We have been busy since the last update in July. We depart for Italy in exactly three weeks from today, and are starting to get really excited.
The trip is mostly planned except for a few minor details. We spent the last several weeks finalizing our travel plans between stops on our itinerary. We have purchased several train tickets in advance on high speed Trenitalia trains we will take. These require seat reservations, and also have steeply discounted fares if purchased well in advance of the travel dates. Since the discounts are limited in quantity, we needed to purchase them now. We have completed the following:
- Purchased tickets from Positano Shuttle for both the Naples to Positano and Positano to Naples trips. We opted for a shared shuttle instead of trying to utilize the slow trains and public buses that can be overcrowded on the winding roads between these two destinations.
- We did purchase one set of regional tickets for the transit between Riomaggiore and Florence because part of the route was on an Intercity train that also has advance purchase discounts. There is typically no advantage to purchasing regional train tickets in advance, but since there were two segments of the trip between these two cities that was combined with the Intercity train segment, we opted to purchase them as a bundle in advance.
- Visited the local AAA office to purchase my International Drivers Permit that is required for driving in Italy. It is basically a multi-language interpretation of the information contained on your normal driver’s license.
- Rented our car for the time we will be driving in Tuscany through Auto-Europe, which is a well established broker of rental cars in Europe. We will be picking up the car from Avis in Florence, and dropping it off at the main train station in Rome as we transit from Assisi to Positano.
- Requested tickets for the Pope’s General Audience on the Wednesday we are in Rome. The tickets are free, but must be requested through one of several outlets, and picked up the day prior to the audience. We requested our tickets through the Bishops’ Office for United States Visitors to the Vatican, and will pick them up at their office near the Trevi Fountain on Tuesday afternoon.
Most of the rest of our efforts have been focused on collecting information for activities we plan to do while in the various cities. As an example, we have pulled together information on several hikes that are available to do in Cinque Terre, as well as Ferry Schedules and multi day train passes for travel between the five cities.
This also applies to some of the places we plan on visiting near Positano, such as the island of Capri, and the cities of Amalfi and Sorrento. We plan of taking ferries to Capri and Amalfi, weather permitting since they don’t run when the seas are rough, and then the public buses back to Positano.
We also gathered train schedules and ferry times for transiting from Varenna on Lake Como to the city of Como, via train, and then taking the Ferry back to Varenna, via the city of Bellagio. That will pretty much fill up an entire day. We will hopefully have one great weather day for that adventure since we will be riding outside on the ferry for photos. If we happen to have two good weather days, we will utilize one of them to take the Bernina Express (click for link to website), which is a scenic train trip through one of the highest rail routes in Switzerland, which is fairly close to Lake Como. Again, this requires an entire day to get from Varenna, our basecamp on Lake Como, to the start of the Bernina Route in Tirano, Italy. We will only transit as far as Pontresina, Switzerland, which is very close to St. Moritz. This will allow us some time to explore Pontresina, possibly visiting a glacier, before we start back to Varenna. This route requires special reservations on their scenic touring train cars, so we hope that there will be space left by the time we make our decision to go, based on the weather forecast. It would not be a very scenic trip in bad weather, and is fairly expensive at 170.00 swiss francs for the journey, about $175. If the seats are sold out or there is bad weather forecast, we will plan on trying this out on a subsequent trip to Europe.
With the trip planning mostly complete, we will start to focus on our packing efforts, trying to minimize the weight of our luggage as much as possible, while still having sufficient clothing. It will help that we will have access to a washing machine in both Varenna and Positano. Luckily these are both longer stay durations since the clothes will have to air dry without a dryer, which most places in Europe don’t seem to have, probably due to the high cost of electricity.
We have experimented with using a free app called Tripit, which organizes most of your travel plans, especially where email confirmations are utilized. You just forward all of your confirmations to their email address once you have an account, and the information is loaded up into your trip. It works fairly well, but at times you have to go in and manually add some missing information. It is nice because you can invite others to see your plan, and that makes it a good tool for sharing information with our families.
This is a public link to our Tripit site for this trip titled Milan, Italy, September 2019. The Tripit App selects the name of the trip based on the first city we identified in our plans, so it does not match this blog title, and unfortunately, it can’t be edited in Tripit.