“Where’s the stroller? Did you get the stroller?”, I shouted in panic as my wife and in-laws struggled to open the six hundred year old door of the Airbnb. I couldn’t see their faces in the dimmed street lights of Via dei Rustici, but it was clear that our most prized piece of luggage was no longer with us. It was on the backseat of one of the random touristy golf carts we took on our way back to the Airbnb from the Duomo. Moments earlier that cart had vanished at the other end of the narrow alley. My tired legs were already in motion in that direction – despite being no match against an electric golf cart speeding across the unknown Florentine labyrinth. Shortly near Piazza di Santa Croce, they gave up.
If you are one of those parents who love to travel, you probably own a YoYo stroller. It’s light, foldable, and sturdy enough to contain a hyperactive three-year-old saboteur from escaping as you push it uphill on cobbled medieval roads. But what made the trusty old stroller so indispensable at that moment was our tour of San Gimignano, Siena, Montepulciano early next morning. Not to mention, the stroller intensive part of our two week trip was still ahead of us – Gimmelwald, Grindelwald, Paris, all hikes have been meticulously planned with the assurance of keeping the little running feet onboard the YoYo. Amazon could not deliver so soon, but Google showed baby stores within driving distance from our Airbnb! Problem solved. The guilt – not quite.
As I tried to fall sleep, the events kept replaying in flash back. After a long train ride to Florence, hike to Michelangelo square, and a bellyful of gelato, the twenty minutes walk back to the Airbnb from the Duomo seemed like an ordeal. So when a tourist golf cart offered us a ride, we hopped on without much hesitation. The driver kindly helped me stow away the stroller under the last row of seats and that’s when it disappeared out of my sight. As we settled in on the cart, we saw his furry little friend, a mahogany pomeranian, jumped off the front seat and left her mark on the street. “Oh Bruni, look what you’ve done” – said the driver with feigned annoyance. We all laughed as the cart picked speed leaving the dazzling piazza behind.
After a few wrong turns in the medieval maze, when we reached the Airbnb, everyone got busy with strapping together whatever cash we had on us (we were carrying almost no cash, thanks to Apple pay) and blissfully forgot about the stroller. Now, in the middle of the night we had no chance of finding an unknown person in an unknown city where we did not speak the language. Weighed down by guilt and helplessness, I drifted into sleep.
My mind started waking up the early next morning. Fleeting images of Occam’s Razor, search algorithms, information retrieval techniques like tf-idf, principal component analysis swirled in a hazy fog, half formed and fleeting, as if caught between dream and reality. Compared to brute force search or when we lack the luxury of structured organization of data, search techniques pivot to heuristics. To explore a space of possibilities, algorithms like hill climbing, simulated annealing, A* evaluate and compare potential solutions, using feedback to improve, and often optimizing by cutting down irrelevant parts of the search space. Was searching in the real world any different? In all of Florence, there are only a small set of people who drive tourist golf carts. There is probably no more than one that has a dog named Bruny. Sites like Viator, Get my guide have already indexed the tour guide operators. Google has indexed the reviews that people have written about their experiences. What were the odds that some customer might have left a review about a golf cart driver who carries his dog on the cart?
I distinctly remember at this point seeing the vector diagrams of cosine similarity, the very first text mining algorithm I learned about years back. I jumped out of bed, convinced I had a very tractable search space.
Jackpot!
https://www.viator.com/tours/Florence/Florence-Eco-Tour-by-Electric-Golf-Cart/d519-7779P5
As I called Viator customer support, I only expected obvious denial – would they even listen to me? after all it was not a bona fide service purchase from the tour operator! Or will some GDPR-ish red tape thwart my search? To my surprise, Viator’s incredible support staff listened sympathetically and gave me the number of the tour operator – Accord Italy Smart Tours and Experiences!
“Don’t worry sir, we know who you are talking about. Carlo will reach out to you soon. Please give me your Whatsapp number”, said the tour operator helpline. Minutes later, Carlo was on the phone. He apologized for not returning the stroller any sooner as without my address he couldn’t make it back.
I was flabbergasted, not knowing how to thank this kind man. Within 20 mins of having my address, he was standing at the same place where he had left us last night. He refused to take anything for his act of kindness and left in the same direction like last night, but this time, the stroller was not aboard the golf cart, I was holding it tightly in my hand.
Our ride for Tuscany had already arrived and as I stowed away the stroller, I had my Renaissance moment. In this ancient city, where art, culture, and history seem to permeate every stone, we had navigated a problem using the marvels of modern technology. Yet, despite all the advances, it was the simple, timeless acts of human kindness and a stroke of luck that made the difference. In a city that flourished through innovation and connection, it felt fitting that our solution came through the same—blending the old with the new in a way that only Florence could inspire.