I was already familiar with the concept from Cornell’s Merlin app, which does something similar on your smartphone. If you hear a bird, you can bring up the app and it will listen and tell you what you’re hearing. It turns out that both the Merlin app and the Haikubox are based on a Cornell project called Birdnet. It’s an artificial neural network (AI software) that can recognize the sounds of over 6,000 bird species from all over the world.
So it’s been a long time without a post, so I guess it’s time I got back to work. In my defense, the reason I haven’t written more is that we’ve been busy. And as I mentioned before, I don’t write quickly.
Anne has done a good job with the chronicling our travels on Facebook, so I thought I’d write a bit about the places we’ve stayed. We’re currently at Fort Pickens Campground in Gulf Islands National Seashore, but in order to get this post finished, I’ll save writing about our last couple of stops until my next post.
We traveled from South Carolina to Faver-Dykes State Park in St. Augustine, Florida, arriving today. Saturday night we stayed at another Harvest Host. This one is at Debellation Brewing Company in Richmond Hill, Georgia. The beer was good, but the food selection was limited and we’d eaten out the last two nights, so we ate in the camper. The only downside was that Debellation was backed up to I-95, so it was pretty noisy. We had a little mishap when hitching up to leave Huntington Beach yesterday, so I thought I’d talk about that and some other travel and trailer-related topics.
Actually, more like “Ah, not cold!” We’re at Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina, and it was 64 degrees this afternoon, with a forecast low of 54 tonight. It was in the twenties and snowing when we left Maine Sunday morning, so this is quite an improvement. We made it to my brother Pete and sister-in-law Kathleen’s in time to watch the Super Bowl with them and our niece Sara. We took our time getting moving Monday morning and headed off. I wanted to avoid the I-95 corridor from Philadelphia to Richmond with the camper, so we decided to head down the Delmarva peninsula and cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. We stopped in Middletown, Delaware for a nice lunch with my high school friend Dave Mumford. We didn’t leave there until almost 3, so we ended up crossing the bridge in the dark. Bad planning on my part! We’ll have to try another time to get the views.
We’re heading off to warmer climes! This has been our travel blog since 2015, and hasn’t been updated since out trip to Scandinavia in August 2019. So I’ll try to filling in a bit of the last two and a half years for Anne and me.
I retired in November 2019, and in January 2020 we bought a Safari Condo Alto F1743. 
After a stop at the stave church in Lom, we made it to our lodging for the night, the Elveseter Hotel. We got moved in just before the rain started. We had a drink and a good dinner, then headed to bed. Tomorrow we would drive the Sognefjellet a scenic drive over the mountains and down to the fjords to the south.
It was cloudy and misty when we woke up, but after breakfast we began to see patches of blue sky. After exploring the grounds of the hotel a bit, we headed further up into the mountains. The climb was gradual, and we stopped at several scenic overlooks along the way. While it wasn’t bright and sunny, most of the views weren’t obscured by clouds. The colors we mostly muted greens and browns. I was tempted to convert my pictures to black-and-white.
Monday afternoon it was time to leave Copenhagen and fly to Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden, the home of Volvo. The put us up at a nice hotel, including a great dinner. Tuesday morning we headed to the Factory Delivery Center to pick up Anne’s new car, a red XC40. After the orientation, a short test drive and lunch, it was time to continue our journey. We hit the road, heading north towards Norway. I hadn’t booked a hotel for Tuesday night because I didn’t know what time we would be leaving Gothenburg, or how far we would feel like driving. We got out around 2:30, and seemed to be making good time, so we decided to continue on to Lillehammer, best know to Americans as the site of the 1994 Winter Olympics. We made it there in time to check in to our hotel and get a great burger and beers at a nice pub called Heim.
As part of their Overseas Delivery program, Volvo is paying for round trip flights between Boston and Gothenburg, Sweden for Anne and me. SAS had a connection through Copenhagen, so we arranged to have a layover for a few days. We were in Premium Economy with extra legroom, wifi, upgraded meals and free booze. The only downside was that the flight left early, at 5:30. By the time I finished messing with the blog and decided to try to rest it was getting close to 11 Boston time. I had barely closed my eyes when they turned up the lights to serve breakfast! We were on the ground in Copenhagen before 6:30 am local time. We took the Metro into the city and had a fairly short walk to the Hotel Bethel. (It’s lucky the walk was fairly short, since pulling our suitcases over the cobblestone sidewalks was no fun.)
This blog hasn’t seen any updates in over four years, but as I write this, Anne and I are on a flight to Copenhagen to begin a two week trip to Scandinavia. The planning for this trip was less extensive than for our trip four years ago, but we’re still hoping for a good time! Once again we’re picking up a car–this time it’s Anne’s new Volvo XC40, so we’re picking it up in Gothenburg, Sweden.
It was a long drive (over 500 km/300 miles) to La Montalla, our agriturismo in Tuscany. Since most of it was on the autostrada, we got to experience sticker shock at Italian tolls–over 30 Euros due when we got off. We arrived around 3 pm, only to encounter a note that seemed to say (it was in Italian) that someone would be back at 3:30. So we decided to check out Contignano, the town nearby. In truth, there wasn’t too much to check out–a small village with narrow streets, a church, and very little open. It did have an ATM and, down the street, a combined piscina (swimming pool)/bar with no water in the pool. We finished our explorations and when we got back, Alphonso, the owner’s son had arrived to check us in.
My original plan for the drive to Italy was to make it into an all day scenic drive. But when we woke up to another foggy, drizzly day, it seemed better to just take the shortest route, and hope the weather was better on the other side of the Alps. Anne wanted to get caches in three countries on a single day. (It’s hard to do that where we live.) So we headed back to Füssen (in Germany), where she did a couple at the Lech River falls. Then back to Reutte for an Austrian cache as we headed south.
Thursday morning we packed up, bid farewell to Frau Lee and and headed off for our next stop, Reutte, Austria. It was a pretty long ride and rather than heading straight there we took a slight detour to Lindau on the shore of the Bodensee (Lake Constance) a large alpine lake at the junction of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The weather turned out better than we expected–partly cloudy and in the 60’s. We got our first view of as we headed down the autobahn towards Lindau and a better view from the shore of the lake in the old town, which is located on an island connected to the mainland by a causeway.
The drive from Rothenburg, mostly on the autobahn, wasn’t very interesting. Some nice vistas of bright yellow fields of rape seed (the source of canola oil), but many trucks to contend with on the highway and rain for the second half of the trip. When we got to Bacharach, it was much cooler–in the low 50’s. We checked in at Hotel Kranenturm, our base for the next few days and headed out to explore the town, or at least find dinner. We finally ended up a a Greek restaurant called Zeus. As we sat down, Anne said, “Is that Boy George on the radio?” The couple next to us, who turned out to be from Philadelphia said, “Yeah, we just heard Duran Duran a minute ago.” It turned out that for some reason eighties music seemed to play in every restaurant we visited in the Rhine valley.
After another good breakfast we bid “Auf Wiedersehen” to Munich and Hotel Uhland. This hotel was the highlight of our trip so far, with a great breakfast, friendly and helpful staff and convenient services. (They did a load of laundry for us for 12 Euro. We spent 8 Euro to do it ourselves at a laundromat in Florence.)
I used the Michelin Navigation app to select a scenic route to Augsburg, where we picked up the Romantische Straße (Romantic Road), a scenic route that wends its way from Würzburg down to Füssen in the Alps. Here’s a map of the Romantische Straße–it’s the North-South red line. We traveled the middle part of it, from Augsburg up to Rothenburg (just west of Nürnburg, you have to zoom in to see it). The drive to Augsburg was pleasant–a short stretch on the autobahn, followed by some scenic back roads the rest of the way there. I had the car up to about 90 mph for a short while on the highway, and the rest of the drive was pleasant once I figured how speed limits worked.
Our train arrived at Munich Hauptbahnhof (the main train station) at just after 6 am. We decided to see if we could find coffee and breakfast somewhere before walking to our hotel. Our first observation was that Munich is not an early rising town. We headed out of the station and found that the nearby cafes didn’t open until 7 and Burger King not until 8. So we headed back into the station and found the shopping section we’d missed the first time and there our breakfast and coffee.
We got to Venice on the train at about 1:30, figured out the Vaporetto (Venice mass transit equivalent of a city bus) and got to our hotel, Pensione Guerrato a little while later. After unpacking we headed out for a short vaporetta cruise (we bought the 48 hour transit pass) before heading to Rialto Bridge to meet our guide, Alessandro Schezzini for back-to-back walking tours. The first, the “offbeat” Venice tour took us on a walk through the back streets and alleys, accompanied by opinionated commentary from Alessandro. That was followed by the bar tour, hitting three bacari (Venetian bars) where we drank wine and ate cicchetti (tapas-style hors d’oeuvres), while chatting with Alessandro and the other folks on the tour. Luckily the last bar was close to our hotel. We managed to stumble back, stopping along the way to pick up a few slices of pizza to supplement the cicchetti.
We’ve been here almost a week and the weather has been terrific. The only rain was a sprinkle as we arrived in Florence on Saturday. Yesterday (Sunday) was cool, with highs in the 50’s. The Florentines were bundled up, but we were comfortable in jackets. Today was glorious–bright sunshine and highs in the mid 70’s.
So it’s official, we didn’t allow enough time for Florence, or I didn’t plan it effectively, or both. It’s 6 pm on our last day here and we feel like we haven’t scratched the surface.
It’s the end of our second day in Florence. Time flies when your having fun! We’re back in our room relatively early for once–it’s only 9:15. Last night at this time we hadn’t started dinner yet! And we’re listening to the Red Sox broadcast, streaming on the Internet, since they’re playing a day game today.
Florence is less overwhelming than Rome. It’s much smaller and very walkable–everything is close together and the narrow streets keep speeds under control. It’s also more “touristy.” And the tourists here seem to be mostly American (or Japanese), while in Rome they were equally likely to be speaking English, French, German, Spanish or some language I didn’t recognize. On the other hand, the selfie stick and flower sellers here aren’t ubiquitous and seem less aggressive.
We’re in Florence and here I am just starting on Rome days 3 and 4. I’ll try to get better at this. I think leaving Rome will help. Rome is so huge and bustling, that you’re tempted to always do one more thing, because there’s always one more great thing to do and you can’t possibly do them all–especially in four days.
Well, life is trade-offs, and we had to make one on Thursday. We had originally planned to go to the Colosseum and Forum on Wednesday afternoon, then take the train to Ostia Antica on Thursday morning to see more Roman ruins. (Ostia Antica is sort of a mini-Pompeii, just a half-hour train ride from Rome. But we didn’t manage to get to the Colosseum on Wednesday so we decided to go Thursday morning instead. The Colosseum is just a short walk from our hotel, so we ran the gauntlet of selfie-stick sellers and fake gladiators to start there. We used our Roma Pass to skip the ticket lines and listened to a Rick Steves audio tour on our phones to get a sense of the history and what went on here. The Steves audio tours are much like the TV show–lots of good information and a bit hokey. They’re not as good as a well-done guided tour, but they’re way better than trying to go it alone with just a book, and they’re free!
So, we’re three days into our visit and I haven’t posted anything. I plead exhaustion. Our trip was pretty uneventful, other than an hour delay on the runway at Heathrow to resolve computer problems before take-off on our leg to Rome.
We got to our hotel at around 3 pm. That was about 18 hours after we left Boylston, with perhaps two or three hours of sleep on the plane. The hotel room was very nice, but the wifi wasn’t working–they hoped to have it fixed later in the day.
Internet access while travelling is pretty important to us–probably more important than mobile phone service. All of the hotels we are staying in advertise Wifi availability, but we’d really like to have internet access on our phones, for things like navigation, as well as posting to Facebook!
Both Anne and I have unlocked GSM phones that support European frequencies. Our service at home is through T-Mobile, which offers “free unlimited” international roaming. The “unlimited” is in quotes because it’s throttled to 2G speeds unless you pay quite a bit extra ($50 for 500 mb). But it turns out our plan isn’t eligible for it anyway and it’s not a good enough deal to make it worth upgrading.
Arrive late in the day after driving from Tuscany, with a stop in Lucca along the way. We’re staying at Il Saraceno in Volastra, which has free parking.
Experience the Cinque Terre.
Leave in the morning, drive to Nice, get car washed and drop it off. Fly home, departing at 3:25 pm.
Hike the famous trails. We need to buy a trekking card, available at trail heads for €7.50.
Arrive after driving from Reutte. We’re staying at Tirlerhof in Castelrotto (map).
Ötzi the Iceman at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano. Scenic drive, perhaps the Abbreviated Dolomite Loop Drive in the Rick Steves Italy book, or one of these. Recommended road: Grande Strada delle Dolomiti – SS 48.
Long drive to Contignano, Tuscany.
Drive from Bacharach to Reutte, about 5 hours on the Autobahn. Arrive at Hotel das Beck (map).
Ludwig’s castles, Füssen, drive the Deutsche Alpenstrasse towards Berchtesgaten.
Tram up the Zugspitze. Some hiking based on recommendation from family friend Mee’sha.
Drive to Bolzano, Italy. The shortest route is over Brenner Pass. We may want to consider using Reschen Pass further west. Route towards Reschen Pass. Alternate routes. Also see Stelvio Pass.
Leave Munich and drive the Romantic Road (map) to Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Staying off the Autobahn, the trip is about 4 hours of driving. We should plan to arrive in time to check in to the hotel, get dinner and then take the Might Watchman’s Tour at 8 pm. Alternatively, we could eat afterwards.
We’re staying at Hotel-Gasthof Goldener Greifen (map). They have parking available and free loaner bikes for guests!
Arrive early morning. We’re staying at the Hotel Uhland. It’s a 1.2 km walk, or we could take the 58 bus.
Pickup Day at BMW Welt! We’re booked for a factory tour at 11:45 and the actual pickup is at 3:30. We can use BMW’s complimentary shuttle service from the hotel to die Welt.
Arrive at 1:35 pm. We’re staying at the Hotel Pensione Guerrato. To get there we’ll take the vaporetto (ferry) route 1 from the train station to Rialto Mercato. From there it’s a one minute walk to the hotel. We may want to pay €25 for a 36 hour vaporetto pass, since individual rides are €7.
Evening: Alessandro Schezzini tour(s)
Depart for Munich at 8:57 pm.
Arrive 11:22 am. We’re staying at the Dei Mori B&B, about a 20 minute walk from the train station.
Museums.
Most museums closed. Duomo, walking tour.
Depart for Venice 11:30 am.
Museums: Accademia, Uffizi Gallery, Bargello Rick Steves Renaissance Walk (book page 493, podcast)
We arrive at about noon. We will take the Leonardo Express from the airport to the Rome Termini station. I originally thought that we would want to buy SIM cards at either the airport or the station. It appears that all the cell providers have shops at Termini. But I was able to purchase cards and activate them in advance, so this shouldn’t be necessary. More on SIM cards and internet.
This post describes our planned itinerary. I will update it over time as plans change or are refined.
Four weeks, starting in Rome, departing from Nice.
| Day # | Date | Weekday | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 0 | April 13 | Monday | Leave Boston |
| Day 1 | April 14 | Tuesday | Arrive in Rome at Noon |
| Day 2 | April 15 | Wednesday | Rome |
| Day 3 | April 16 | Thursday | |
| Day 4 | April 17 | Friday | |
| Day 5 | April 18 | Saturday | Train to Florence in am |
| Day 6 | April 19 | Sunday | Florence |
| Day 7 | April 20 | Monday | |
| Day 8 | April 21 | Tuesday | Train to Venice in am |
| Day 9 | April 22 | Wednesday | Venice, overnight train to Munich at 9 pm |
| Day 10 | April 23 | Thursday | Arrive Munich 7 am |
| Day 11 | April 24 | Friday | Munich, Pickup Day, Factory tour at 11:45, pickup at 3:30 |
| Day 12 | April 25 | Saturday | Munich |
| Day 13 | April 26 | Sunday | Drive to Rothenburg ob der Tauber |
| Day 14 | April 27 | Monday | Rothenburg. Drive to Bacharach. |
| Day 15 | April 28 | Tuesday | Rhine Cruise |
| Day 16 | April 29 | Wednesday | Mosel Valley drive, Burg Eltz |
| Day 17 | April 30 | Thursday | Drive to Reutte, Austria |
| Day 18 | May 1 | Friday | Ludwig’s castles, Füssen, etc. |
| Day 19 | May 2 | Saturday | Zugspitze, some Alpine hiking |
| Day 20 | May 3 | Sunday | Drive to Bolzano, Italy |
| Day 21 | May 4 | Monday | Bolzano and the Dolomites |
| Day 22 | May 5 | Tuesday | Drive to Contignano, Tuscany |
| Day 23 | May 6 | Wednesday | Assisi/Umbria hill towns |
| Day 24 | May 7 | Thursday | Tuscany |
| Day 25 | May 8 | Friday | Tuscany |
| Day 26 | May 9 | Saturday | Drive to Volastra/Cinque Terre |
| Day 27 | May 10 | Sunday | Cinque Terre |
| Day 28 | May 11 | Monday | Drive to Nice, dropoff car, fly home |
After quite a bit of research and discussion, we have at least the outline of a plan for the trip. Originally, my thought was to pick up the car in Munich, drive south through Austria to Venice, then on to Rome and Florence, making stops in the countryside (Umbria and Tuscany) along the way. Then head back up through Switzerland to Germany and finish our sightseeing there before dropping the car back in Munich and flying home.
I’ve been working at Constant Contact since March of 2005. One cool benefit we have is a paid one month sabbatical (in addition to regular vacation) after ten years of service. Around the holidays last December it occurred to me that mine was coming up and I ought to start thinking about how to spend it.
Anne and I have done only a little overseas travel. We went to Vienna, Budapest and Prague in 2000, had a long weekend in London right before I started at Constant Contact in 2005 and went to Paris for a week in 2013. But having a month seems like a perfect chance to do some European travel before retirement. Anne has been at least temporarily retired from paid employment for the last couple of years, so we don’t have to worry about time off for her.
Lots of our older pictures are online at our photo gallery. More recent photos are mostly at Facebook (Jim Anne) although I hope to publish more here on this new site.
Back in the summer of ‘99 we travelled to national parks across much of the country for a month. We have our journal and pictures online!
