Speramo che Lu Pado schioppa!

Loosely: we hope the Padua team blows up. A sign we saw in Spello. They take sports seriously here. Lu Padua I was told is dialect. Speramo = we hope.

Spello is a beautiful, peaceful little town. Thanks to Debora for showing us around and getting the chance to meet her two grandmas.

Squacquerone e Crestine

A type of cheese typical of the Emilia-Romagna area that we had for lunch. It was served with crescentine, a type of fried bread, and various salumi. In fact the appetizer looked just like this picture. You can see the crescentine in the foreground.

Scusateci per il disagio

Please excuse our mess. I like this phrase. I saw this in downtown Bologna.

The Empty Fridge

Of all the symbols of packing up and moving away for awhile, the empty fridge hit home with me that we are leaving. We are shutting off the refrigerator so we threw away some things and gave others away. (Exceptions: we swigged down the last of the limoncello with a friend and put a liquer we brought back from Sardinia, made from myrtle, in the basement.)

We’ve been living with minimum provisions for a few days now and it really isn’t so tough. To think folks can’t live without two refrigerators these days.

The Packing Board

We broke down and went to AAA and bought the packing board and some compression bags. Several friends mentioned the usefulness of these items so we came off our high horses to try them. I’m still skeptical, because I’m a “stuffer” as in just stuff everything in. None of my clothes are that special that I need to care about what they look like – or at least that’s what I tell myself. And no, we are still not packed. BTW, I just love what Anne can do with scarves.

What to Pack?

It’s getting closer to leaving and the question usually asked is “Are you packed?” Packing, clothes-wise, is not too bad for me. I can list easily the number of pants (3, 2 jeans, 1 pair black slacks), underwear (6, ex-officio travel), socks (6-8 smart wools), etc. Shoes are a little trickier, but still not bad. A pair of everyday shoes, a pair of hiking/cross trainers, and a pair of black dress shoes – is the minimum. If room permits, a pair of sandal-like shoes or running shoes (very *not* Italian).

The problem I have is what to pack data-wise. How many books to carry? How many maps to bring? What kind of supporting data? From past trips, I realized that we usually brought more guide books than we actually used. And, we typically used the books at night to plan for the next day. Carrying the books around during the day was typically not needed. A map or some documentation about finding a trail, yes, but not books. These usage patterns along with the fact that you can buy good guide books and maps (in English) at your destination made me feel like we were spending a lot of energy lugging this material around. On the last few trips I even started taking apart guide books and taking only the relevant sections to cut down on what we had to carry.

This trip (given the length) I’m going a step further. I’ve taken apart several guide books completely and scanned them to OneNote. (See previous post.) There are some gotchas to the approach. First, it can be time consuming depending on the size of the book and type of paper (coating and size) used which could make the automatic feeder a nightmare to use. Second, it is only on the computer so we can only access the info when we have the computer. The idea I’m going for is to get as much digital travel info as possible to maximize what is on my computer. Scanned books combined with browser pages (copy and pasted or printed to OneNote) of relevant articles can make a pretty complete off-line resource. I even found PDF of Italian bad words and dictionaries. When the scanned pages are in the computer the words are recognized so that you can search for text on all the pages quickly.

I looked around and there are no downloadable guides that are as useful as the books. I like the thought that goes into how a book is produced; I just want it digitally. So I have scanned guide books for Italy (general), Croatia, and the Greek Islands. About a 1,000 pages. Also, I scanned books about culture and language for another 500 or so pages. We’ll see how useful this is.

The Practical Nomad

Subtitle: How to Travel Around the World. Author: Edward Hasbrouck. At first I was a little skeptical of this book, but as I flipped through the pages and read different sections I warmed up to it and found I liked what the author was saying. On Visas: “…on asking for a visa you are asking for a favor, not claiming a right.” On choosing destinations: “Your daily activities and the people you meet have more influence on the quality of your travel experience than the sites you visit or sights you see.” And then a small passage on independence versus interdependence – as in citizens of capital-rich countries often value independence while citizens of labor-rich countries often value interdependence - and to keep this in mind when travelling.

Prego! Scanned!

It may not be the best book for learning Italian, but the Prego (6th Edition) is the book we are familiar with, so I scanned it. Yes, all 500+ pages are now a searchable OneNote notebook. (I don't want to carry the book on the trip but I'm committed to carrying a laptop so I might as well maximize what is on the laptop.) It was relatively easy to do. Here's how I did it.

1. Grab a dozen or so pages (each chapter is about 12 pages and much more gets you into trouble on our scanner).
2. Put them into the scanner (ours is a HP OfficeJet 7310 All-in-one) feeder.
3. Scan to PDF (not searchable)
4. Open PDF and print to OneNote. You should get a column of even or odd pages depending on what you started with.
5. Take the stack of pages and keep the same order but flip each page so you get the other side of the page.
6. Scan to PDF again and now you have a column of pages that are the companion pages to the previously scanned bunch.
7. Print to OneNote again and arrange the newly imported pages alongside the previously imported ones (move the pages together, don't do it one by one).
8. Repeat until the book is finished.
   

I used an X-acto knife to remove the sections of the book.

I am impressed with OneNote's ability to recognize words in the scans. It isn't perfect but it can usually get you to what you are looking for. Plus, if you want to, you can annotate the pages for better searching.