The Moveable Feast Returns to the beginning

Greetings all - the Moveable Feast has returned to from whence it began - Paris. For those who dont know, "The Moveable Feast" is the title of Ernest Hemingway's memoir of life in Paris in the 1920s which I consider to be his best book. It is a captivating piece of travel writing that well captures both time and place for those of us - like me - who wish we had been there alongside Papa H and his exotic menagerie of friends. It seemed to me a good title for this blog for a trip where we have feasted on the scents, sites and sounds of many parts of the world that I would have scarely imagined I would visit even a few years ago. I am not signing off yet as we still have a North American part of this adventure ahead and I look forward to compiling my often acerbic and twisted reportage on the trail back home.

My one resounding piece of advice to all - if you can take a year off to travel or do whatever you want for that matter, do it! - and do it while you are still lucky enough to have the good health and energy to make the best of it. Patty and I are indeed fortunqte to be in this coveted state and to have had this opportunity - no matter how often we were reminded that we were no longer backpackers in our early 20s.

Naturally, we are a wee bit travel weary at this point (some 85 beds into the trip) and are looking forward to our return to Canadian soil. During our last few weeks in Croatia and Italy, we have been hit by the dual sledgehammers of a heat wave and a full-frontal tourist blitz throughout the sites and cafes of these places. The latter has been worse in many respects but we have enjoyed soem of its sideline benefits - for example, overhearing the most remarkable conversations between distinctly unworldly tourists and, in internet and telephone cafes, their colourful phone calls back to their Moms trying to extract extra cash because their hostel is a mess. We can just hear their Moms thinking that it could not possibly be worse than the state of thir bedrooms at home.

After travelling gracefully incident-free for ten months, our luck finally ran out this week at the Pisa airport where I was relieved of my passport and other valuables by a pick pocket. All of a sudden we were not lazing around Pisa enjoying its famously tilting sites, we were bulleting to Rome to get to the Canadian embassy on the last business day before a long weeken to get an emergency passport. The Embassy was able to perform magnificently under the circumstances in a multi-multi Euro transaction. The consular staff also let me know that it has one of the highest incident rates in the world for stolen passports confirming that Italian operators are not only deft with their hands in carving marble and painting ceilings.

I am spending today researching the big differences between Paris and Rome - two frontline contenders for the classiest cities in Europe. Early observations in Paris suggest far fewer sunglasses deployed and far more smlall dogs relieving themselves on the streets. Nor have we seen any police women in high heels yet. In Italy, unlike at home, I noted that the highway authorities do not dare tell Italians to take off their sunglasses when entering tunnels. Anyone who has driven in Italy will recall how prodigous are the Italians in tunnel building. Rather than asking that sunglasses be removed, they simply light up these immense tunnels so vision through Raybans is comfortable.

Au revoir