Evolution 

This has been a mentally exhausting last few days.  It feels like the most troubled of the times leading up to departing for Croatia this summer.  So much uncertainty, so many unknowns.  You wake up one morning with a clear idea in mind, and it’s quickly washed away by the next bit of information that comes in.  It’s hard to believe that it was only Sunday morning, just 48 hours ago, that we settled on Plan A.

Sunday AM: Plan A (Bike to Piacenza)

The weather has taken a turn for the much better here in the Po valley.  Conditions look fair and stable for about 10 days, and it seems clear that we’ll be able to bike all the way to Piacenza, as planned.  We detail out the coming days, make bookings through to Cremona, create and load GPS routes, and then take off for a day ride.  Plan A looks like this:

• 10/27: bike to Sermide, a village on the Po about halfway to Mantua.  We’ve booked at a nice sounding inn with a couple of restaurants close by.
• 10/28-9: Bike to Mantua, stay two nights at an apartment near the river, an easy walking distance to the center.  We’re excited about this place and stay.  Last time here, we stayed in the core and hated riding over its horrible cobblestones and climbing four steep floors up to an attic room with beams so low I brained myself three times before mastering the layout.
• 10/30: Canetti sull’ Oglio, another riverside town halfway to Cremona.  Not beside that river though, but the Oglio - the minor tributary that flows south to the big river from its origin at Lake Iseo.
• 10/31-11/01: Cremona.  We’ve booked ourselves into a very nice sounding apartment, the Stone Violin, about two blocks from the cathedral.  We loved Cremona last time and are anxious to return.
• 11/02-4: Piacenza.  Not yet booked, in case the good weather doesn’t hold out that far after all.
• 11/05-7: Take the train to Tremoli, a town on the Molise coast just north of Puglia.  It sounds like a beautiful place.  It will take all day on the train and require transfers at Ancona and Pescana, but then we’ll stay for a few day rides before continuing south to Brindisi to collect our waiting suitcases and take the ferry to Greece.

Monday AM: Plan B (bike to Brindisi)

We return from dinner Sunday evening to news of the new, tighter Covid restrictions that go into effect nationwide at midnight.   Gyms, pools and cinemas are closing, which is fine by us.  Closure of restaurants by 6 PM is another story though.  How will restaurants and society deal with this?  Will some start shutting down entirely?  Will we get trapped somewhere and not be able to get a meal?  We’re going to starve!  Suddenly it feels like we need to be getting out of Italy sooner than later.  Greece is one of the only remaining green spots on the EU map.  

It’s obvious that at a minimum we’re going in the wrong direction.  Instead of biking northwest toward Piacenza we need to be going south toward Brindisi, our suitcases, and the ferry to Greece.  We could take the train but in the middle of the night I wake up, think with discomfort about spending fifteen hours cooped up in four regional trains when Covid is raging rampant, and scope out the idea of biking south along the Adriatic coast to Brindisi instead.  I come up with what looks like a plausible route: 14 days more or less, all short enough that we can get our miles in and arrive in town early enough for lunch as our main meal of the day.  The planned itinerary: Comacchio, Ravenna, Rimini, Ancona, Port Sant’ Elpidio, Alba Adriatica, Pescara, Vasto, Termoli, Lescina, Manfredonia, Bitonto, Monopoli, Brindisi.

We discuss this over breakfast, and quickly reach consensus.  We cancel the reservations made just the previous morning for Sermide, Mantua and Cremona, and make new ones for the coming days in Comacchio, Ravenna, Rimini, and Ancona.  Far enough for now.  We can always change our minds in Ancona and catch the train from there if the situation keeps worsening.  

With that settled, we set off for a ride east along the Po.  Along the way we chat with Romain and his family, racing to Venice and their own escape to Greece.  They reinforce our thoughts about leaving the country, and if anything make us think ours are too slow.

Tuesday AM: Plan C

I awake in the middle of the night, take my iPad to the bathroom, and read the mail.  Item 1: a note from Romain sharing a link to The Local, an Italian paper in English.  He recommends reading it for perspective on Covid developments.  It has a firewall, so I take out a one month subscription and read the latest.  The government is cautioning against all unnecessary travel, and warns that they cannot guarantee that other constraints including curfews or regional travel restrictions will not be coming before long (and, in fact, the next morning we’ll learn that already Campania clamped down and banned unnecessary travel into or out of its province).  We’re going too slow.

I go back to bed, sleep on it a bit, and then get up to see if there’s a ferry to Greece from Ancona.  There is.  We could contact our hotel in Brindisi, have our suitcases shipped to Ancona, and leave the country there in just 4 or 5 days.  And then I check the mail and read item 2: a note from my primary care physician at Kaiser.

I’ve developed a sore on my shoulder, probably at least two months ago now, that I’ve assumed was from an insect bite that was slow to heal because I keep scratching and aggravating it.  It finally sinks through to my pea brain that maybe something else is going on.  Saturday morning, Rachael takes a photo of it and I send it off to Kaiser.  Later that day we hear from the weekend doctor who says it looks like an inflamed hair follicle and recommends over the counter treatment as well as more disciplined personal behavior (stop scratching, idiot!).  Good news!  I’d been wondering if it could be cancerous, and if we should be going home. So at least we don’t have that problem to deal with. 

But, we do have that problem to deal with after all.  My doctor is back on duty now, has shared the photo with the dermatologists, and they think it could be cancerous after all.  We e-chat a bit, and he says it’s probably fine to wait until January.  If it were his decision he probably wouldn’t come home now, unless it gets worse.  Watch it, and in the meantime start applying cortisone.

And then, there’s item 3, regarding a different issue we haven’t mentioned before.  Our son Shawn called up Saturday night to let us know how his Friday doctor’s appointment went.  Shawn has a birth defect, a bicuspid aortic valve, and his medical team believes he needs it replaced with an artificial heart valve.  Sometime over the winter he’s looking at open heart surgery.

Suddenly, it’s obvious.  Plan C:  go home.  Now.

Execution

So, this takes a bit of thought.  Rachael and I talk it through as soon as we’re up, and quickly agree that we need to leave as soon as possible.  The fastest option is to fly home from Bologna (I researched flights last night before going back to sleep).  So much to do all of a sudden.  Cancel the reservations we just made in Comacchio, Ravenna, Rimini and Ancona.  Decide which flight we want to take home.  Find a hotel in Bologna.  Contact the hotel in Brindisi and arrange for our suitcases to be shipped up.  Figure out where to stay when we reach Portland.  

Everything comes together, and we get it all done in a few hectic hours: we’ll stay another night here, and then stay three nights in Bologna, flying out Saturday AM.  Suitcases are in shipment to Bologna, and should arrive tomorrow.  The flight is booked, and we have an AirBnB in Northwest Portland booked for the month of November.  I have an appointment with the dermatologist next Friday.

Amazing.  For now at least, our Balkan dream of winter in Crete will remain exactly that: a dream.  Home in time for the election after all, and the coming civil war!  Not our first choice of course, and we’re not at all enthusiastic about returning to our deranged homeland.  

It’s the right thing to do under the circumstances though, obviously.  Team Anderson has been so lucky, and has used up at least several of its proverbial nine lives by now.  No sense pushing our luck too far and finding ourselves trapped on the wrong side of the ocean at the wrong time of life.

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