So long, Texas…and hello, Italy!

The stress and workload of the first few months of 2026 began to lighten up almost as soon as our airplane from Tucson touched down at DFW Airport. I say almost because the flight was delayed by seven hours, so we arrived at our Plano hotel just after 3:00 am on Sunday, March 8. After having been up very late the night before while we inventoried and sealed our moving boxes, we were exhausted and ready for some sleep.

Saying “so long” to our Dallas friends

We had already filled our planned time in Texas with visits with our many Dallas and Plano-area friends. We knew that it would be the last time we’d see most of them for quite a while–or in some cases, sadly, probably forever–so we made sure to make the time count. From a hastily-arranged reunion of the great team from my first company, ProSoft Corporation (thanks to Carol, who fortuitously happened to be in town with her husband Darron that weekend) a mere nine hours after we checked into our hotel, to dinner on our last night in town with our friends Will and Lisa–who were kind enough to lend us a car during our stay–we had social appointments every single day of our two-week stay…even squeezing in a last one with RVing friend Kevin in the DFW Admiral’s Club just before our flight to Europe.

Our last round of U.S. checkups

Ever since we started RVing, we had returned to Plano each spring for our annual physicals with our internists, teeth cleanings and exams with our dentist, and checkups with the ever-growing variety of medical specialists we’d accumulated as we had gotten older. We knew it would be a few months before we could get established in Italy’s national health care system, so we wanted to take care of as much as possible before we departed. We also got copies of our medical records and prescriptions for medications to give to our new doctors in Italy.

We had had some of these doctor-patient relationships for 10 or 20 years or more, and many of them had supported us through our years of nomadic travels (some even following us on this blog!), so saying goodbye to them was almost like leaving another group of friends.

Cheryl’s visa appointment in Miami

As you may remember from our last blog post, after several anxious weeks of waiting, we had finally received Cheryl’s nulla osta–the clearance for her Italian visa to be issued–two days before we left Arizona. Although the news was a relief, it also meant that we had to delay our departure to Italy and extend our stay in the Dallas area to allow enough time for her visa appointment and to receive her passport with the visa afterward.

On Thursday evening, March 13, Cheryl flew from DFW to Miami, where she stayed overnight to be ready for her appointment at the Italian Consulate General there the next morning. As with my appointment two months earlier, she was in and out of the office in about 15 minutes, leaving her passport with the Consulate to finish issuing the visa.

That morning, Cheryl’s close childhood friend and neighbor Socrates traveled from his home near Melbourne down to Miami to meet up with her after the appointment, and they got to spend the rest of the day together.

Cheryl flew back to DFW the next day, and we began the wait for her passport to be returned to us in the Priority Mail Express envelope she had left with the Consulate. We had allowed eight days for this, which we thought would be plenty based on the time it took for mine to be returned in January. But naturally, we instead had to have one more nail-biter: her passport with her new Italian visa finally showed up on Saturday, March 21–a mere 24 hours before our first flight.

And with that, all the lights had finally turned green for our departure to Italy on Sunday, March 22!

Hello, Italy!

After all the drama of the preceding few weeks, our travel overseas was blissfully uneventful. We did have to make two connections–one in Cincinnati and a second in London–because that’s all that was available for our mileage award tickets when we’d been forced to rearrange our plans two weeks before. But other than lengthening the trip by a couple of hours, it was a non-issue: all three flights departed and arrived on time, the connections were simple, and all our luggage made it to Italy.

Because we each had two large checked bags plus a couple of carry-ons, we had arranged for a driver to pick us up at Milan’s Linate Airport on Monday, March 23 so that we wouldn’t have to wrangle all the luggage on a bus and train to Lecco. After a long day of travel, having door-to-door service from the airport to the Airbnb we’d rented for our first two nights was a welcome (but spendy) end to the trip.

The next morning, Tuesday, we walked around the corner to a cafe in Lecco’s historic center for breakfast. As you can see from our clothing–and the snow still crowning Mount Resegone, on the east side of Lecco–winter wasn’t quite over yet.

Moving in

At 10 am, we met up with the real estate agent and the owners of the apartment that we had finally managed to rent. To our great relief, the apartment turned out to be far nicer than what we’d expected based on the photos and videos the agent had sent us. It’s located on what we in the United States would call the fifth floor of a small six-story building–although it’s considered the fourth floor here, because in Italy the “first floor” (prima piano) is the floor directly above the “ground floor” (piano terra). Fortunately, the building has a small elevator, just barely large enough for three people.

Our two-bedroom, one-bath apartment has exposure on two sides, with numerous large windows that make the interior light and bright. The building, located on the edge of Lecco’s historic center, was constructed in the early 1950s, but the apartment was renovated more recently. From our windows and balconies, we have great views west toward Piazza Manzoni and Mount Moregallo–which rises from the opposite side of the Lecco branch of Lake Como–and north over our treed boulevard (Viale Dante Alighieri, named for the 13th-century Italian author of The Divine Comedy, also known as The Inferno) and part of the Resegone mountain complex.

We spent the rest of Tuesday hauling our luggage from the Airbnb up to the apartment and beginning to decide where all our stuff would live in the new place. Wednesday, we checked out of the Airbnb, and we spent that night in our new place for the first time. And on Friday, after DHL delivered our boxes–19 from Arizona and one from Dallas–the unpacking began in earnest.

The apartment came furnished with an eclectic mix of furniture, ranging from contemporary to nineteenth-century antiques. Each bedroom had two single beds, and what would become our guest bedroom had no clothing storage, so that first weekend we purchased a nice bedroom set from friends that we’d met the previous fall. With their help, I rented a cargo van (with a manual transmission, like most vehicles here; it was the first time I’d driven a “stick” in about 30 years!), and then drove with them about 45 minutes south to the garage where they had the disassembled furniture stored. We managed to fit it all in the van, drove it back to Lecco, and then hauled it all up to the apartment. Most of the parts fit into our tiny elevator, but we had to carry the largest and heaviest pieces up on the winding staircase of our building.

Over the next few weeks, either an Amazon driver or an IKEA delivery van visited us almost every day as we replaced the 110v appliances we’d sold in the U.S. with European 220v versions, substituted some more modern chairs for their uncomfortable Victorian-era counterparts, and acquired the other furnishings needed to turn our new apartment into a home.

After the bed, our second most important purchase was an electric clothes dryer. Dryers aren’t that common in Italian homes, both because of the high cost of electricity (three to four times that in the U.S.) and because of a long-standing cultural preference for air-drying laundry. We tried it the Italian way for a couple of weeks, but we soon tired of stiff, rough towels and clothing, and eventually we bowed to the American luxury.

Settling into Lecco

While we were getting settled into our apartment, we were also settling into our new hometown. Of course, there were the mundane necessities like learning our way around the hypermarket and finding a pharmacy. But we also discovered the pleasure of buying freshly baked bread from the panetteria, and piatti pronti (ready-to-eat dishes) from the gourmet cucina, both right across the boulevard from our apartment. We paid frequent visits to our favorite gelateria; marveled at the sight of Mount San Martino framing Lecco’s landmark bell tower (officially the Campanile of the Basilica of San Nicolò, but known around here as Il Matitone, “the big pencil”) as we entered Piazza XX Settembre, the main square in the city center; and watched from the lungolago along the shore of Lake Como as the setting sun colored the evening sky.

And each time one of these sights took our breath away, one of us said to the other in amazement:

“You know what?”

“We live here.”