2023 Italy / Slovenia: part 0 (planning and travel)

Erica and I do love a good adventure. After doing the Bermuda Challenge and Ragnar New England, we decided maybe it would be fun to have an active vacation that wasn’t focused on running. “How about a multi-day hike?” she asked me one day. “Suuuuure,” I said, envisioning a week-plus of sleeping in a tent (something I got my fill of in the Marine Corps). She did some research and came back with a terrific suggestion: On Foot Holidays, a UK company that arranges cross-country hikes with lodging at each point. In particular, she suggested we look at their route in Slovenia, which covered six nights starting in Ljubljana and ending in Trieste. This was especially attractive since neither of us had been to either Italy or Slovenia before. Each day was a separate point-to-point hike, with lodging arranged, and On Foot would handle moving our luggage for us.

We signed up and started digging into the logistics of traveling from Huntsville to Ljubljana. Let’s just say that the process wasn’t entirely straightforward. Erica had built up a great stash of Chase Ultimate Rewards points and wanted to use them, so she started hunting for flights. We ended up with great points deals to go from Miami to Venice on Air France, and from Venice direct to Newark on United. I booked Delta mileage tickets from Huntsville to Miami and from JFK back home, and then the real fun started. First Air France cancelled the Miami-Paris leg and moved it a couple of days, so I got to call AF and get that all straightened out. That change necessitated changing our Delta flights too, but when the dust settled, we had a fairly simple Huntsville-Atlanta-Paris-Venice routing.

On Foot provided us a thick packet of maps and guidance well in advance of the trip. Each day of the hike had its own topographic map and printed set of very detailed turn-by-turn directions, along with a summary itinerary telling us where we’d be staying and what to see/do in each location and a detailed packing list. They also gave us a single GPX file that had all of the GPS routes in it (more on that in a future post!) The On Foot team communicated frequently and clearly throughout the pre-game process, including assigning us a local contact that we could use if we got lost, stuck, or puzzled. That left us free to concentrate on planning the Venice and Trieste stays, since we could trust that On Foot had arranged lodging and food. As usual, Erica did an amazing job of identifying things we might want to do and organizing and arranging them. We had nearly two days in Venice on arrival, followed by a day in Trieste and two more days in Venice after the hike, and that led to a jam-packed schedule of things to do, see, and eat.

Our travel started out as completely unexceptional. The friendly Delta ticket agent figured out that he could check our bags straight to Venice even though we had separate Delta and Air France tickets; once that was done, we flew to Atlanta, had a snack at the Sky Club, changed planes, and settled in for the long-haul flight to Paris. The flight featured a toddler in the row in front of us who cried, whined, and, at one point, spit a mouthful of cracker over the two of us. It was just exactly as much fun as you’d expect, but we got to Paris undaunted, changed planes again, and then arrived in Venice.

Of course, when we got to Venice, only one of us got a suitcase. We’d checked two bags. Mine went from Huntsville to Atlanta to Venice, all on Delta flights. Erica’s went from Huntsville to Atlanta to Paris to Venice, also all on Delta flights. Notice that we didn’t take those flights. Why did our bags take different flights from us? Why were they different from each other? Heaven knows. We filled out the you-lost-my-bag form, stood in an interminable line, and learned that Erica’s bag would arrive that evening but after the cutoff for bag delivery, meaning that if she wanted it that night, we’d have to go back to the airport to get it. Resigned to that fate, we grabbed a cab to our hotel to get ready for visiting Venice proper…