I want to just say a couple of words about traveling to Europe from Seattle. It is a long way, and unless you have enough miles or money to travel first or business class, the trip can be grueling. I suppose folks back home reading this from Italy are going to think that’s kind of petty, but I do have some tips:

The first is to fly through one of the European cities rather than from New York or Atlanta. You get on the plane in the afternoon in Seattle and arrive the next morning, and that has seemed to be a lot more tolerable — and shorter — than going through another American airport.

We have flown on SAS to Copenhagen, Air France to Paris, and this time on Lufthansa to Frankfurt, and it is pretty easy and convenient to get a connecting flight from there. Actually, the best flight from Seattle is to London Heathrow, but it is sometimes harder to get a connecting flight from there because so many of the flights to the continent go from Gatwick, and you have to make that switch.

That being said, you can see from the accompanying photo of an American traveler enjoying the comforts of the Frankfurt airport that this system isn’t foolproof. But at least they don’t have armrests, so one can stretch out. sort of. We were on an Airbus 330 in steerage. Plenty of legroom. If you are under 5-feet.

This is a view of the itinerary Pat and I will follow in Italy. The trip will begin with a week in Rome, a week in Puglia with our base in Lecce — you can see it right on the heel of the boot, a week in Eastern Sicily with an apartment in Syracusa, then five days on the Amalfi Coast (Ravello) and then a return to Rome. An entire month. And that requires a little bit of background.

Pat and I have traveled to Italy twice previously, but both have been in the northern areas, Tuscany, Venice, Cinque terra, Lucca. We’d only had one day in Rome, and I have been eager to get back there to get a better feel of the city, see more of the city’s art and architecture, and hang around places like Campo  de Fiori that I have heard so much about. But that’s an old story, and there are a lot of places we’d like to go.

The difference this time began with the decision to leave full-time employment — officially on Oct. 1, which, incidentally, is the day this trip begins.

Pat suggested that I might need a month’s trip to move past thinking about work continually and focus on the next phase. It is a worthy goal, and part of this trip will be an investigation into whether I can do that. I have always identified myself with what I do for a living, and my goal is to live more in the moment, be content with what I am doing at the time. Cliche? Sure, but accomplishing it will require going beyond cliche status.

So the decision was made to take the month of October to travel. I think Pat may have had some self-interest in mind, but she seemed from the very beginning to be willing to make the sacrifice to take a month from her schedule to mess around in Italy with me. The itinerary was interative: I wanted to go to Rome, and I had been thinking about  Sicily for a while. Patty wanted to make sure there were opportunities for walking and hiking, which she prefers to the more urban pleasures I prefer such as hanging around drinking coffee in the morning, wine in the afternoon, and napping in between. So this itinerary is an amalgam of those two pursuits. Not really a compromise: the idea was for everyone to get to do what they wanted some of the time. As this blog evolves, I want to talk about where we have been and what we have seen and done, but also explore the other questions of life after work — or before returning to self-employment — and getting along with each other while everyone around us is speaking Italian.