Travelogue, last leg After Rome, we flew to NYC, caught a cab to LaGuardia, and visited Mom & Dad in North Carolina. Then, after a too-brief visit, back to NYC. We stayed in a Holiday Inn in Long Island City, with a very nice view across the East River. As much as we wanted to see everything, we couldn't, with only two-and-a-half days of tourism available to us. We missed a few things due to a lack of prior research and no local expertise beyond my memory of the subway system. Luckily that was enough, mostly, for a few highlights. I don't often miss living in NYC and doubt I would be successful transitioning back, as the up-front costs would be extraordinary, but it was nice to see the old place, including many of the new things I've read about. So much new; it was good to see. So much old; it was good it's still there. (The subways, however, need a serious upgrade. Rome and Berlin were so much quieter and cleaner. Although their maps aren't as good as the MTA's.)

Travelogue, part 4 Rome, the Eternal City. Absolute chaos. More tourists than I've seen outside of the Louvre, in Paris. Our hotel wasn't great, but it was less than 2 kilometers from the Colosseum, another 2 to the Vatican, so we had no trouble getting around and seeing as much as we could in two days, which was a lot. Romulus' & Remus' mom doesn't look too impressed, but she's everywhere. The Swiss Guard really do dress like 1970's McDonald's employees, but with spears and metal hairnets. You cannot escape the crowds at any time of day.

Travelogue, part 2 Christo. I've missed all the installations he's done since I first learned of him, including the Central Park "Gates", so I didn't, even after reviewing the web site, have much sense of what the "Big Air Package" was going to be like. We trained out from Berlin to Oberhausen, where a disused "gasometer" stands, and where Christo has previously had an installation. It was built in 1929 and was the largest in Europe. It is indeed enormous, a tourist destination in its own right, apparently. Christo's installation on this occasion was an "air package", which is the format he started out with, back in the sixties, and has come back to now and then since. This is the biggest. There is no clear way to describe the experience other than "awesome".

Travelogue, part 3 So, after Berlin, we flew to Pisa, where we didn't stop, but caught a train up to La Spezia and then on to Riomaggiore, the southernmost town in the Cinque Terre region. This was a true highlight of the trip. The landscape was incredible, mountains straight up out of the sea, terraced for olives and grapes, but much of it still wild, too, with each of the five towns along the coast being perched and clustered right on the edges. Italians seem to like their cats, too.