True Stories Well Told

By Sarah White

“Cena? Non ce stasera,” the barrista tells us. Dinner will not be served tonight. The little restaurant of the Torre Cambiaso hotel is closed, because this is a Monday.

This means there really WILL be no dinner, because the nearest restaurant is so far down the mountain that the cost of the taxi alone would equal a dinner.

My husband Jim and I have arrived at this baronial-estate-turned-hotel high on a promontory overlooking Genoa, and we are in the kind of personal low that predictably overtakes anyone who’s been in transit more than 24 hours and has been told there will be no dinner.

The problem, when you are planning your next trip, is to capitalize on knowledge gained on past trips but avoid the trap of thinking you are an expert. That was my situation as I organized a visit to Italy’s Cinque Terre region for my husband and me, in celebration of our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

On our last Italian trip, we arrived in Venice midday, too early to check into a hotel, too tired to sightsee. With nowhere to place our bodies, we ended up in a small park, taking turns napping on each other’s shoulders, desperately sleepy and disenchanted. I swore I would plan better this time.

The way cross-Atlantic flights are timed, the midday arrival is unavoidable. So I set myself to finding a hotel in Genoa that would offer a restful improvement over that dingy Venetian park. Google’s top search result presented me with Torre Cambiaso, “located in a former manor house with a unique tower. It was once the home of a noble family, and is set in its own private gardens with a swimming pool… A walk through the gardens leads guests past a lake, several grottos and a secluded grove where peacocks roam.”

I settled in to read the consumer reviews, and chuckled with a knowing smile at descriptions like, “We struggled to get any service from the bar and when we did we had to wait while a waiter could find the time to get us a coffee!” Yes, we experienced visitors appreciate the unhurried pace, and the less-intrusive service style, of Italian waiters. Those poor uptight Americans imposing their rush-rush attitudes. While several reviews mentioned the remote location as a negative, to me that sounded tranquil–perfect.

I composed the scene in my mind; lounge chairs in the private garden with the peacocks and all, enjoying drinks brought (however lackadaisically) to our elbows as we dozed in afternoon sun. The Torre Cambiaso got my click and credit card deposit for one night’s stay. We would fly to Genoa, arriving midmorning.

That was the plan. Instead, we were delayed in Rome awaiting our connection, and those sleep-desperate hours I’d tried to place in the Torre Cambiaso’s sundrenched garden instead took place in hard plastic chairs in Fulmicino Airport. When we finally got to Genoa, afternoon had turned to evening and “sundrenched” turned to merely “drenched.”

A taxi took us in pouring rain high into the hills above Genoa. Something came back to me from my Googling, a consumer comment saying, “ I was well aware that this hotel is not near anything,” which had preceded a complaint about difficulty getting dinner.

We check in. Our room is small but the setting is baronial, with modern amenities crowded by heavy antiques. We went to find out when dinner service will begin in the little restaurant on the ground floor, where the website promised “Italian and Ligurian cooking styles combine.” And that’s when the barrista gives us the bad news.

The moment is ripe for domestic dispute. But wait, the barrista is promising that the staff will put a cold plate together for us! And there’s a complimentary bottle of white in our mini-fridge. This will do.

When the tray of dinner arrives, we decide to take it upstairs to the library area under the eaves. There we picnic on an array of cheeses, olives, arugula sprouts, breadsticks, and a sliced composed meat called cima. Jim (a chef) is excited to see the cima, a Genoa specialty he’s read about. A veal breast is wrapped around a pate of ground veal, eggs, and pistachios. “It’s no stranger than bologna,” Jim says, damning with faint praise.

The meal and wine raise our spirits. Already we are catching the spirit of the place, imagining it filled with conference-goers or wedding guests. Before long we return to our room, where sleep slams into us.

We wake to find the rain lifting. In a gallery overlooking the courtyard a breakfast buffet offers pastries, rolls, cereal, and blood oranges.

The waitress is stiff with us, and no friendlier to the other guests—a trio of conference planners who have arrived in advance of their event, and a pair of women, probably travelers passing through as we are. Did Google seduce them too?

After breakfast Jim and I explore outside. Maybe now we’ll inhabit the scene I composed when I booked us here, lounge chairs and peacocks and all, revised to feature a cappuccino in morning sun instead of wine at sunset.

Online I had read that the Torre Cambiaso grounds cover 100 acres. I now realize that most of those acres are given over to a working farm. The actual grounds for guests comprise no more than half an acre, falling away steeply from the manor house on its narrowing promontory.

The amenities described online are packed as tightly as clothes in a suitcase. We follow a garden path that winds in hairpins past rose bushes to the grotto. A gas grill squats in an alcove, ready to be wheeled out for summer weddings. A little watercourse flows into a swan pond (the “lake” of the online description). The path leads past cages housing peacocks and swans to a small formal garden surrounding a fountain. At the bottom of the garden stands a little faux Grecian temple, a party house now locked up and in disrepair. I imagine a terrazzo floor inside, a ghostly string quartet playing as guests of the Baron Cambiaso dance.

But here comes the rain again—forget cappuccino with the peacocks. I’m picturing myself here with a conference, or a friend’s wedding. The Torre Cambiaso has a peculiar air of being perfect for somebody, sometime, but not us, not now.

But no matter. We’ve completed our “inserimento.” We summon another taxi and leave without a backward glance.

Our short stay at Torre Cambiaso was a microcosm of any stay anywhere, the predictable highs and lows in mood, the twists of fate. These are the complications that deliver the traveler to the next story and the next.

Inserimento in Italian means “settling in.”

It describes the process travelers go through when arriving in a new location. it happens at the beginning of the trip, and again with each change to a new locale. Inserimento is that gateway between the transition and the new “here and now.”

It is equivalent to the Hero’s Journey step of the gateway (“he finally crosses the threshold between the world he is familiar with and that which he is not”) or, if inserimento goes badly, the beginning of tests, allies, enemies (“out of his comfort zone, the Hero is confronted with an ever more difficult series of challenges he must overcome on the journey towards his ultimate goal.”)

As I wrote in Write Your Travel Memoirs (shameless plug), “How do you sync up with the place you’ve reached? What is its story, and what is your place in it? When expectations crash into reality, how do you handle the impact?…On a short vacation there’s a lot riding on inserimento.”

In my last post, I invited you to send my travel stories. How about we share tales of  inserimento? Here’s mine.

I went to Indiana over the 4th of July weekend for a reunion with my closest friends from college. These people are my chosen family, dearer to me than life itself, and we haven’t all been together in one place since roughly 1978. Thanks to the miracle of social media we’ve stayed in touch, and were able to align on staying at a lake cottage down in the hollows of Brown County, Indiana, not far from Bloomington where we hung around Indiana University all those years ago.

Before I could reach the calm still center of that lake cottage vacation, I had a lot of inserimento to get through.

My route was circuitous, a plan designed to get me there with time to do some necessary work on the way instead of behind the steering wheel for the 7+ hour drive. I took a bus to O’Hare airport where I caught a flight to Cincinnati. There Friend Marty and his wife would pick me up as they passed through en route from West Virginia to Bloomington.

Arriving in O’Hare, my troubles began. The airline wouldn’t let me carry on my carry-on bag. A short two hours later, waiting for it at the baggage carousel in Cincinnati, texting with Marty waiting in the cell-phone lot, my iPhone went “brick.” Dead to the world. I had my laptop–but its battery had run down to zero while working during the flight.

Then I noticed my flight had cleared the monitor–no bag. And no contacts. Everything was on those devices.

I went to the customer service desk, got the delayed-bag report started, used the nice man’s phone to call my husband back home and have him look up Marty’s number, then call Marty with the update. The nice baggage man promised United would forward the bag, even though my destination was over 2 hours and a state away. Marty came, I met his wife Diane for the first time, and off we went.

That’s about the time I realized the asthma inhaler I need twice daily was in that delayed bag.

We arrived in Bloomington about 5pm, went to the house of  Friend Donna and her sweetie Tom, and I explained my dilemma. “The bag might make it yet tonight,” I hoped. But Tom insisted, “The stress of worrying about it could bring on an asthma attack. I want you to have that inhaler,” proving to be a take-charge, take-care kind of guy. We drove to Bedford 20 minutes away to fill the prescription.

That evening, I opened the bag I’d picked up at the pharmacy. Wrong inhaler.

In my panic (I am surprisingly flappable when plans go awry, to my own dismay) I had told the pharmacist the name of my rescue inhaler, not my daily maintenance drug. I spent an uncomfortable night worrying about when I would stop being able to breathe. In the morning, Tom went back for the right inhaler. In my Hero’s Journey, I had found my ally.

By noon the next day my bag still hadn’t left Cincinnati. We left in several cars for the lake. Donna gathered some hotel mini personal products for me and took me to Target to pick up a bathing suit, coverup, and hat. We arrived at the cottage, opened the window to chase the mustiness out, changed into bathing suits and Inserimento was over. I had everything I needed–and my friends.

Soon the rest of the “family” arrived–Victor,  Rick, Colette. We welcomed their “plus-ones”–spouses/lovers and Colette’s sister Suzie, whose urge to return to Indiana had set this whole Rube Goldberg machine of a reunion in motion.

Then the delight of downtime enveloped us. The weakest whisper of a cell signal reached down in that valley, and I used it to tell United “forget delivering my bag, I’ll just pick it up on my way back.”

We powered down and story-told instead. The convoluted tale of how we all met, the combinations and recombinations since, co-creating the myth of our shared past.

And so passed several days. We migrated and morphed in small groups conversing on the deck, down on the dock, and in the water hanging out on our swim noodles. In the Hero’s Journey, we had reached Reward. (“After defeating the enemy, surviving death and finally overcoming his greatest personal challenge, the Hero emerges a stronger person and often with a prize.”) As I wrote in Write Your Travel Memoirs (shameless plug, now available for Kindle and iBook), “If insertion goes well, you are living a new life you were always meant for.” I only wish I could have stayed there a whole summer, living the life my friends and I were always meant for.

But for the Hero, the journey has a return leg. He must make it through more ordeals to return to the Ordinary World, bearing the Elixir that “represents three things: change, success and proof of his journey.” For me it was back to Cincinnati, reunion with my bag, a flight and a bus and a short drive to home. My other home, because in my heart, like Rick and Ilsa have Paris in Casablanca, we’ll always have that lake.

Now, send me YOUR stories of inserimento! Submission guidelines here.

– Sarah White