“What Was the High Point of Your Trip?”

​On Easter Morning, 2025, my wife, Cedar, and I flew to Dallas-Ft. Worth followed after lunch by a 10 ½-hour second flight to Rome, Italy. It was the start of a three-week trip that would take us from Rome along the Amalfi Coast and then around Greece to Athens on a large sailing yacht followed by eight days in Egypt highlighted by a five-day Nile cruise and ending with three delicious days in Paris. We got back to our Front Range home in Boulder, Colorado, the evening of Mother’s Day. You might say we left on a religious holiday and returned on a secular one...

In the nearly two weeks since our return, the question I hear the most is “What was the high point of your trip?” Without a doubt the literal response would be our trip home from London’s Heathrow Airport to Denver in a huge Airbus 350 with a capacity of over 400 passengers since we were cruising at 40,000 feet. As it happens, a fair answer to the question is difficult, for there were many high points. Here are a few:

• Three days of R & R in the Rome suburb of Fiumicino.
• Nice weather throughout the trip.
• Smooth flights, all eight of them.
• Calm seas and thus no seasickness.
• Comfortable accommodations, both on land and on the water.
• Incredible sights/sites, including Athens’ Acropolis and the historic ruins of Egypt.
• Visiting new countries: Greece and Egypt for Cedar; Egypt for me.
• Getting away from political news in the U.S. And perhaps most importantly,
• Neither of us getting sick, either during the trip or on our return.

But if I were forced to come up with a single high point, I would have to say the friendliness of the people in all the places we traveled. True: Travel staff on any sort of conveyance are paid for being friendly, and they all were. But I mean ordinary people who had no job requirement to be so. One notable example was the owner-manager of the Café Boccaccio in Messina, Sicily. Our good ship The Wind Spirit stopped every day along our route from Civitavecchia/Rome to Athens. Messina, a mere mile of water from the toe of the boot of Italy AKA Calabria, is an example. Having spent maybe 20 minutes walking up the hill the city is built on, at 85 and 80 we felt tired and stopped at this café. It was a late-April Saturday. The funeral of Pope Francis was playing on the TV. I practiced my Italiano by chatting with the staff, especially the woman in charge. From a work trip to Sicily years before I had remembered a few Sicilian variations on the language and threw them in. I then paid with a five-euro note and we left. We were hardly out of the door when the signora ran out, the five-euro note waving in her hand. As she gave it back to me, she said in Italian, “Here, have this back. You were our honored guests!”

​Or take Paris, not known for its friendliness to Americans. Again, my knowledge of French may have played a role. But people, a number of them, went out of their way to greet us on the street, ask us if we needed anything, and even helped us, for example in the labyrinth known as the Paris Metro, to make sure we made the right connections. One young woman, for example, walked several hundred yards with us to guide us to the next Metro line we needed to get back to our hotel. This is a tough time for us earth-dwellers. Others’ kindness abroad was magical.

Friendly people even in the Paris Metro! Incroyable!