{"id":241,"date":"2003-08-20T01:06:20","date_gmt":"2003-08-20T08:06:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=241"},"modified":"2003-08-20T01:06:20","modified_gmt":"2003-08-20T08:06:20","slug":"accidental-tourist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2003\/08\/accidental-tourist\/","title":{"rendered":"Accidental tourist"},"content":{"rendered":"

I take it all back, everything that I said<\/a> about Ryanair. Two months and 6 flights later, it’s clear that deregulation is drastically changing the way Europeans will fly — much in the same way it did in the US. The era of the accidental tourist is truly upon us: Cheap last minute flights now make it possible to fly from London to Italy on a whim.<\/p>\n

And that is what I did last week. Matthew and Kim had already hired a villa outside Siena, Michael B. had already rented the car from Rome’s airport; I just needed to show up at the appointed hour. In the event, I managed to talk Eurof into abandoning his wife and child, and off we went, like Navy Seals of tourism, ready to be dropped into the world’s cultural hot spots on 48 hours notice.<\/p>\n

Random acts of tourism have their payoffs. In our case, it was stumbling onto the Palio horse race, which began on the day we went into town. While others had waited for hours in 40-degree heat to witness the race, we rounded the corner to the Piazza del Campo just as the canon went off and the race started. It wasn’t fair — we should suffer more for our arte<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

New trend alert:<\/span> In crowds, digital cameras are now held aloft as periscopes for the shorter members of the entourage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I take it all back, everything that I said about Ryanair. Two months and 6 flights later, it’s clear that deregulation is drastically changing the way Europeans will fly — much in the same way it did in the US. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-3T","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}