Yet early on, we established a comfortable rhythm that has worked ever since. The first day or two, we usually all go to the most interesting town or village, in part to get our bearings and a sense of the area. We split up driving responsibilities -- the singles usually rent a car together, while couples team up in small vans or in their own cars. We meet up at lunchtime and again at an agreed departure time. In between, we break up to wander wherever we want.
For the rest of the week, people split up and chart their own itineraries. Each day, we reassemble around 6 p.m. to sample wines and cheeses we've purchased on our outings and share tales of our daily adventures.
The author's D.C. neighbors gather at their Tuscan villa in Montespertoli.
(Robin Wright -- The Washington Post)
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Sharon, who recently finished reading a book on the Lewis and Clark expedition, thinks our trips work for the same reason that their early American exploration succeeded. "As a neighborhood, we'd already gone through learning group dynamics and what it meant to be a group. It's more than knowing and liking each other. It's knowing how to negotiate our differences, which is a big part of trusting and being comfortable with each other," she reflected.
Jerry says it's just a stoop party in a different location.
Our neighborhood travel club reflects our roots. Like much of Washington, we're imports, even though many of us have lived here for more than a decade or two. Most have ties to the Midwest -- Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Nebraska -- and we brought a Midwest sense of community with us. We give potluck snow parties in bad weather. Anyone who gets sick becomes a block project, with food supplies, pharmacy runs, escorts to the hospital, dog walking. As Isabel says, a big part of the travel club is the already established civility.
But neighborhood travel has also proven to be a more affordable way to see the world. On arrival, we all put about $60 per person in a kitty for breakfast foods, basic necessities, evening hors d'oeuvres and wine. We buy staples -- such as cereal, fruit, coffee and milk -- to keep in the house. The morning walkers among us wander into town to buy fresh croissants and the papers. Anyone who buys something later takes funds from the kitty, leaving a receipt behind.
To our amazement, the funds generally last the week. In the process, we get to taste life in the local community and aren't isolated in a hotel filled largely with other foreigners.
The few difficult moments on our trips have often happened getting to and from destinations -- and often involved Joe, our beloved but sometimes oblivious-to-trouble physicist-turned-businessman. On one trip to France, he was taking a picture on the edge of a winding mountain road when he was knocked over by a car and had to be hospitalized. On two trips to Italy, he forgot that European cars often take diesel and filled his car with regular gas. Both times the car died.
The neighborliness can crack during election years, when dinner-table debates get noisy. We're pretty evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Evie, Joe and Bonnie often have to rescue the mood by steering us to other topics.
The birthday trip went so well that we decided to do it again in Italy the following summer. Alan and Maryellen organized this outing. They found a villa among the Tuscan vineyards in Montespertoli, a modest town 40 minutes by bus from Florence, with an uninterrupted view across voluptuous green hills. It had eight bedrooms and, more important, eight bathrooms, a pool, vast living spaces, a veranda and enough grounds and garden foliage to please even the bird-watchers.
