I’m writing this while sitting on an Air Canada Rouge flight, the final leg of my summer travel adventure! I’ve spent the last 19 days traversing the globe with my family, and I’ve been trying to get better at journaling, at holding onto the memories. To that goal, I thought it would be fun to share some stories about my travels with anyone who might like to read them. You guys are keeping me on task with my journaling! I will now attempt to condense those journal entries into this article.
I was pretty nervous before heading off on this trip. My mom raised me into a seasoned traveler, but leaving her and my home worried me. I anticipated some serious homesickness, especially since this is my last summer at home before leaving for college. But I love to travel and I’m lucky to have the opportunity, and so I joined up with my cousin Maddie’s branch of the family to take the adventure of a lifetime.
The trip began with a flight to Toronto, where I met up with my cousins and Aunt and Uncle to board an overnight flight to Frankfurt. I more or less stumbled off of that flight after a combined 14 hours of air time and found myself in Friedrichsdorf. Fun fact: Friedrichsdorf is the home of the original inventor of the telephone! Everything in our hotel was telephone themed, it was pretty fantastic.
My Uncle Mark is all about “the shift.” He follows strict rules, and is an even stricter enforcer, in an attempt to make shifting from one time zone to the next as swift as possible. Not painless, no. Just more or less immediate. I’m honestly surprised this trait didn’t scare my Aunt Anita off. But I guess I see the benefits, seeing as I should be fast asleep with jet lag right now, but am instead awake enough to write this piece!
Anyway, we did our best to stay awake on our way to visit family in Germany. I was immediately reminded why I love to visit. Everything was green, the air felt fresh with the promise of adventure, and the warmth of my family was all-enveloping. We talked over tea and an arrangement of different cakes. We listened to my young cousins perform a duet on the piano and the French horn. We bounced on the trampoline and I attempted to learn some German phrases as the words I’d managed to learn in childhood came back to me. It’s amazing how many languages students in Germany are able to learn; I wish I had started learning as young as they did, but it’s never too late to try!
After Friedrichsdorf, we visited the rest of our family in Bruchenbrücken. Arriving in Bruchenbrücken was an amazing feeling. I didn’t realize how much I loved that town until returning this year. I’m heading off to college in the fall. I spent a lot of time this year studying epic works and the so-called hero’s journey. It seemed to be a given that every hero returns from their adventure changed, not quite fitting in back home. I’ve been trying to prepare myself for college by looking at it as my own hero’s journey, but I didn’t like the idea of losing my sense of home in San Diego. Well, let me tell you, my visit to Bruchenbrücken knocked that fear out of me completely. I felt so incredibly at home in a town I’ve only been in a handful of weeks throughout my life. It was a feeling of rightness in the people I was with, and the memories I had there. I can never lose my sense of home, not any more than I’ll lose my love of Germany. That was a really important realization for me as we barbecued in the front lawn and threw frisbees and ate as a family.
My Uncle Christian took all us cousins on a tractor ride, through the streets and into the fields. We stood in the tractor’s scoop and he lifted us into the air, among the cherry trees. We picked cherries and ate them off the branches. The juice ran down my fingers and left my hands stained purple. I didn’t even know that shade of purple existed. When we returned the tractor to my Oma and Opa’s house, Maddie and I played on their swing set, the one I remember from visits when I was eight years old and explored their garden. There was more fresh fruit to pick, raspberries and currants to eat straight off the vine.
We took my baby cousin Lina to the local school and played on their playground. Germany has the best playgrounds. We heard stories from family members we hadn’t seen in years and ate wild pig. It was everything I remember and everything I needed to reenergize my jetlagged, tired body for the rest of the trip!
The next leg of travel took place on the speediest train between Frankfurt and Munich. In Munich, we met up with my Uncle’s friends and collected my cousin Lauren. We all drove into Schliersee, a town tucked into the valleys of the German Alps, home of my Uncle’s friends Hubert and Disco Tony. I’ve only been through Schliersee once before. It was absolutely beautiful, even greener than Frankfurt had been, with a sparkling lake and lots of other small mountain towns to visit. We stayed in a nice bed and breakfast and saw no one else. It seemed as if we were the only ones there.
One night, I crept downstairs late in an attempt to capture the best possible wifi connection. I sat in the darkness swiping around my iPad, my face probably lit up like a ghost. The landlady walked in and screamed. I still feel bad about that. She didn’t speak much English, and my German is mostly limited to ice cream flavors. But we laughed together and she brought me chocolates to fuel the late-night web surfing.
The next day we visited different towns and scarfed down traditional Bavarian sausages. We took Lina to the local playground, which boasts a pretty epic zipline. We ate ice cream by the lake because Lina’s only goal in life is to get ice cream, which means we all got lots and lots. It was a good visit.
It’s an eight-hour drive from Schliersee to Tuscany. We split the drive into four-hour halves, stopping in Bardolino for a few days to bike into town and frolick in Lake Garda. I get carsick, which meant I got the front seat in Disco Tony’s car. Maddie, Lauren, and I traded off shifts as DJ. Disco Tony has very refined musical tastes. Even downloading the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever couldn’t completely appease him. The drive was fun, there were trees and rivers and towns to watch going by as we wound our way through the mountains and in Italy, we saw sunflower field after sunflower field. Sunflowers are so happy to look at!
Bardolino is a small town. It’s touristy but mostly seemed to be full of German tourists. When we stopped in a restaurant a little outside town everyone stared. We were the only Americans, but we had Tony to help us get by. He explained nuances in the culture, how the meals were meant to go, helped translate. It was a pretty immersive experience for a family trip!
Maddie and I rented bikes from our hotel to ride into town and get at least one gelato a day. We swam in the pool and in the lake. We watched my Baby Lina and sent postcards home. I swear to God we saw lake otters, but no one seems to believe they exist.
Maddie, Lauren, and I became The Three Musketeers as we navigated the railroads and water buses on a day trip to Venice. (Maybe more accurately, we became Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy. Hamilton was a major feature of this trip.) The city was crowded, but not as crowded as I expected. We arrived early to see the main tourist spots and then snuck through the alleyways for photo shoots and discoveries. We found ourselves in the most incredible bookshop. The Libreria Acqua Alta is built of books, stacks, and stacks of books, bathtubs filled with books. You can climb a staircase of books to watch the boats pass by. There are books and postcards and newspaper clippings of every genre, from years recent and years past. There’s even an erotica section on proud display right next to a gondola full of books that feature as the centerpiece of the main room.
This trip to Venice was our last day before leaving Bardolino. It was another four-hour drive to Tuscany. There were a million more sunflower fields to see, each one more and more exciting. This time, we let Disco Tony control the radio.
On the way to Tuscany we picked up my cousins Albert and Caspar. They were gone when we visited Bruchenbrücken, and so they were kind enough to come visit us now, and I got another rush of the excitement I had felt visiting their hometown. There’s nothing like a reunion with family; it brings back so many memories and so much love.
We found them in Pisa, and then headed to our rented villa in Vada, Tuscany. The villa was absolutely incredible. I spent every day feeling like a storybook character, like a princess in her summer home, hidden away from the world and soaking up the sun and the warm Tuscan air.
Each bedroom in the villa was themed. Maddie and I shared the Yellow Room, which had sombreros on the wall, Teletubby stickers on the dresser, and possibly a ghost. It was excellent! The curtains and the color scheme maintained my sunflower-filled Italy trip. We stayed on the main floor. There was also upstairs, where my aunt and uncle stayed with Baby Lina, and a basement level, with more bedrooms, and a game room with a life-size Elvis statue that scared me every single time I walked in.
On our first day we rented mopeds. Albert chauffeured me around for a bit, and then I attempted to drive it myself. That sort of ended in disaster, but hey, it was fun! We had more gelato.
The villa became a home for family and friends. It seemed as if every day someone was leaving or arriving. New people for me to meet and bond with. It was sort of a strange dynamic, getting to know all of my uncle’s friends as we lived in a house altogether, but it was a fun experience and I came to appreciate everyone who stopped in. They were potential moped drivers, dishwashing buddies, people to cheer through Eurocup with. I learned to share my space and did my best to stay open to every conversation, because although I like my alone time this trip was a unique chance to meet all sorts of unique people. We splashed around in the pool and shared precious shady spots when drying off. We played with Snapchat filters and a karaoke machine. We lit sparklers to celebrate the Fourth of July. We ate dinners altogether and took day trips to the ocean. I got to swim the Mediterranean as I was reading about the famous heroes who had sailed it in The Song of Achilles. Maddie was reading The Odyssey.
Every town in Italy made me stop and take a breath. There’s just so much history in the cobblestone streets, the bricks in the buildings. We visited two towns with Ancient Roman roots, Bolgheri and Volterra. We went to Bolgheri for dinner, but spent a day in Volterra. Volterra sits high up on the hills, and is still under excavation. I watched the archeologists at work on a Roman theater and wondered at the view laid out beyond them, all rolling hills and greenery, windmills in the distance. I tried to imagine what it had looked like the Etruscans who once walked these streets. My mother later reminded me that Volterra serves as home to the Volturi vampires, according to Stephenie Meyer. I wasn’t on guard at all. I totally could’ve died. But I feel like the view might've been worth it?
Maddie and I set off on another adventure through the trains after Lauren had gone home. We were only two of our three musketeers, but it was a great day in Florence. Florence was hotter than Vada. It’s farther inland, and full of people. But again, not as crowded as I had expected. We started at the Duomo. It took my breath away as soon as I saw it soaring up into the sky. We rode a carousel. Then we stopped to eat lunch in a courtyard down an alleyway, described by the sign as an “Urban Garden.” They had street food and free wifi, which I used to download and promptly get lost in Pokemon Go. I played my way through Florence, and accidentally stumbled upon the statue of David when searching for Pokéstops. It was a fantastic moment. The plaza in which David stands is awesome, full of statues and history, and a giant golden turtle.
Maddie and I climbed up to the Plaza di Michelangelo. It was the most exhausting climb, but the view was absolutely worth it. It was even worth breaking out the selfie stick.
Back in the city, we visited the church where Michelangelo and Dante are buried. It was too hot to meet the church dress code, but we came prepared with bright pink flower print sarongs to wrap around our waists. The height of fashion, I know.
We stopped to shop, ate gelato, and made a scavenger hunt out of a series of murals scattered throughout the city.
The last days of our trip were spent in the villa. We went swimming every day and continued to eat our weight in gelato. We listened to music and traded stories with our fellow villa-dwellers, when we all took day trips to different places. We had our last meal altogether and it was absolutely delicious.
The next day, I flew back to Canada with Maddie’s family. I spent the night with them, and now I’m on my way back to San Diego, writing all this down. I watched Letters to Juliet before beginning to write, in an attempt to pass the flight time and relive my Italian adventures. Coming home is the best feeling in the world. I live in an amazing place. There are some tourists sitting behind me on the plane, talking about all the things they’re going to do in San Diego. It makes me feel so proud of the city I grew up in, and even more excited to get back. But I’ll never stop loving travel. There’s something so exciting about learning a new place, finding your way in a new city and suddenly feeling at home there. This trip has made me really excited for my next big adventure! Even though leaving home sucks, the adventure is always worth it, and it only makes coming back sweeter!
