Planning a family vacation around active teens plus a notoriously persnickety Italian/American husband is no small task for the determined traveler. Let me tell you! Especially when the vacation revolves around a once-every-four-year FIFA Soccer World Cup season.
Not being quite up on the official (seemingly semi-secret) game schedule some four months ahead of time, it just so happened that my excellent travel planning techniques ran aground just ever-so-slightly (so to speak) when tournament postings revealed the World Cup final would - in fact, take place during my family’s eventual cross country, coast-to coast return flight home from a trip to New England from Northern California.
Whoops. Oh well, it wasn’t as if Italy or England or the U.S. were anywhere near to a sniff at the final anyways. At least that was my line. And for the most part, the Italian Husband was a good sport in going along with a laugh with knowing friends and family.
I mean, how could I have known that a seemingly routine six-hour flight from Boston’s Logan Airport to SFO could possibly consume some two, epic, nail-biting hours of an entire four-week global sporting finale?
It was the luck of the draw. Some things are just meant to be. Or not. The fact that he’d not missed a live screening of one single game wasn’t going to stand in our way. We’d simply DVR the final and watch it once we made it back home to Sonoma County on Sunday night.
“Plug your ears if you don’t want to know who won the World Cup,” announced the friendly United Airlines Pilot mid-way cross the continental U.S. Not too worried, myself, seeing as I knew we’d had it all set up in the digital recording department back home, I continued my conversation with an intriguing Monterey County horse ranch caretaker seated beside me in the sardine-like flight accommodations.
The Italian husband was across the way, feverishly working his way through an airport novel when word came of a Spanish triumph over the Netherland team. There was no way not to hear this announcement. And I have to admit – this was just a little anti-climatic after four weeks of early morning wake-up calls to the nightmarish vuvuzela.
Needless to say, there were (somewhat surprisingly) no further admonishments on the return drive on fogged-in 19th Avenue, through San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge. After a week of most excellent New England adventures and four World Cup games watched in good company in the greater Boston area, the sporting troops were seemingly fairly well satiated.
And what a difference a week makes anyway, for the day of our arrival in Boston following a red-eye flight and a underground train ride directly to the city’s iconic Italian North End was probably just as good as it gets with World Cup Fever anyways!
(Pictured above, drop-dead delicious cannoli's from Mike's Pastry and a two-hour, cappuccino-fueled, post-East Coast arrival breakfast at Cafe Pompei)
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