You don't go to Rudi Steele looking for either a wild adventure or that obscure village in Moldova with a great bed-and-breakfast. Rudi's specialty is the best of the best of conventional travel. That was fine with us. My wife's work takes her to enough exotic but underdeveloped locations. For her birthday blowout, we were happy to zero in on well-touristed Western Europe: Paris, Rome…no destination was too banal. Years ago, as a student backpacker, I had visited a town in southern Italy called Ravello and thought it was the most romantic place I'd ever seen: perched, as I recalled, above the rugged Amalfi Coast, with cliché-gorgeous views of the winding coast highway and the Mediterranean. When I told my wife this, she insisted that Ravello was where we were going. This made me nervous. Decades had passed. Both of us had seen a bit more of the world. What if the town's charms had been paved over for an autostrada? What if it didn't stand up in the global romance rankings? But Rudi very much approved. Ravello—best known, until recently, as the home of Gore Vidal—was, he assured us, extremely romantic. There were two fantastic hotels, and he knew the general managers and concierges of both. Naturally. We ended up spending five nights in the large new Villa Caruso suite at Ravello's Hotel Caruso, and then two nights in Rome at the Hotel de Russie, near the Piazza del Popolo.

Among our birthday extravagances, we had a car and driver pick us up at the airport in Rome for the three-hour drive to Ravello, we bought dinner service for twelve from a local shop, and we chartered a private boat for a day-trip to Capri (even though the hotel ran a group boat). I can't bring myself to reveal what the whole thing cost, but it was a lot. Think of five figures—all west of the decimal point and not starting with one, either. I basically gave Rudi our credit card number early in the planning process (which started about four months in advance of the trip—none too soon, from Rudi's professional viewpoint) and, through sheer will, wouldn't let myself think about it until the trip was over.

What we didn't know until afterward, and might never have known if I hadn't decided to write this article, was that Rudi had actually reduced the cost of the trip in various ways by using his connections and his wiles. For example, he had the Caruso include daily lunch or dinner in the room rate, and got the Hotel de Russie to throw in free use of the Wellness Zone health club. Since the daily rate at both hotels was well into four figures, this may seem like an almost farcically modest triumph. But even in the stratosphere, every bit helps. On a somewhat grander scale, Rudi somehow got British Airways to chop $8,500 off our two first-class airfares from Seattle to Rome. Once again, I'm not saying what the tickets cost, but you could look it up on Expedia or Orbitz, subtract $8,500, and still be in for a shock.