Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Tuscany Tours Is Born
T
he Lord, as you may have noticed, moves in mysterious ways. During the last decade of
the last millennium, Pam and I had one foot in the world of Renaissance Italy and the other
in the world of American high-tech. Actually, it was more like having one toe in the water
in Tuscany while all the other toes gripped tightly to
terra firma
in the USA.
Earlier in the decade I had entered a Ph.D. program at The Union Institute, and four years
later I received my doctorate. Afterwards I found ample opportunities to teach a class or two
in the Bay Area as a stringer, but there was nothing available that resembled a tenure-track
academic position. For that we would have had to move to someplace like Nebraska or Ten-
nessee where we knew no one and start life all over again. It was the kind of thing that one
might do in one's twenties, but certainly not in one's late forties.
I was passionate about art and psychology, but the money was clearly in high-tech. For
teaching a two-day course on project management software, I earned nearly as much as I
did for a teaching a semester university class. So, for ten months of the year we ran a cor-
porate training business initiating teams of engineers into the world of Unix-based project
management software. We worked with product development teams at all kinds of organ-
izations: pager engineers at Motorola in Florida, missile engineers at the Redstone Arsenal
in Alabama, chip designers in Chicago, and Navy programmers in New Orleans. We were
good enough at it that the companies with which we contracted put up with our annual de-
partures to Italy. And, so, for two months every summer we ran away to immerse ourselves
in Tuscan culture, Renaissance art and tiramisu.
One summer I taught a course at the Berkeley School of Religion on “The Religious Ima-
gination of the Renaissance.” Shortly afterwards, I received an unexpected invitation from a
graduate school friend. Alicia was an associate Dean at the Starr King School for the Min-
istry, another of the schools up on “Holy Hill” in Berkeley. She knew that Pam and I were
in love with Tuscany, and she asked if we would be interested in putting together an alumni
tour of Tuscany for her denomination. I told her I would think about it, paused for two
seconds, and then said “Sure”.
The fact that we had never done anything like this before was daunting enough. But, to com-
plicate things even further, we learned a few months later that our first child was on its way.
We calculated that if all went well our baby would be about two months old when it came
time to lead the tour. How we would deal with a mewling and puking infant on a tour for
ministers and theology students?
Search WWH ::
Custom Search