A favourite memory

We arrived home from a 54 day holiday overseas late October.

Many of our friends asked the inevitable question “what was the highlight of your trip?”, and honestly there were many. Without going into a full discourse of our trip which would have bored them senseless it was impossible to cover all the highlights. After all, the trip consisted of 3 days in San Francisco, two weeks on a Trafalgar land tour of Italy, two back to back cruises of the East and West Mediterranean, 6 days in New York, and a further 6 days with my Aunt in Tacoma Washington. It was all great and for a change because of the slow pace in the latter stages we didn’t feel that we’d had enough and ‘just let me go home!’ - We’d have quite happily kept on going for longer.

Strangely, my favourite memory and highlight started about 2 weeks in August before we left.

To my consternation the spring in the hinge on the ensuite cabinet broke. I searched all over the place locally; thought I had found a replacement at Bunnings only to find the spring arm was not the right shape. Frustration!

The original was made by Ferrari, Italy and with research the smallest size presently available in Australia is 25mm – mine was maybe 15 years old and measured 20mm.

Advice given to me by a local reseller was to locate a merchant on-line and buy it from overseas. Good suggestion, but by this time I was only a couple of days away from going overseas and didn’t have time to be worried about that right then.

The thought occurred to me that while I was overseas I might find a hardware store and try my luck so I slipped the broken hinge into my bum bag and took it with me. Much to Sandra’s disbelieving observation.

Now I don’t know whether you have ever tried to find a hardware store in Italy but they just don’t look like they do here and they don’t stand out. Disappointing!

When we had returned to Rome after the Trafalgar Tour we had 6 days at our own disposal for which we’d planned various excursions staying at different places to take in sights we didn’t see on the tour. Anyway, before leaving Rome, we needed to get some cash from an ATM and put some money on Sandra’s prepaid phone plan, so we set about doing that and after accomplishing the agenda we continued to walk when I spotted a little shop about a hundred metres from the Vatican Wall that looked like a nik-nak shop – nothing much of a window display and nothing outside – it just looked interesting.

We went in. Inside was narrow – customer space was narrow, counter was narrow, staff space was narrow and it went around a corner to somewhere I couldn’t see from the door.

I thought “what the hell – nothing ventured, nothing gained” and dropped the broken hinge on the counter and asked the young attendant whether he had one of “those”. He looked perplexed and shook his head. I was about to pick up my broken hinge and leave when an older man (probably the owner) said from further down the counter to the young guy “hop up on the counter” and pointed to one of maybe fifty small wooden drawers with no labels. The young fellow did as he was bid and came down with the nominated drawer, plonked it down on the counter and sure enough inside was the exact hinge I needed. It cost me a whole €2. It was amazing.

It tickled my fancy that I’d almost gone as far as The Holy See to find my new hinge and that I’d gone against the odds to find it in such an unlikely place.

It may not have been the typical highlight of an overseas holiday, but to me it is a favourite memory!