The Last Temptation of Harold Crick

Italy: Overture

At the moment, when someone asks me what I do for a living I answer, “I am a travel agent.” I don’t identify myself as an agent as I believe a human being is greater than the sum of his or her parts. Just because I work as a travel agent now, does not mean I have always been a travel agent or have aspirations of doing other things with my life, or having other interests. But, that is a post for another time. At the moment I am a travel agent.

I have worked as a travel agent off and on over the course of the last ten years. And in that time I have been offered three free trips. I feel very fortunate to have been offered any at all, but I say this so you’ll understand that travel agents aren’t in the habit of flitting around on free trips every six months because, let’s face it, I don’t get any special deals from airlines or travel companies just because I am an agent. It just doesn’t work that way. But, every once in a while (thrice in a decade) an opportunity comes along. In November 2015 I was offered a place on a famil with Trafalgar Tours. In travel industry speak a famil stands for familiarization, which is a way of saying that I get to go somewhere so I can be familiarized with the destination and the travel product in order to help me sell said product and destination. In this case the product is Trafalgar Tours, and the destination is Italy.

A famil is typically made up entirely of industry people. Currently, the Trafalgar Tour I’m with is made up of 41 Australian travel agents and two representatives of Trafalgar. Much to my dismay (and more to her horror) I was unable to bring my wife Helen with me to Italy. But she is an extraordinary woman and over the past decade has come to understand what it means to be the companion of a travel agent (in a word: lonely). So, as much as I would love to be exploring the wonder and beauty of Italy with the only person I EVER want to spend my time, instead I am here with a bus load of randoms, and she is in Australia with a house full of sociopathic midgets (otherwise known as our children). In preparation for my famil I found myself vacillating between unbridled excitement over my first trip to Europe and untempered self-loathing over leaving Helen by herself for over a week with our four children. Fortunately we were able to fly her mum down to stay with her during this time to act as second in command, but it is still difficult for me to completely enjoy myself, knowing how hard my wife has to work in order to make this possible. My love and gratitude to her is multilayered, exquisite, and boundless.

So it was with these complicated emotions that I made my departure from Hobart, Tasmania to the Eternal City: Rome, Italy.