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It’s all very well saying that you want to hang around in a foreign country and do some touring, but unless you’re the Spice Girls with a management entourage to book your dates, you can’t just leave it at that. Unfortunately, we sort of had done until two weeks before. Our brief discussions on what to do had resulted in a desire to visit Rome and an idea that we should go somewhere else on the way - Florence was our prime candidate. Therefore we had to do some booking.
It is worth pointing out that the wedding was on the Easter Monday of 1998 and our arrangements for ourselves had to start on the Tuesday. It may well be regarded as foolish for us not to have planned our hotel arrangements well in advance of this Easter time, in order to avoid disappointment.
After a particularly disturbing realisation that it was so close to our departure with no arrangements in hand, we took to the escapism of the internet - and I’m not referring to 1000’s of trekkies looking at alien autopsy photos, nor hours of gazing at Saucy Suzie’s Sizzling Sexy Snapshots. We actually found that we could make use of this bag of chips (that's the computer, not a snack) and circuitry to do more than play games and write dissertations on. Microsoft were running a web-site called Expedia back in 1998 (they still do), which is an online travel agents (well sort of). Unfortunately, at the time of our foray, it was only available to people inside the US and Canada, but it was free. I registered, pretending to be from the US, using the postcode 90210 (which may be familiar to those people who watched the TV series) and we were able to use this service.
To avoid going into the nittiest of gritties on how we did it, I’ll just say that the service was able to show us various hotels on the city-map of Rome and allow us to price up the options and check for room availability. Once we had our hit list, we used the computer to fax the hotels and within about 5 hours we had hotels booked in Florence, Rome and Milan. The Milan hotel was at the airport and was for the last night of our stay in Italy, where I reckoned we would want to arrive, go to bed and then be near to the plan to avoid panics before our morning flight.
And it was that simple. Just push some buttons send some credit card information and your stay is sorted - it kind of pleased me from the point of view of ease, but also from the techno-sexiness of it…
After a few phone calls I was able to find out how to book rail tickets in Italy and we pre-booked our EuroStar rail journeys between Milan, Florence and Rome. The total itinerary was:
When you list it out like that, it doesn’t look like much, but to put it into perceived time while there, it lasted 20 years. However, when you put it in terms of perceived time since we’ve been back, it never happened, and if it did, it was about 45 seconds from start to finish.
With all the plans made both by ourselves and by David and family (for all the wedding guests), all we needed to do was pack and get ready to leave.
Written: May 1998
Posted: 29 October 2001
Ashley Frieze