BUCKEYES IN EUROPE -- HALLELUJAH FOR HOLIDAY INN; DRIVING, WALKING EURO STYLE

HALLELUJAH FOR HOLIDAY INN QUARTO D’ALTINO

When my wife worked for a Cincinnati furniture rental company and traveled through their service regions, our category of choice for lodgers included Marriott Courtyard, Residence Inn, Staybridge and Holiday Inn Express. I cannot recall when we last stayed at a full service Holiday Inn because they always seemed a cut below the aforementioned facilities in quality and service.

When I searched online for Venezian lodging, I was hesitant at first to pursue the Holiday Inn in Quarto D’Altino, located about 12 kilometers north of Venice because of lingering memories of their frumpy style and lackluster facilities. Moreover, knowing little about Venezia itself, I thought staying in the city of canals was where I wanted to be.

Our four-day stay at this Holiday Inn has more than erased memories of a place I summarily lumped in with the worn out lodging chains like Howard Johnson, among others. During their heyday, these nationwide chains were affordable, predictable and widespread. But over time, their quality drifted downward, in my opinion, and settled at the lodging equivalent of what eating at Denny’s is to people whose palate yearns for taste and presentation, not just food on a stark plate.

When I submitted my request for three days at 81 Euros each, a fabulous rate in Europe as any seasoned traveler will tell you, its location in the country outside Venezia was a gamble, made more so because we would no longer have our Fiat Panda, forcing ourselves to ride the rails to and from the Santa Lucia train station in Venezia.

When I first searched for Quarto D’Altino on Google Maps, it appeared isolated in the Veneto countryside, far from the madding crowds that mob the area and keep the ancient city’s coffers afloat. But to maturing misanthropes, which we are, not being in the center of the water logged city was not all bad. When we pulled up to it in our car before dropping it off near Plaza de Roma in Venezia itself, where rental cars are returned and all buses congregate, we were immediately taken with its newness and style, two features we had not heretofore associated with the chain. For the first time in Europe, we stepped on carpet. All previous lodgings offered floors made of wood, tile or marble. Although America seems to be carpeted from coast to coast, a feature that has turned my 1966 classmate’s company Stanley Steemer into an international carpet cleaning giant, Europe continues its tradition of natural, regional materials that can easily endure for decades or centuries.

Being a new Priority Club Member, our young [make a mental picture of Pee Wee Herman] counter clerk presented us with complimentary drink cards [only good at the bar as we learned later] and pleasantly surprised us with an upgrade to a suite of rooms. Sounded good, we thought. It looked even better when we entered our room.

In addition to a second room where four chairs, a center table and executive writing desk were located, we also had two giant bathrooms to boot. One marble bathroom featured a shower so amazing, I wondered whether it had been designed by NASA, Dr. NO or whether it was a modern version of a torture chair I saw in Amsterdam at the Museum of Torture that featured a clam-like contraption made of daggers that, when closed, tenderized the poor soul in it as if he were a cold sandwich being pressed by a hot Panini machine.

Stepping into it to try it out, I drew together the two curved clear-glass doors until they met in front of me, forming a seal. With the water flowing, a dial could be turned that would change the flow of water from the hand-held faucet to the overhead spigot to jets that shot from the rear of the device to a streaming water fall that, when you sat on the tiny seat provided, washed over your head like a mini waterfall. Compared to our en-suite shower in Faeto, which was like washing in a coffin wearing a straight jacket, this advancement in forcing water through different sized holes was truly a miracle of modern hydrology.

But with five rooms in total and two wall-sized flat-screen TVs, the room did not have in-room Internet connections and we and the staffer sent up to work it for us could not figure out to work the pay TV feature. I was told Internet is available in the business center and the per-hour price is five Euros [or $6.35 USD], a steep rate by anyone’s measure.

When a blogger like me has to feed his blog habit, accessing the Internet is critical, which is not always easy in Europe where wireless phones are as common as shoes but where Internet points are found, if at all, in small store fronts, like vegetables and bread. The butcher, the baker, and the Internet maker is the emblematic of small business in contemporary Europe.

It was, therefore, a bitter sweet request to be downgraded to a room with fewer rooms but a high-speed connection line and better TV. My Holiday Inn team came through in quick fashion. In a matter of minutes, we were in a third floor room – fourth up from the street [remember, in Europe street level is “0”] and I was happy to buy 48 hours of continuous hours for 15 euros, which computes to 31.2 Euro cents per hour or about 40 cents USD. This is a super deal for sure. But subtracting sleep time and tourist time, it was no surprise that I was writing furiously up to the last second, when I had to knuckle under and buy yet one more hour to finish my Internet work.

Although it was not my story, Melissa, our new friend from Texas, left a bag on the return train to D’Altino that held her camera and several gifts. Tired from a full day of walking in Venezia, she forgot to grab it as we all dashed off the train at our stop. She broke down in tears at the front desk hoping the staff could help. As we learned on our trip to Murano, it would have been very easy for the staff to shrug their shoulders and tell her to contact Trenitalia, the national train system. But the following day, refreshed and revived, Melissa retold the story of how the counter staff snapped into action and called the next train stop. Amazingly, her bag was retrieved. Her tears of tiredness turned to smiles the next day as she told us how the staff performed in ABCD fashion – Above and Beyond the Call of Duty.

My final story of customer service valor is about locating my wife’s block of Polar Pak Foam Brick, which keeps her medicine chilled while traveling. To keep it frozen from place to place, we have either used the freezer in our room or asked our lodger to keep it frozen in their “frigo.” The evening before check out, I took it to the restaurant manager who directed me to the barmaid. She took it and disappeared. Returning, she smiled and informed me I could retrieve it the next day.

The next day, when I went to retrieve it 30 minutes before check out, the new barman knew nothing of the ice pack. He called his manager who asked me what it looked like. He then disappeared for over five minutes, returning with a blue bottle, which was not mine. After I stood patiently for another ten minutes at the bar watching a gaggle of young Italian girls eat and drink their lunch, I took the initiative. Walking through the narrow passageway leading to the work area behind the scenes, I made my stage appearance in the kitchen. The kitchen staff, wearing white aprons and small white caps as if they were medics in a hospital ward and who walked hurriedly to and fro, looked at me with surprise. After all, this was no place for a guest of the hotel. Over the course of the next ten minutes, I looked in each refrigerator and freezer they had and found nothing of mine, although as a former restaurateur it gave me a chance to check out their inventory.

Asking the manger to call the barmaid from the previous night to ask her where she had put it, he said he had called but there was no answer. He then said he was leaving to drive to her apartment, which was close by. I thought that was a truly diligent thing to do and applauded him for making that decision.

Just as he was ready to leave his post, one of the kitchen staffers came running through the kitchen aisle carrying our frozen foam pack, which I had wisely printed my name on in strong black letters, making it stand out from any cold neighbors it might have. I first tried my simple identification test in Amsterdam, where it worked like a charm. In Faeto, though, it hit a communications pothole, when Concetta, our kind and helpful desk manager, whisked it back into the inner sanctum of the large party house kitchen. Will she be here tomorrow, and if not, will she tell any one where she put it, I asked myself? It was eventually found, which brought smiles to me and the staff.

When I handed my survey of my stay to the manager at check out time, I told her the story and again made it clear that their facility and their high level of staff attention was one we would not soon forget.

To anyone visiting Venezia, my recommendation is to do yourself and your pocketbook a favor and consider the Holiday Inn in Quarto D’Altino. You love it, from its modern style to its convenient location directly across from the train stop there, and the staff will bowl you over, especially if you are from the States, with their customer and language skills.

Driving, Walking Euro Style

DSA versus EU

Back in the Divided States of America (DSA), where I’m driving and walking stateside again after nearly six weeks of country hopping in Europe, the clear difference I see between driving and walking here and there, especially Italy and France, two countries in our five European Union walkabout, is the sharp contrast between the power of the pedestrian there and the rule of cars here.

Everyone it seems walks in the EU; whereas here, hardly anyone does. In every city we visited, big and small, walking is done by the very young and the very old and everyone in-between. In major cities, like Roma or Paris, walking is a necessity to activily living one’s daily life. Used to driving everywhere to get anywhere here, during our nearly 40-day odyssey there, we walked a minimum of three miles nearly each day. We had a handful of travel days when we went intermodal and used planes, trains and buses. On several days, especially in Paris, Roma, Barcelona and Venezia, it seemed as though by not walking, we would miss too much of the local streetscape and the amazing panoply of shopkeepers that inhabit small and engaging space. All toll, and considering we drove a car for at least half of our time there, we realistically estimate that we walked upwards of 100 miles; that's tantamount to the distance between Columbus, Ohio's capitol, and Cincinnati, a southwest city on the Ohio River.

Before a car is needed, lots of secondary transportation choices, such as bicycles, scooters and motorcycles for individuals and Metros, buses, trolleys and taxis, robust and omnipresent, are there for the taking. The nexus of public transportation systems can take you from one end of the EU to the other. In the DSA, recreating, or in some cases building from scratch, an EU-style transportation system – the buzz term for this coordination of transportation systems is intermodal -- is a laudable goal, but I’ll be dead by the time it comes, if ever.

The positive symbiosis and interplay between walking and going intermodal in the EU is what makes it so easy and exciting, like a little adventure, to get around without hassling with a car, as most everyone in the DSA does. Sans car, intermodal is what you do to get to the next walking point on your way to your destination.

Pedestrians across Europe, no doubt, have commanded streets from the animal paths they were centuries ago. And with some streets being primarily pedestrian ways [see 5/29/06 post titled My Pickle in Pescallo], it appears that cars there were designed to fit cities, while cities in the DSA have been designed to fit cars here. Where military vehicles turned passenger car go, pedestrians will shy away from.

Having logged over 2,000 miles of combined driving in Italy and France on this trip alone, I can tell you that when the traffic light turns red [intersections generally have three light configurations: across the road, top of the light stanchion and a small set at driver-eye level], cars stop on a dime and pedestrians bolt forward without hesitation to claim their rightful space. Unlike the DSA, where cars are permitted to turn right-on-red and where drivers, through practice, learn pedestrians are inferiors to be tolerated but not respected, the opposite is generally true in the EU. Drivers there are very aware of pedestrians and always defer to them, notwithstanding the close shaves and near misses given by generally small car drivers who accommodate walkers but sometimes not by much.

Pedestrians make communities come alive, as they did for us in the small, medieval walled Italian city of Lucca in Tuscany, where it took only 20 minutes to walk from the east gate to the west gate. Or In Roma, where gas-powered vehicles and people constantly overlap. Walking on any sidewalk in Roma, for example, you can expect to encounter any or all of the following: a grandparent walking with a cane or a grandchild, kids kicking a soccer ball, a mother riding a bicycle with her child on it, a teenager on a scooter, a young adult riding a motorcycle or a small car, parked.

Here in the DSA, where traffic rules make everyone paranoid to do what is done naturally in the EU, brains and blood would be splattered everywhere because people’s heads could not take the tension that comes with the free flow of people and machines as is customary there. The few driving rules religiously obeyed in the EU are adequate to keep man and machine moving along while the book of driving rules here, which are actively enforced by local law enforcement officials who are constantly cruising roadways like sharks in the ocean hunting for their next meal, seem artificial in their guarantee of safety.

In the DSA, police and police cruises are always on the hunt. While driving in the EU, in its cities and on its Autostradas, I can remember seeing only a dozen or so police. These public officials, looking sharp in the military-style uniforms [a la CHIPS] were either standing with their buddies in traffic circles or were watching the ebb and flow of cars and people with a benevolent attitude of “let the flow go,” or as we might say here, ”no harm, no foul.”

In Italy, all cars are equipped with the same turn signals as cars in the DSA. But Italian drivers rarely use them, preferring instead to go where they want when they want. From my first visit to Italy and Rome in 1999, I learned how cars and civilians coexist and witnessed interactions between the two that were veritable miracles of movement that to me approached walking on water or parting colorful seas.

Walking in Italian urban areas in Centro areas, where history has molded the urban landscape into either narrow channels of brick or stucco or into piazzas so large and august that statues and spouting fountains are the perfect compliment to walkers, I saw first hand and participated myself in the delicate if not fast-paced interplay of man and machine where no one stops for anyone but everyone makes way for the next guy.

Standing on a street corner in Roma, I once watched as two Italian business men, dressed as if they were Marcello Mastroianni in a Fellini movie, stepped from the relative safety of an Italian sidewalk into the streaming traffic speeding around one of the many roundabouts in the city. Without a hint of care for or acknowledgement of the oncoming traffic, the two men, looking at each other as they conversed with language and gesture, strode across the stream of cars, motorcycles, busses, and bicyclists as if they were protected by some special shied of invulnerability. Once on the opposite bank of the traffic stream, they kept walking, not once admitting through gesture any trepidation of the feat they had just performed.

In Columbus, Ohio, where The Ohio State University marching band performs its signature act of uncoiling itself from a tight-knit square into a single stream of musicians who spell out in cursive the state name, the popular performance of Script Ohio is a hometown example of what is done in the EU everyday on a massive scale. The brass band musicians, when they hand write the name of their state, cross through each other at several points of intersection where letters are linked. In style befitting crossing a busy Italian street, the strutting marchers, playing their instruments as they march, never stop but speed up or slow down a micro-second so as not to hit an oncoming musician who was further back in the pack.

On Italian streets, where La Dulce Vita or "the sweet life" is made exciting by at the same time disdaining the powers of opposites while also calculating them, is a rare art that may never be understood or practiced in the DSA. Here, where our biggest public places are often times car parking lots, the exhilaration of walking in fast moving traffic is curtailed by personal paranoia and by an in-bred fear of violating traffic rules. If more people in the DSA walked more, the landscape, which is designed for and ruled by cars, would change to put people at the pinnacle of power, and relegate cars to what they are in the EU, the last choice in transportation.

In a timely report about how more and more aging Americans are being stranded at home because they cannot drive and must therefore rely upon the kindness of family and neighbors and the clear inadequacies of local bus companies, The Columbus Dispatch reports that about "82 percent of Americans 65 and older say they worry that they will be stranded when they no longer can drive, according to a survey last year by the American Public Transportation Association."

In 2005, the paper wrote, "there were 36.8 million people age 65 and older in the country, according to U.S. Census estimates," and "The number is expected to reach 72 million by 2030, representing about 20 percent of the population. The 85-and-older group is the fastest-growing segment of the population." A local AARP [American Association of Retired People] spokesperson addressed the obvious question that will only be exacerbated as more of our aging citizens become more isolated in their homes. Her poignant query of how these people are going to get around is a concern we should all focus on here. The EU, for many reasons, has not forsaken its intermodal public transportation systems and while it takes a bit of work, people of all ages there can live their lives without a car. Is it too late to improve our pubic transportation systems here? The simple answer is no, but the complex answer is that for change to happen here, Americans need to change their attitude about the importance of public transportation and elect public officials who have the political will to invest in system improvements going forward. Otherwise, people, especially seniors, will find life more frustrating as their transportation options dwindle, leading them unavoidably to becoming increasingly marooned in their homes and separated from the world around them.

As local bus systems like the Central Ohio Transportation Authority (COTA) try valiently but vainly to compete against the power of the car, it is little wonder that meager systems like COTA, which is not only financially imploding on itself and but finally if not unfortunately giving up the ghost on years of preparatory work to bring light rail to the area, will never be able to lure enough passengers from the driver's seat of a revving, engineered sanctum world to a passenger seat on a public system that is not comfortable or private and does not contribute to their self-esteem. The lastest Hummer car commercial makes my point, as it implies will happen if you lay down $50,000 and buy a behemoth that only produces 13-miles per gallon. Filling the 32-gallon gas tank of the car brought to American roads in the early 90s through the action-hero proclamations of Arnold Schwarzenegger only costs about $96 a pop at today's $3-gas prices. A small price to pay, surely, to feel like a man, even if you are a soccer mom.