Our Fall 2024 trip has a specific focus - getting ourselves truly bought into changing our international travel so that we are doing less physically taxing running around and staying more in one place. As such we can consider this trip to be an experiment. And following the principles of the scientific method, it is as important to disprove a hypothesis as to prove it. (Though in the real world, anyone who has been professionally in academia knows that you only get published and tenure if your hypotheses are proven!).
In fact, we are doing two tests.
The first was to see if we could find another locale that meets the criteria we've set up for our desired long-term stay. This has been the first three weeks of our trip where we have been looking at numerous locales along the Northern half of Italy's Adriatic coast.
Our failure to find any place that met our objectives in Italy should therefore not be considered a failure of the test. The test merely proved that there are no locales in this area for our needs. Italy bombed out because of a number of factors.
It has (at least based on our sample which now includes the opposite coast based Rome/Lido di Ostia) the unique culture/system of renting out vast portions of its beach to private operators who turn them into turn-key sites for beach goers which include shade (umbrellas), chairs, access to food and drink, often times sporting activities (beach volleyball courts, beach soccer courts, paddle boards, etc.), music, etc. I remember when we arrived our very first stop, Caorle, where the hotel we stayed at told us if we wanted to go to the beach, we were assigned spot (I forget the number) where we would find an umbrella and chairs. I thought it odd at the time. Little did I know.
There is also a distinct separation between beach areas and the towns. We stayed at a number of nice places on the beach. But none of them had shopping and services in convenient walking range. We stayed or visited at other places that were nice towns for walking around, where you could potentially live a walking lifestyle. But none of these were close to the water.
Finally, the towns that did seem to intrigue us (I'm talking about you Vasto) were lacking in short-term rental housing suitable for us in the areas where we would want to stay.
We're now on our way to the second test. This is a long-term (one-month) stay at one of the locales we've previously gone to see if we would be content going back there. Personally, I am looking forward to the slowing down and being settled for a while. Whether we go nuts after two weeks remains to be discovered.
1 comment:
I'm glad you are not disheartened by the way experiment. You are looking for a location with a lot of specific requirements, and I can see why it will be hard to find. But you look like you're mostly enjoying the search!
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