Introduction

28 November 2015

It's been a little over two weeks after returning from Italy and things are all jumbled up in my memory.  Organized tours cover a lot of ground and after it's all over it's not easy to sort out events and places.  I'm constructing this blog to put things into proper perspective before my trip becomes a hazy memory.

In February 2015, my friends Paul and Aiko Damrow called me and said they were thinking of taking a trip to Italy and were wondering if I would like to travel with them.  The last tour I took was in the late nineties and since then I haven't take any tours, since the single traveler penalty was discouraging to me.  The tour company, Overseas Adventure Travel, or OAT, had no single traveler penalty, so this would remove the only reason I don't take tours these days.  I thought about it for a few days and agreed to go.

The basic tour covered the Tuscan area of Italy in fourteen days, and we decided to take the four day Rome extension for 18 days.  The Damrows had friends in Florence (Firenze), Lucca, and Naples (Napoli), so they proposed leaving five days pre-tour and staying four days post tour.  I decided to leave a day later, so the total was 26 days for me and 27 days for the Damrows, not counting travel time.

We spent a month or so searching for the best deals for independent air travel to and from Italy to accommodate our personal extensions.  The lowest fares at the time were through Lufthansa or their partnered airline United.  Later this would come back to bite us, but more about it later.  The tour company was banking on the continuing decline of the Euro and was offering a discount for early signup, but there was a deadline.  We also discussed the travel insurance and decided not to take it.  The coverage was very extensive, but also very expensive.  I made my final payment ($4115) to OAT on March 18th, a little after the Damrows.

Previous international trips in Economy seating were miserable, so I originally thought I'd book Business class, but this turned out to be over three times the price of Economy.  It was a lot cheaper the last time I traveled.  There was a new class, Premium Economy which was only a small amount more.  Reviews of Premium Economy seating were generally positive, so I decided to try it.  I finalized my air travel with Lufthansa a couple of days later on the 20th, paying $1868 for seats on Premium Economy, about $400 more than regular.