Hats off to our Folks

Both Philip's and my family (both families of 6) took a trip similar to this when we were young--my family in 1973 and his, I believe, in 1976. We keep thinking how much more difficult and daunting this venture would have been 35 years ago:

1. Navigation. Our parents only had fold-out maps. We have a navigation system in our rental car (with AC, stereo, iphone chargers, DVD player), plus the ipad, which pinpoints our location in a matter of seconds. And we still get confused. At one point, we gave up on finding our B&B and had to put the longitude and latitude of the place into our ipad to figure out where we were going. Notably, our current navigation system talks to us in French--so in Italy, we hear it say, "tournez a droit" or whatever, and it can get a little comical.

1a. Currency. We've only had to deal in 2 currencies--the British pound and the euro. It's still a bit confusing, but imagine going from country to country and having to exchange money!

1b. Borders. Nowadays, you just breeze on through, like you're going from West Virginia to Maryland--no worries. But the queues, the questions, the rigamarole all those years ago? Daunting.

2. Children. They get bored easily. We have 2 itouches, an iphone, an ipad, books, and movies and tv shows downloaded onto the computer. And they still melt down. What in the world did our parents do? Peter and Joan had two boys under 7.

3. Planning. We avoid queues by preordering tickets on the internet; we booked our accommodations months ago and have all the confirmations on emails. Via the internet also prebooked all ferries and trains in advance. For our parents, it all had to be done over the phone or by mail--or by the seat of the pants. Btw, we booked almost half of our hotels through Tablet Hotels--an international boutique hotel site. They are always excellent and plushy hotels with all kinds of perks and discounts. We're always psyched when a Tablet hotel is coming up.

4. Language barriers. We have Italian "apps" that give us the exact pronunciation of most any phrase we need. Clare has been learning Italian through these apps all summer and has been a great resource. Our parents had old-fashioned dictionaries.

5. Staying in touch with home. We have this blog, email, cell phones, snail mail, New York Times and Sydney Morning Herald access on our i-toys. We are following the US Open on our ipad (updated every 30 seconds).

6. Accommodations.
I believe the Kearns actually slept in hotels and B&Bs. We slept in a very small caravan in dodgy campgrounds every night (George and I swinging in hammocks over everyone else). My mother still talks about the rowdy Australian rugby team that keep us up all night outside of Venice.

Anyway, hats off to George, Pree, Joan and Peter. You guys were crazy (crazy!), but you gave us children an incredible experience.