Home From Italy
Oct. 13th, 2015 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sroniIt occurs to me that maybe I should have written more things from our trip/while we were there/our trip back, but, I didn’t. Oh well.
For the trip down, I was put in charge of navigating, because I apparently inherited my mom’s sense of directional skills; there are two stories that I tell semi-frequently to demonstrate the two types of directional skills that my brother and I possess. Kevin (as my dad calls him here) once had to call my mom because he’d gotten lost and didn’t know how to get back home and it turned out that he was about eight blocks away from the place we’d lived for the past twelve years or so. Story Two is about myself:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aadler, Kevin and I had driven down to Houston (I was a brand new driver, so I did most of my driving in Oklahoma rather than in anything resembling a city; hit a dog once but didn’t freak out because I had a car right beside me and a car right behind me and if I’d done anything to evade the dog, I would potentially have caused a massive wreck with all three of our cars, plus anyone who was behind them. I don’t feel bad about it, either, though I do feel bad for the dog itself.) because Kevin needed to go to the Chinese Embassy there for visa stuff before flying out of Houston to China. Being the newest driver meant that they really didn’t want me driving in the city, and I didn’t want to be driving in the city, so I was instead put in charge of navigation (plus there were exactly two of us in the car that could read a damn map and aadler was already driving). Kevin had an app on his phone that would give us directions, but we couldn’t select routes, and it wanted us to constantly take highways while aadler wanted to be taking other roads with stoplights and stuff. One of the first things we did when we got there was find a hotel, and the hotel had those little touristy maps, so I grabbed one of them. While we were getting food, I saw that there were a different set of the touristy maps there that was quite a bit more in-depth than the one I’d grabbed at the hotel, so I grabbed one of those, too. Flash forward to Monday, when we need to get Kevin to the airport, and I was navigating by the map in the atlas, the two touristy maps, and Kevin’s phone, figuring out new routes if we missed a turn, and I am damn proud of that.
And before you say “But, Roni, those are two completely different sets of skills, yours was navigating by aid of a map while Kevin didn’t have that”, there’s a third story of us on our way to California, when every time Kevin would start driving, he’d ask what he needed to do and we’d say “Hop on the I-40” and he’d ask “But which way?”, so I’m pretty sure that even if he’d had a map at his disposal when he got lost close to home he would have stayed lost. And Story 4 is with Kevin and Irish, Kevin had been driving someone home with the two of us in the back seat, dropped the friend off, gotten lost, and then he decided that maaaaaaybe he shouldn’t have been driving and asked me to drive instead. Before we got lost, I had recognized the area as one I’d done some babysitting about ten years previous (and he’d gone to the friend’s house at least once a month for yeeeeears so he really should have recognized it, too), so I knew where the main street we eventually needed to hook up to was, and I knew where the street that would take us to it would be if we hadn’t managed to go straight to the main street, so I just headed “straight and right” through a bunch of twisty turns and lo and behold, the street I knew would take us there. Kevin was convinced I was getting us more lost, and I just kept telling him to be quiet.
So, yes, two types of directional awareness in my family, and I got my mom’s. (I can also retrace the way I came any time I need to, so long as I was paying at least a little bit of attention the first time, and that skill very much comes in handy. Of course, in terms of my navigating skills, there are the times that I get us in another state, but in my defense, we’re usually within ten minutes of the border when that happens and I realize my mistake right before we see the “Welcome to ______” sign.)
So I was the navigator for this trip because Irish was driving, and I’m literally not allowed to drive over here because I have an American license. I’ll need to take a driving test over here, and before I can do that, I have to 1) pass the written and 2) take driving classes and when the driving instructor thinks I’m ready he signs off and then I can take the practical exam. On the upshot, my father-in-law is a driving instructor, so when it comes time for it, he’ll be the one teaching me. I’ll have a leg up in the fact that I already know how to drive, and I even already know how to drive a manual, I’ll just need a refresher on it and I never actually drove one on the road, and I’ll need to get used to driving on the right hand side of the street and all the other differences. Anyway. Irish had to be the driver, and that meant I was navigator. The roads to take were super simple. We get off the ferry in Holyhead, Wales and drive to Dover, England, which meant that we took one road to the second road, the second road to the third road, the third road to the fourth, and then that one to Dover. Unfortunately, the second road I’d selected wasn’t a toll road (I had been trying to avoid toll roads and he had neglected to tell me that the toll roads were the best and fastest and therefore he wanted me to use them) so we wound up going through the middle of nowhere (where I saw a gorgeous tree and I’m still mad at him that he wouldn’t let me take a picture of this tree because it was the prettiest damn tree I have ever seen in my life and there’s a reason that I sometimes worry that I might be on the Autistic Spectrum, okay? And the fact that when people asked me what my favorite part of the trip was and I go on and on and on about this tree is an example of why I worry. But for real, though, that tree was gorgeous, the bark was all gray brown and the leaves were this almost velvety green and I want a picture and I don’t have one and I am still mad over that) and Irish was snippy at me because I hadn’t read his mind to know that we should have taken a toll road, but I fixed it the first chance we got. But since we had to stay on that road for a couple hours, I took a little nap because the ferry had made me very sick (I get very very boatsick) and I really just needed to nap for some recovery time, unless he wanted me to puke all over him. The other option was to stop driving while my body evened out, but we needed to get to Dover in time to get the ferry we’d booked to go to Calais, France, so stopping for an hour or so was a bad idea.
So turns out that Irish really doesn’t like it when people fall asleep when they’re supposed to be navigating, even if there is nothing for them to do ever. We were on that road for three hours. I told him to wake me up when he saw signs for any one of five different things, and that would have me awake long enough to become alert before we needed to turn onto the next road (which we would stay on for another couple hours). He was still titchy and stuff about it, but meh. We got over it.
England was pretty but I honestly don’t really remember anything other than the tree.
The ferry from Dover to Calais was a lot easier on my stomach than the one from Dublin to Holyhead. I was miserable, but I was able to sleep through it instead of praying for death.
We got off the ferry and drove for a short period for some god unknown reason since it was three in the morning, and missed the main road we needed because Irish was trying to find a gas station instead of the road. He finally pulled over at a rest area instead, in the middle of nowhere, and we slept there for the night. It was cold, I was miserable, I woke up at six, desperately having to use the bathroom, and the place we’d stupidly stopped for the night had no toilet seat or toilet paper. I lasted as long as I could, but I had to wake Irish up to take us to an actual gas station because I was desperate. He was very much not a happy camper (but to be fair, he’d gotten three hours of sleep and here I am, waking him up because it’s a bathroom emergency), and we got stupid lost trying to find one because we had to go into little bitty towns (pretty sure we passed a prison), but we finally found one and all was good in the world again.
I don’t really remember that much about France, I’ll be honest, other than managing to take us about an hour out of the way because I misread the signs (the sign gave an arrow for the road we needed, but it turned out we needed to keep going straight). Turns out that if we’d kept going, we would have hooked up with where we wanted to go, and it cost us more in time and money to turn around and go back than it would have to keep going, but at that point, it was eleven at night and we’d gotten pretty much no sleep (we’d catnapped in the afternoon at one point, and that was about it). We spent the night in France again, and once again, I was freezing. But I popped some sleep meds and conked out (though it did make waking up difficult in the morning and at one point before I fell asleep I was tracing patterns in the air and I’m pretty sure I was solving math equations, which makes no sense because I am not a math equationy type person, but that’s what I was doing anyway) and we got into Italy the next day.
And now we get to Rome. See, I’d opted against taking this one road to the ring road around Rome, because it would be taking us a bit out of the way. Irish decided to look up specific directions for where we needed to go, but didn’t bother asking me where we were. I’d mentioned that we’d already passed that road, but we were tired and hungry and cranky and I guess he just didn’t really process that. The directions he gave me had us taking that road, but I guess I forgot that we’d passed that road, too, so it’s not like I can blame him all that much. It wasn’t until we stopped seeing signs for Rome and started seeing signs for Naples that I figured we should turn around. Turning around was all kinds of “fun” and we wound up going drastically out of our way but finally succeeded. After that, it was smooth sailing until we got into the town. We were supposed to take a particular road, and couldn’t find it. Wound up a couple towns over, turned around and went back the other way, didn’t see the road, hit a couple towns over, turned around again, went back. We did this for at least an hour. We finally just pulled over, got lunch, Irish texted his boss for directions and told him where we were, and we stayed at the pizza place for the next hour until he got a response. (We went back to this pizza place a lot because Marco, the owner, was so nice to us and gave us free bottles of water and a bottle of Coke, and wouldn’t let us buy the square pizza and insisted on cooking us fresh pizza that was damn good pizza. Whenever Irish went in by himself, they were very concerned about me and asked about me a lot.)
Even with the step by step directions, we still got lost, and when we finally found the road, I don’t feel bad about not seeing it, because the name of the road was behind about four different signs and some bushes. The reason we didn’t realize that was because there was a name carved into the wall on the corner, and we assumed that was the name of the street. (It wasn’t.)
All in all, it was actually a really fun trip. I would have liked to eat more and sleep in the car less, but it wasn’t bad at all.
For the trip down, I was put in charge of navigating, because I apparently inherited my mom’s sense of directional skills; there are two stories that I tell semi-frequently to demonstrate the two types of directional skills that my brother and I possess. Kevin (as my dad calls him here) once had to call my mom because he’d gotten lost and didn’t know how to get back home and it turned out that he was about eight blocks away from the place we’d lived for the past twelve years or so. Story Two is about myself:
aadler, Kevin and I had driven down to Houston (I was a brand new driver, so I did most of my driving in Oklahoma rather than in anything resembling a city; hit a dog once but didn’t freak out because I had a car right beside me and a car right behind me and if I’d done anything to evade the dog, I would potentially have caused a massive wreck with all three of our cars, plus anyone who was behind them. I don’t feel bad about it, either, though I do feel bad for the dog itself.) because Kevin needed to go to the Chinese Embassy there for visa stuff before flying out of Houston to China. Being the newest driver meant that they really didn’t want me driving in the city, and I didn’t want to be driving in the city, so I was instead put in charge of navigation (plus there were exactly two of us in the car that could read a damn map and aadler was already driving). Kevin had an app on his phone that would give us directions, but we couldn’t select routes, and it wanted us to constantly take highways while aadler wanted to be taking other roads with stoplights and stuff. One of the first things we did when we got there was find a hotel, and the hotel had those little touristy maps, so I grabbed one of them. While we were getting food, I saw that there were a different set of the touristy maps there that was quite a bit more in-depth than the one I’d grabbed at the hotel, so I grabbed one of those, too. Flash forward to Monday, when we need to get Kevin to the airport, and I was navigating by the map in the atlas, the two touristy maps, and Kevin’s phone, figuring out new routes if we missed a turn, and I am damn proud of that.And before you say “But, Roni, those are two completely different sets of skills, yours was navigating by aid of a map while Kevin didn’t have that”, there’s a third story of us on our way to California, when every time Kevin would start driving, he’d ask what he needed to do and we’d say “Hop on the I-40” and he’d ask “But which way?”, so I’m pretty sure that even if he’d had a map at his disposal when he got lost close to home he would have stayed lost. And Story 4 is with Kevin and Irish, Kevin had been driving someone home with the two of us in the back seat, dropped the friend off, gotten lost, and then he decided that maaaaaaybe he shouldn’t have been driving and asked me to drive instead. Before we got lost, I had recognized the area as one I’d done some babysitting about ten years previous (and he’d gone to the friend’s house at least once a month for yeeeeears so he really should have recognized it, too), so I knew where the main street we eventually needed to hook up to was, and I knew where the street that would take us to it would be if we hadn’t managed to go straight to the main street, so I just headed “straight and right” through a bunch of twisty turns and lo and behold, the street I knew would take us there. Kevin was convinced I was getting us more lost, and I just kept telling him to be quiet.
So, yes, two types of directional awareness in my family, and I got my mom’s. (I can also retrace the way I came any time I need to, so long as I was paying at least a little bit of attention the first time, and that skill very much comes in handy. Of course, in terms of my navigating skills, there are the times that I get us in another state, but in my defense, we’re usually within ten minutes of the border when that happens and I realize my mistake right before we see the “Welcome to ______” sign.)
So I was the navigator for this trip because Irish was driving, and I’m literally not allowed to drive over here because I have an American license. I’ll need to take a driving test over here, and before I can do that, I have to 1) pass the written and 2) take driving classes and when the driving instructor thinks I’m ready he signs off and then I can take the practical exam. On the upshot, my father-in-law is a driving instructor, so when it comes time for it, he’ll be the one teaching me. I’ll have a leg up in the fact that I already know how to drive, and I even already know how to drive a manual, I’ll just need a refresher on it and I never actually drove one on the road, and I’ll need to get used to driving on the right hand side of the street and all the other differences. Anyway. Irish had to be the driver, and that meant I was navigator. The roads to take were super simple. We get off the ferry in Holyhead, Wales and drive to Dover, England, which meant that we took one road to the second road, the second road to the third road, the third road to the fourth, and then that one to Dover. Unfortunately, the second road I’d selected wasn’t a toll road (I had been trying to avoid toll roads and he had neglected to tell me that the toll roads were the best and fastest and therefore he wanted me to use them) so we wound up going through the middle of nowhere (where I saw a gorgeous tree and I’m still mad at him that he wouldn’t let me take a picture of this tree because it was the prettiest damn tree I have ever seen in my life and there’s a reason that I sometimes worry that I might be on the Autistic Spectrum, okay? And the fact that when people asked me what my favorite part of the trip was and I go on and on and on about this tree is an example of why I worry. But for real, though, that tree was gorgeous, the bark was all gray brown and the leaves were this almost velvety green and I want a picture and I don’t have one and I am still mad over that) and Irish was snippy at me because I hadn’t read his mind to know that we should have taken a toll road, but I fixed it the first chance we got. But since we had to stay on that road for a couple hours, I took a little nap because the ferry had made me very sick (I get very very boatsick) and I really just needed to nap for some recovery time, unless he wanted me to puke all over him. The other option was to stop driving while my body evened out, but we needed to get to Dover in time to get the ferry we’d booked to go to Calais, France, so stopping for an hour or so was a bad idea.
So turns out that Irish really doesn’t like it when people fall asleep when they’re supposed to be navigating, even if there is nothing for them to do ever. We were on that road for three hours. I told him to wake me up when he saw signs for any one of five different things, and that would have me awake long enough to become alert before we needed to turn onto the next road (which we would stay on for another couple hours). He was still titchy and stuff about it, but meh. We got over it.
England was pretty but I honestly don’t really remember anything other than the tree.
The ferry from Dover to Calais was a lot easier on my stomach than the one from Dublin to Holyhead. I was miserable, but I was able to sleep through it instead of praying for death.
We got off the ferry and drove for a short period for some god unknown reason since it was three in the morning, and missed the main road we needed because Irish was trying to find a gas station instead of the road. He finally pulled over at a rest area instead, in the middle of nowhere, and we slept there for the night. It was cold, I was miserable, I woke up at six, desperately having to use the bathroom, and the place we’d stupidly stopped for the night had no toilet seat or toilet paper. I lasted as long as I could, but I had to wake Irish up to take us to an actual gas station because I was desperate. He was very much not a happy camper (but to be fair, he’d gotten three hours of sleep and here I am, waking him up because it’s a bathroom emergency), and we got stupid lost trying to find one because we had to go into little bitty towns (pretty sure we passed a prison), but we finally found one and all was good in the world again.
I don’t really remember that much about France, I’ll be honest, other than managing to take us about an hour out of the way because I misread the signs (the sign gave an arrow for the road we needed, but it turned out we needed to keep going straight). Turns out that if we’d kept going, we would have hooked up with where we wanted to go, and it cost us more in time and money to turn around and go back than it would have to keep going, but at that point, it was eleven at night and we’d gotten pretty much no sleep (we’d catnapped in the afternoon at one point, and that was about it). We spent the night in France again, and once again, I was freezing. But I popped some sleep meds and conked out (though it did make waking up difficult in the morning and at one point before I fell asleep I was tracing patterns in the air and I’m pretty sure I was solving math equations, which makes no sense because I am not a math equationy type person, but that’s what I was doing anyway) and we got into Italy the next day.
And now we get to Rome. See, I’d opted against taking this one road to the ring road around Rome, because it would be taking us a bit out of the way. Irish decided to look up specific directions for where we needed to go, but didn’t bother asking me where we were. I’d mentioned that we’d already passed that road, but we were tired and hungry and cranky and I guess he just didn’t really process that. The directions he gave me had us taking that road, but I guess I forgot that we’d passed that road, too, so it’s not like I can blame him all that much. It wasn’t until we stopped seeing signs for Rome and started seeing signs for Naples that I figured we should turn around. Turning around was all kinds of “fun” and we wound up going drastically out of our way but finally succeeded. After that, it was smooth sailing until we got into the town. We were supposed to take a particular road, and couldn’t find it. Wound up a couple towns over, turned around and went back the other way, didn’t see the road, hit a couple towns over, turned around again, went back. We did this for at least an hour. We finally just pulled over, got lunch, Irish texted his boss for directions and told him where we were, and we stayed at the pizza place for the next hour until he got a response. (We went back to this pizza place a lot because Marco, the owner, was so nice to us and gave us free bottles of water and a bottle of Coke, and wouldn’t let us buy the square pizza and insisted on cooking us fresh pizza that was damn good pizza. Whenever Irish went in by himself, they were very concerned about me and asked about me a lot.)
Even with the step by step directions, we still got lost, and when we finally found the road, I don’t feel bad about not seeing it, because the name of the road was behind about four different signs and some bushes. The reason we didn’t realize that was because there was a name carved into the wall on the corner, and we assumed that was the name of the street. (It wasn’t.)
All in all, it was actually a really fun trip. I would have liked to eat more and sleep in the car less, but it wasn’t bad at all.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2015-10-13 11:29 pm (UTC)Gabrielle
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Date: 2015-10-15 02:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-14 12:00 pm (UTC)Sounds like quite the adventure.