 8:30 PM and I just left my dad to come back to the hotel room so I could blog and watch a Kid Rock concert on MTV Europe while he went to find a bar to have drinks and meet people. That awesome. Let me start from the beginning.

I flew into Rome from Amsterdam last Saturday and had a night to kill before meeting up with my dad. My intention was to find some cheap food and get an early night's sleep. However, that didn't happen - as it rarely seems to over here. I met a few Americans in my hostel room who were on their way out to dinner, so I figured I'd join them. They were a few years younger, all college kids studying a semester abroad in Holland. They were just visiting Rome for the weekend. They were all pretty fun, so after dinner we went out for drinks. Then a bunch of drama went down like you only see in bad sitcoms. The guy there had a bad combination of too much wine and an unrequited crush on one of the girls. Somehow it ended up being just the 3 of us at the table when it went down, and it just got messy. Gotta hand it to the guy for laying it out there, because he definitely made his feelings be known. He just wasn't doing such a good job at hearing that the feelings were not being returned. This conversation went on for about 30 minutes, him telling her how much he liked her, etc and her saying how much she didn't. With me there. He even tried pulling me into it a couple times, which I just refused to allow to happen. I excused myself to go to the bar and get the hell out of the convo and when I came back all I saw was him storming off towards the hostel with his glass of wine in hand. Ah well. We had a few more drinks, awkwardly laughed off what had just transpired, and eventually made it back to the hostel. I was kinda thankful that group had to take off early the next morning, so I didn't have to see any more of the awkwardness.

So on Sunday I killed a couple hours and went to the hotel my dad had booked. Note the lack of “s” in hotel. A real hotel. As in no sharing the bathroom or room itself with anybody else. As in other people make the beds. As in they provide you with soap and towels. As in the room was actually at a respectable level of cleanliness. I felt like royalty! After 2 straight months in hostels, I had definitely forgotten how the other half lives. I took a quick nap (without having to hide all my valuable shit!) and waited for my dad to arrive. It was great seeing him when he got there....that's probably the longest I've gone without seeing any family, so it was very refreshing. We quickly caught up and then hit the road in Rome. It is a beautiful city. We walked to the Coliseum, which is incredibly impressive in person. Pictures don't do it justice, especially when you consider how long ago it was built. But then again everything in Rome seems to have been built a couple thousand years ago. It's pretty safe to say Romans took their churches seriously back in the day. You can walk by any old looking church on the street, and pop your head in, and they are usually breathtaking on the inside. Later, after dinner, we went out for a drink and found a bar that happened to be attached to a hostel. My dad just loved this, chatting with everybody, asking all sorts of questions like where they were from, etc. I think that interaction gave him a bit of a glimpse as to the type of people I've been meeting and how I've been socializing. And I'm pretty sure I did my best to not act embarrassed, which was admittedly a little tough at times, like when he asked about 3 or 4 Americans in a row why their English was so good. This was after a couple bottles of vino, to his credit.

The following day we did a hop on hop off bus tour of Rome which was cool. I often see the tours in the cities I visit, but don't usually do them for budgetary reasons. So it was nice to see the city from a different perspective, and get taken to all the different sites. We did some more site seeing, and then had another nice night of dinner and a couple bottles of wine. The following day we did the Vatican. Talk about your impressive churches. St Peter's Basilica is jaw-dropping. We went in the morning and luckily it wasn't too busy. We took our time exploring the Basilica, and then visited the tombs of all the popes, which is slightly less creepy than it sounds. Then we did the Scavi tour, which I recommend for anybody who is visiting the Vatican. I had never heard of it, but my dad had booked it a few weeks in advance. Apparently they only let 200 people in per day, so it's kind of a big deal I suppose. Basically, the Basilica is built above ancient tombs. The rumour was that St Peter's bones were buried beneath the alter of the Basilica, but nobody really wanted to try digging them up. Eventually an excavation was commissioned in secret, and sure enough, St Peter's bones were found. So you go underground through these very narrow streets that are thousands of years old, and you see lots of tombs, and eventually at the end of the tour you actually see St Peter's bones...so they say anyways. Our guide said that whenever Pope JP II would come back from travelling, the first thing he would always do is come down to pray with St Peter's remains. Like I said, it was a very cool tour, and if you get the chance, take the tour. If for no other reason that you can act snooty and say you did the exclusive tour.

So the next day we figured we'd move on to our next destination and head to Naples. I'm sure most backpackers can relate to this problem... when I tell people of my journey, they often ask “what's your favourite place”? This is such a difficult question to answer since so many cities have so many different things going for them. One may have great history and museums, but the people leave something to be desired. Some may have great culture, but the prices can be prohibitive. Well it hasn't happened yet, but if ever I get asked what my least favourite place is, I'll be able to say Naples without hesitation. I'll admit part of my reason isn't Naples' fault, but I have nothing good to say about my time there. My main 2 reasons for this are: 1) I was struck with food poisoning within about 3 hours of being there and 2) Naples was kind of a hole. No offense.

I'll start with the latter. When we were there, there was a garbage strike on. Not a great way for a city to endear itself to any visitor. Our hotel was in kind of a dumpy area, and the piles of garbage certainly didn't improve anything. My dad would say this next point a lot more diplomatically than I would. He would say that “Naples is a city that hides its charms well”. Here's how I'd say it if I was talking to you straight - everybody we encountered in Naples kind of seemed like a dick. I'm not generalizing and saying everybody from Naples is a dick. I'm not even saying we encountered enough people to represent a legitimate sample size of dickishness. I'm just saying that the people who we crossed paths with in our particular journey were, with very few exceptions, dicks.

Onto the former. I'm not sure what I ate (we've got it narrowed down to a few suspects), but by our first evening in Naples, I was feeling ill. I couldn't even make it through dinner without being sick. I'll spare you all the gritty details, but I spent the majority of the night assisting my stomach in making sure it was rid of whatever it was that it didn't agree with. I was very thankful to have my dad there to help me out, as he made a couple trips to the pharmacy for me, and grabbed me a few bottles of water, etc too. I was also very thankful to be in a hotel room rather than a hostel, the biggest reason being an en suite bathroom. I slowly started to feel better the following afternoon, finally able to keep water down. By the next morning dry toast was doable, so I definitely made strides. I stayed in for the most part, and my dad did a lot of site-seeing on his own. I think he found some nice parts of the city, despite the dicks (those are my words, not his – he'd never say something like that about people, no matter how many dicks there were). He'd probably have nicer things to say about the city since he had more exposure to it, but I'm pretty sure he'd agree that he enjoyed Rome more too.

So finally, today (Saturday), we left for Sorrento. We probably would have left a day or two earlier, but I just wasn't physically up for it unfortunately. Tomorrow we'll likely try to catch a ferry out to Capri, which is supposed to be a cool scenic island. I'm looking forward to the next week with my dad, where we'll both hopefully be healthy and able to do this trip all-out for the rest of the way! That's why I'm back in the room early. I'm still feeling pretty fragile from the food poisoning, so I'll rest up for one more night and hopefully be back to my old self.

Here are some pics of Rome, taken by my dad for the most part.

Amsterdam

It was nice. There was a park. It was also nice. Met up with Courtenay, who is the friend of a friend from back home and went to a hip hop show (Jedi Mind Tricks). It was nice.

Next up, Italy! I'll be flying to Rome this afternoon and my dad will be meeting me there tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to catching up with my old man over the next two weeks as we travel the south of the country. Should be fun!

Remembrance Day

One of the most important days on the Canadian calendar in my opinion. If there's any vets out there, thanks!
Two proud Canadians at the Canadian War Memorial in London

Time flies

Well it's been a while since my last post. That's cause I've just been having too much fun to stop and write to be honest. A lot's happened in the last while, so it'll unfortunately have to be a bulletted list update

• Left Bath for Bristol and stayed with Mandy's friends who were good people and great hosts. They showed us around Bristol, including some cool graffiti (Bristol is Banksy's hometown). That night we went to a house party. Apparently it was nothing out of the ordinary for there...but it's definitely unlike any houseparty I've been to. Hard to really describe it...so I won't. Just kinda crazy.
• The following day I left for London to meet up with the rest of the Core Four as we had taken to calling ourselves. London consisted of strolls through many beautiful parks (Hyde, Regents, Kensington, and probably more that I'm not thinking of), Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, the Thames, trying to comprehend the Australian fascination with Squirrels, the British Museum, getting shut out of pubs way too early, Trafalgar Square, etc.
• After a few days of London shenanigans, Liz, Dan, and I decided to cross the Channel and head for Belgium. Hayley stayed behind in London for a friend, which is too bad, but understandable. We'll hopefully cross paths again! The 3 of us started in Brussels (lost and confused), but eventually found our way to the hostel as well as plenty of fun. We hit up a bar the first night and must have enjoyed some of Belgium's finest beers a little too much, because we only ended up back at the hostel after sunrise. Brussels is a busy town with some beautiful architecture. We did lots of exploring in between stops for chocolates, waffles, and of course more beers.
• Bruges. Got here yesterday and explored the town. Liz was brave enough to climb the high tower and got a great view of the city. Dan and I climbed into the nearest pub. Later we took a boat tour of the canals of Bruges. And generally just walked around and discovered the beautiful town. Very picturesque. Don't believe Collin Ferrell, it's not a shithole.

So now you're caught up. Liz the Leader is leaving us today for France (despite our begging), so Dan and I will be heading to Amsterdam for a boy's trip today. I'm not sure how we'll have fun there on our own, but I'm sure we'll manage. Until next time!

Oh and I actually managed to take some pictures. Here you go!