I decided to write this book when my wife Rebecca pulled out some old letters. She’d gotten them from my mother. I’d sent them to my mother on my first trip to Europe almost thirty years ago.

Mom had saved these letters because she loved them. Back then, she was the head nurse in a nursing home. She’d read these letters to her patients. She said that the whole home used to look forward to getting them.   When I called her on the phone from Europe, she didn't want to talk to me.  She wanted to know when a new letter was coming.  I am apparently more interesting on the printed page than in person.

Reading through these letters after all these years was shocking. I’d thought that they were funny when I wrote them. I remembered think that they were funny.  What was shocking was that they actually were funny.  They were almost as funny as I had remembered. After all of these years, I had expected them to sound stupid and banal, the product of a mere child.  Apparently, I hadn't grown as much as I had lead myself to believe.  

I don’t usually enjoy reading my own writing.  I don't like it any more than I like looking at myself in a mirror. Ugh! The longer I read—or the more I look—the more faults I see. I would never finish anything if I didn't put it down and get away from it awhile.  Perhaps the longer I put something down, the better I like it.  These letters impressed me as interesting and amusing. With so little experience in life at the time, I had been able to see the humor in things almost effortlessly.

This realization that my work had been good, of course, immediately worried me. Had I grown old? At almost fifty, had I lost the ability to see the nonsense in life? In all the years since, I’d written a lot of books, but I couldn't think of anything that I'd written that was at all amusing. Useful?  I hope so.  Enlightening? Perhaps.  Interesting? Maybe.  Amusing?  Not in the slightest.  

Of course, I don’t feel that I’ve aged at all. My joints may ache, but my humor seems as quick as ever.  I’m still making jokes all the time. I still have to apologize to people who I’ve offended, explaining that "It’s a just joke!" 

My wife and my daughter accuse me of having a perverted sense of humor, but they never accuse me of being humorless. My wife, Rebecca, laughs at my jokes.  After many years of marriage, this is still some accomplishment.  Of course, I also laugh at her joke.  I actually think that she's gotten funnier over time.  Of course, she attributes this to my twisting her sense of humor. She claims that she was a nicer girl before she met me.  She only laughed at nice jokes until she was exposed to my humor.  Still, in the final analysis, we both think that we are pretty funny people.  Our daughter, Amanda, might agree with the funny part, but she might mean something different.   

The problem is with my writing.  You can’t tell I have any humor from anything that I’ve written. I certainly haven’t written anything in the last thirty years that my mother would want to read to her friends. I haven't written anything that she'd want to read herself.  

Was I just fooling myself about still having a sense of humor? Was I now as dull as I thought all grown-ups were when I wrote my letter from Europe?

Let's consider the evidence. 

I still watch cartoons, but I spend most of my time watching the news. That's pretty dull.  When I was young, I didn’t watch the news at all. It was the most boring thing in the world. Heck, it still is.  Back then, I didn’t see what my mother and father saw in the news. It’s still the most boring thing in the world, but now I watch it. Is this a symptom of my degeneration?

I still prefer comedies to any other form of motion picture, but it seems that there are fewer and fewer good comedies around.  The vast majority of comedies have few surprises for me anymore.  I get more laughs from a film adaptation of a Jane Austin novel than I do from most of the most popular comedies.  Movies these days seem to more reliably produce tear than laughter.  There seem to be a couple of good weepies every year, but damn few good comedies.   Is it me or the film industry?  Since movie industry grosses continue to rise every year, the evidence doesn't look good.

Either I had maintained my innocence through all these years or I had broadened it.

Actually, we didn’t plan this trip. Rather, it just happened.

Our tour of Italy was a compromise. My mom had wanted to take my sister, Michele, on a tour of Turkey. She invited my wife, Rebecca and I to join them. The year before, Mom and Michele had toured France in a car and met up with Rebecca and I in Paris. Mom thought that we should have taken the whole trip all together.

Rebecca and I weren’t interested in Turkey. We had been planning on going to Italy. Almost all of our trips to Europe together had been related to our business. We’d both been to Florence and Rome when we were young, but we’d never been to most of the cities of Italy together. We’d just been to Milan, because there is business there with a day trip out of Milan to Venice.

Somehow or other, Mom decided that she and Michele might want to go to Italy too. This turned out to be a good decision, at least for them. A huge earthquake hit Turkey about the time Mom and Michele were planning on going. My mother is over eighty. She wouldn’t have been that much help digging people out of the rubble. She would be much more useful consuming the excess wine in Italy.

We also originally hadn’t planned on going with a tour group. Rebecca and I have traveled a lot, mostly on business, but we had never gone anywhere with a tour group. We were planning on taking the trains from city to city.

Michele wanted to rent a car and drive around Italy as they had France the year before. She liked seeing the countryside. Having driven around Italy myself, I didn’t think a car was a good idea for her first visit. She’d want to see the major cities. We wanted to see the major cities. Italian city traffic is anything but civilized.

Mom suggested that we might want to try a tour as a way of traveling the country. Mom had spent the years since her retirement traveling with friends in tour groups. Only recently had she begun travelling with family. Since none of the rest of us had ever been with a tour group, it would be a new experience for us. The idea seemed harmless at the time.

I did some research and we chose Perillo tours. They were the largest organization offering tours of Europe. At least one of the factor we considered was that they advertised that they had toilets on their buses. I don’t know why going to the toilet on a bus sounded so appealing at the time. As it turns out, I never even saw the toilet on the bus. I assume it was there, but no one in the family ever used it. Considering the age of moan of people on the tour, the bus stopped frequently for toilet breaks. Having a toilet on the bus, if there really was one, was never an issue on the trip itself.

My mother was nervous about our selection of Perillo from the start. To begin with, she’d never heard of them. This made her nervous because she’d once lost a large amount of money buying a tour of India. Over the years, the amount that she remembers losing has gone up from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands. She’d paid the money and the tour company went broke before her tour was scheduled. Ever since then, she had been wary of tour companies that she didn’t know.

To make matter worse, Perillo insists on cash deposits and cash pre-payments. They don’t accept credit cards. This made them highly suspicious in my mother’s mind.

I tried to ease her fears. After to doing the research, though, Perillo seemed relatively safe. They had been in business for over fifty years. They took tens of thousands of people to Europe every year. I couldn’t find any complaints on the Web about people losing their money with them. The cash deposits worried us all a little, but it still seemed like the best choice.

Of course, I knew that if things went wrong, it would be my fault entirely. I was the one who did the research. Since I was the source of the information, any problems with the trip were going to be blamed on me. Fortunately, I’ve outgrown the need for parental approval. Yeh, right.

Perillo didn’t help themselves before the trip. They sent us only scanty information about the itinerary. We’d sent them all these thousands of dollars for the tour and they barely sent up any information, not even a good receipt.

Worse, they didn’t send us a carry-on bag.

"I’ve been with a hundred tours," Mom said. "They all send you a cheap little carry-on with their name on it."

"Did you like any of those bags, Mom?" I asked.

"No," she admitted. "I us my own carry-on, but it’s the idea of the thing. If we’re going to spend these thousands of dollars on a tour, we’re suppose to get the cheap, little carry on. It’s practically a rule of the road."

I didn’t argue with her. She had years of experience with tour companies. We never did get the cheap carry-on. We only got a one-page itinerary with the dates of travel between cities on it. Eventually, we also got a list of hotels. We also got four big green luggage tags.

Rebecca and I didn’t even get airplane tickets. Mom and Michele got tickets from California to Milan, so they had something tangible to show for their investment. Rebecca and I had a lot of air miles that were expiring. We used some of them on the round trip tickets. It saved us few hundred dollars apiece on the price of the tour and we would be flying with an airline with whom we were had a gold card. We have each traveled a million miles on the same airline and it’s gotten to the point where they almost treat us like real people.

We planned to meet the tour where it began in Milan. Without the airplane tickets, we had nothing except those green luggage tags to show that we were even with the tour. A cheap little carry-on might have been nice just for its symbolic value.

We were traveling during the middle and end of September. The hope was that the weather would still be warm. We would be gone for almost three weeks, two weeks in Italy and then another week in London on the way back. We would have to pack light since we were limited to one bag per person on the bus.

As the trip approached, we had do decide what to do about clothes. We expected Italy to have temperatures in the low eighties. Since we live in Seattle, we didn’t personally need warm weather clothing. The hottest it usually gets in Seattle is the seventies.

The only warm weather wear we had was what we took to Hawaii, Florida and such places. That clothing felt too tropical for Europe. We couldn’t see ourselves wearing flowered shirts in the Sistine Chapel. We knew that shorts and sleeveless shirts weren’t even allowed in most European churches. I don’t blame the churches a bit. The least thing I wanted to see when visiting a church was a bunch of overweight tourists in flowered shirts and Bermuda shots.

We decided that we just had to buy new travel clothes. Well, Rebecca decided more than I did, but as the female half of the team, that is her job. Since we wanted to pack light, we decided on clothes that we could wash in the sink and dry overnight. We travel enough that we would probably get our money out of them.

We looked around town at the travel stores and found very little clothing. We found lots of books, maps, and electrical devices. We found many little containers for pills, detergent, and shampoo. We found travel carts and travel pillows. We found luggage to pack clothes in, video tapes on how to pack clothes, and travel irons and steamers to take the wrinkles out of clothes. We didn’t find that actual clothing itself though everyone had heard about it.

We turned to mail order. One mail-order company specializes in an extensive line of travel clothes. We picked the items that we wanted from their catalog. It seemed like a perfect solution until we tried to order from them.

The phone clerk that answered our call sadly informed us that they were moving their warehouse. They were out of stock on most everything. They couldn’t tell us exactly what they had in stock. They could tell us when anything they had might ship. Since we were leaving in four weeks, she said that couldn’t guarantee we would get anything at all.

This wasn’t encouraging. It certainly wasn’t the best sales pitch we’d ever heard. We decided to look around some more locally. We got a little lucky. Rebecca found a black dress that almost fit at a travel shop. I found some pants and a couple of shirts at an outlet store for a local manufacturer of travel clothes. Still, this wasn’t enough for three weeks.

Rebecca tried the mail-order company again. This time she called the customer service desk instead of the order department. She just wanted to see if the customer service department had better information about what was shipping.

It was a smart move. The customer service phone person agreed that they were changing warehouses, but she seemed to think that we could get a lot before our trip. She suggested we put in an order and see what we got. If we didn’t get the clothes in time for the trip, we could always send them back and get our money back. Her customer service view was that it is always better to get your order in. Once your order was in, good things could always happen, but, without an order, nothing was going to happen.

This was both the right attitude and sound advice.

Rebecca follower her lead and put in a large order. She then called every couple of days to check on our order’s progress. At first nothing was coming. Then everything was coming. Then some things were coming. Finally, packages started arriving.

It was like Christmas in the days before our vacation. We kept finding packages on our doorstep. Of course, Rebecca knew what was coming. By now, she was so tight with the customer service desk that she knew what was in the packages before we opened them.

When it was all done, we’d gotten almost everything we’d ordered. We ended up sending stuff back because we had backup items orders. We would be outfitted in the latest style, lightest-weight, wrinkle-free, easy-to-wash, fast-drying, dirt-resisting, air-cooled travel clothes.

We also had secret pockets, secret pocket hidden inside other pockets. We had zipper inside our zippers with velcro locks on top. We could hide and lock away our valuables from the pickpockets. I’ve always wanted a secret passage in our house. I’ve never gotten one, but secret pockets are the next best thing.

One last big issue for me before we traveled was whether on not to bring my laptop computer. I was inspired to write about the trip. The only question was how to do it.

I didn’t want to lug around a laptop. First, I didn’t want to to worry about breaking it. My old Toshiba is getting delicate. It has a small crack at its hinges that I keep gluing closed so that it won’t break entirely. Over the years, I’d taken it on dozens of vacations and never used it. I was planning on writing on this vacation, but that didn’t mean that I really would. We were packing light. The laptop was too bulky to take given the off chance I would actually use it.

I looked at the new, sleek Sony Viao. It wouldn’t take up any room at all. It is smaller than a pad of paper. It wouldn’t fall apart. It wouldn’t weigh me down. Unfortunately, it was also expensive. In the end, I was too cheap to part with the money.

Also, I’ve given up on buying the latest computer technology. I was in the computer business and bought all the newest products for years. Now that I’m no longer in computers, I’ve decided that it is all overpriced. I keep well behind the technology curve and I’m falling more behind all the time. Old computers and old software seem to suit me fine.

In the end, I decided to bring a paper notepad. I didn’t even have that on my first trip. I wrote on those letters on scraps of paper I found along the way. If I was going to write at all, I would write by hand like I did back then. Of course, I hadn’t written anything by hand in years. My handwriting muscles were flabby from disuse. This would give me a good opportunity to get my finger musculature in shape. It would also gave me a good excuse not to write if I really had gotten old and couldn’t find anything worthwhile to write about.

Of course, I am getting old. To prove it, while running shopping before the trip, I damaged my Achilles’ tendons. Like my computer hinge, my heel tendons have grown fragile with age. They had been almost healthy for months, but a few days before the trip, I tore them by running the length of a local mall. Of course, I wasn’t running for a good reason. I was running to beat some little old ladies to a sale on Beanie Babies. My wife and I collect Beanie Babies—as we collect so many things we don’t need. We were standing in line waiting for one store to open when we heard that another store down the mall had some new Beanies. I immediately took off to beat all the others racing from throughout the mall. I got the Beanie, but I had to limp back to where I left Rebecca. Like a proud hunter returning from a particularly dangerous hunt, I hobbled toward her holding my trophy for her to see. It was a brightly colored worm.

We are all getting old. My damaged heels fit right into our family group. Mom is over eighty with a very bad ankle. My sister turns fifty this year and is little overweight with bad knees. My wife, Rebecca, the youngest of us all, had been fighting a bad case of shin splints. She’d gotten them honorably from her daily workout on a treadmill. My sore tendons fit me right into this sad group.