The backpack (or, Being Scared and Going Anyway)

Repeatedly, during our years together (17, counting the dating phase), the Total Package has dealt patiently with me being scared.

If I looked like a pie chart, you would see two even halves, one side representing fascination, curiosity and enthusiasm and the other half would be fear.  The Total Package doesn't deal in fear, necessarily.  Instead, he arms himself with data, or learns the necessary skill, so that fear dissolves into respect or due caution. Then he goes out and enjoys a new experience.

Most of my life, curiosity overcame most of my fraidy-cat tendencies, but having babies turned me into a complete ninny.  My husband has been nice about it, and my parents have been a big help.  For example this spring when The Total Package learned he would spend August's first week in Baveno, Italy, on Lago Maggiore, attending meetings...

...my mother said, "You're going, right?  We'll watch the boys."

So August came, my husband flew to Italy, and I prepared to join him in a week.  We decided to leave Baveno on a boat and land in Locarno, Switzerland, then take trains north for a week, eventually flying home from Zurich.  He kept emailing from Baveno ("I can't wait for you to get here!") and sending photos like this:

On my last day home I stopped the mail, cleaned the house top to bottom, emptied the fridge, set timers on a few lamps, and packed the backpack.  The Total Package does not love checking bags, and neither do I.

"I bought this backpack for your dad when we were dating," I told Sharpshooter.

"Did you know you would marry him when you bought it?"

I had to think about that one for a while.  "Not exactly, but I was pretty sure, and I thought he might want to marry me even more if I bought  him this cool backpack."

The backpack has seen many sights. The Total Package takes it snow camping (North Cascades, Crater Lake) and climbing (there are two St. Helens permits dangling from the straps), and I used it for two weeks in China.  So, I packed it tight and strapped it on.

All ready to go.  The boys and I drove to my parents, who fed us a nice dinner.  I ate a lot of dinner, which was delicious, and then became too nauseated to function. This is normal for me when I'm nervous. I went to bed with a bowl, just in case, and woke up to my alarm (3am) feeling fine.

Umpteen zillion hours later I landed in Milan.  A nice lady drove me to Baveno, where the Total Package waited in the hotel parking lot, next to a fountain with beautiful stone women holding pitchers, spewing water.  He took me inside and got me the Best Coffee In the World.

Then we took a boat to Isola Bella (one of those islands in the photograph above) and visited the palace and the beautiful gardens all around it.

Then we hopped to the next island, Isola Pescatori.

Ha!  We did not take the fancy boat in the foreground, but something like the one sailing into the background.  Anyway, on Isola Pescatori we did more important stuff:

We had to keep moving, or eating, because if we sat still I fell asleep, and to avoid jet lag one should stay awake until bedtime in the time zone one finds oneself.  Back at the hotel I fell asleep in a beach chair by the lake, and then again in our room, during a phone call to the boys, because I was lying down at the time. So we walked into town for dinner, ate wonderful handmade tagliatelle with ragu and some sort of chocolate cake, and by then it was really, truly bedtime.

In the next post, I'll share photos of Isola Bella.  (My cousin Natalie urged us to go, since she visited years ago as a landscape architecture student, and I'm so glad we took her advice.)  More to come.