Sheep Guarding Llama

We were up at a more normal time today, seven thirty.  Enough time to get ourselves ready before heading down to breakfast about as soon as breakfast was open.  Not quite immediately as a group of French guests, the only other guests that we have seen all this week other than the Norwegians, was just leaving to head out for the day.

We ate breakfast as quickly as we could which for us with the girls is rather slowly.  Luciana demands, every single morning, to walk around and we have to constantly chase her as she either goes out to reception or heads out into the driveway so that she can make an attempt at climbing the steps or the steed driveway itself where she has almost no chance of staying vertical for any amount of time.  So breakfast is quite a challenge for us.

After breakfast was done we set out immediately in our Fiat Panda to get up to the lake country in the far north of Italy.  We had wanted to do this drive yesterday but it is pretty far, over two hours, to get up there and we don’t want to be getting home too late.  So we saved it for a full day trip today.

The road north went through Asti and Alessandria which comprise, in our opinion, some of the most boring landscape around.  The landscape in that direction is completely flat as you go into the Po Valley.  It is a beautiful area, to be sure, but boring and flat.  Rice paddies are really common which really tells just how flat it is.  It makes even Oklahoma and Kansas seem hilly.

This ride helped to cement that the Langhe really is the right area for us to be looking in.

Coming into Lago Maggiore from the west heading to Spesa you go from the endless flat rice paddies to pretty quickly going into hills and the road goes into tunnel after tunnel.  Liesl loves going into tunnels.  She gets excited every time whether it is on the train or in the car.  She explained to us that cars go through car tunnels and trains go through train tunnels.  Her car seat in the back of the Panda is really high and she can see out the front of the car to some degree and she likes to look for them coming and shouts out to us when she sees one.

We arrived in Stresa and the GPS lead us down a winding road, too tight for two cars at once from time to time, into town.  This is where the GPS sucks – when it takes you off of the main road onto dangerous and crazy “locals only” roads that no tourist should ever be on.  The whole GPS phenomenon has done some really dangerous things.  I can’t believe the places that the GPS tells us to go.

While the drive down into Stresa was kind of crazy, once we arrived it was amazing.  We drove right into the middle of town and just managed perfectly to pull straight into a parking space right in front of the big, grand hotel right in the middle of the water front.  Amazing.  I pulled out little Panda right into the space and we were free to wander the main water front with free parking!  This was great.

We walked only the tiniest bit before everyone was hungry so at a place called Daniel’s, right in front of the Grand Hotel and in front of where we parked, we stopped and ate some pasta and gelato with wonderful views onto what must be the most beautiful lake in the world.  Lago Maggiore reminds you of a large scale, really breath taking New York Finger Lake.

The food wasn’t bad.  It was a tourist trap, semi-temporary place definitely not aimed at being fancy or special but the food was okay.  We ate and then went for a walk north along the lake until we came to the boat launch to Isola Bella and the cable car going up the mountain.  This was the end of the public walkway along the lake and we decided to end our walk here.  I would have loved to have gone out on the lake to the island but the boats are small and the water was choppy so Dominica was concerned about sea sickness so we decided to stick to walking and turned around to head back down south to the car again.

We got pretty warm on our walk as I had to carry Liesl in my arms much of the way.  It was not a lot of walking but it is amazing how quickly you get exhausted carrying a three and a half year old.  The entire walk was really beautiful.  Lago Maggiore is really something to see.  One of the most beautiful places that I have ever been.

We did not stay for long.  We wanted to get over to Lago Como today, yet, and there is only so much to do in Stresa.  I mean, it is a gorgeous lake, but other than walking along it and getting some food, what does one do on a lake, really?

The drive from Lago Maggiore to Lago Como really is not too bad.  On the drive over we got to experience getting petrol in Italy for the first time.  Easy, but any new fueling experience comes with some amount of anxiety.  It was fine, though.  It ended up being a full service place.  Fuel here is more than twice the cost as it is back home but the Fiat Panda gets around 53mpg so even though the cost per gallon is crazy, the overall cost is pretty normal.

The drive to Lago Como was not bad at all.  It is a relatively short jump from Maggiore to Como.  Knowing both of these locations from travel videos it is odd to see them in juxtaposition to one another.

As you approach Como my first reaction was to marvel at the wall of mountain on the far side of it.  I truly had no idea that Lago di Como was set against such magnificent mountains.  Nothing that I have seen on video prepared me for this at all.  This is not the Como that I imagined.  The backdrop of the city is truly a vertical mountain face.  It is stunning to approach.  The lake is only a part of the story.  The city is really gorgeous even if you never see the lake at all.  The mountain setting alone is worth the trip.  Amazing.  I have not seen anything like this in the US at all.  You really cannot take pictures to explain what this looks like.

We drove down into Como and drove around town just for a tiny bit. Sadly Como was overrun with tourist and there was not even a place for us to park, that we found.  We drove a bit, saw town, had some adventures in regards to the driving where Dominica commented as to how “Italian” I had become and then we decided to head out of town.  I took some backroads hoping that they would lead us to some new and interesting areas around the lake.  Dominica did not want to leave either, we just wanted to be away from the tourists.

So we took a back road that headed to some higher ground.  This seemed interesting so we following our instincts and kept climbing.  This was probably really, really bad instincts.

Have you ever seen one of those movies where someone drives into an Italian village and it is a one car width (barely) medieval town and people come nose to nose and someone has to drive backwards so that someone else can get through?  Well, this was real life.  It wasn’t just a town but we climbed a mountain full of hair pins and nose to nose encounters and streets barely wide enough for the smallest of cars.  It was insane.

It probably took much less time but it felt like between thirty and sixty minutes of the most intense driving that I have ever done.  I was surprisingly un-stressed considering how insane the whole thing was.  I am not sure that words can convey how crazy this way.  This would never, ever happen in American.  I actually drove a stick shift car up a mountain side through the tightest little streets ever.  It felt like something that couldn’t possible be real.  It must be a ride or a joke or something.

Dominica was starting to freak out a bit just a little ways up the hill.  The roads were tight and the road was alongside a tremendous drop off.  Kind of scary.  Twice I had to come to a stop and drive backwards so that cars in front of me could come down.  I have never driven anything like this.  I cannot imagine that anything like this exists in America.  How could it.  This is insane.  That this exists here is impossible to really internalize.  We are amazed.  This is real?  This is really happening?

I really lack the ability to describe in words just how crazy this drive was.  Each turn caused us to be more and more amazed.  The feeling was a lot like what you get when you are on a roller coaster except this was real, I was really driving and having a real disaster (or more likely, scraping the side of the car or getting completely stuck) was quite a real possibility.

That I had to slow to a crawl to get the car mirrors to fit down the streets, that cars would come around blind hairpin turns and end up nose to nose with someone having to drive backwards down (or up) a very steep road that is so tight that normally you would not even consider driving it forward, that he streets are so steep that the car might stall, that you have to worry about your brakes overheating on a normal drive down the mountain… it was all unbelievable.

It took probably half an hour of driving like this with us sure that each new turn would lead us out of the quagmire and into a spacious, normal road before we reached, not a road, but the top of the mountain.  Yes, that’s right.  This wasn’t a tight backroad between two normal roads.  This was a dead end that had multiple villages along it.  The first village, clinging to the steep mountain side, was Brunate, which was actually very lovely.  It was truly amazing to us, far more than the fact that this road existed or that we saw other cars using it, that an entire, real village was located up here with restaurants, shops, churches, homes and everything.  You could totally make dinner reservations, drive this insane drive and eat at a restaurant on one of this crazy little cobblestone, massive angular grade, super tight roads with staggering views of Lake Como below.  How the food is shipped up here I have no idea.

Beyond Brunate, which was amazing on its own, at the top of the hill was the very small town of San Maurizio which, thankfully, had a tiny traffic circle (no, seriously) and a parking lot.  A parking lot where you had to pay a central town meter and it gave you a parking slip for however long you paid for.  Yes, even at the ends of the earth they have these new-fangled parking meters.

Dominica was really shaken from the drive and was not ready to face going back down the mountain so we paid for an hour of parking and got out to explore.  This is the end of the road, more or less.  Technically there is more road but it goes nowhere.  Just service roads for the people who live here.  The only way for us is to head back down the hill.  Totally crazy that we could just make one wrong turn, not be sure where to go and be trapped driving through this!  I can only imagine that most drivers, faced with this drive, would just panic and lose it.

Amazingly, at the top of the hill was a fancy restaurant!  We decided not to eat there as we were not really hungry and it was not what we were looking for but it was pretty amazing to find it there.  There was also a little roadside cafe selling coffee, prepacked ice cream, chips, maps, and other sundry items and had two or three people there taking a break after they, too, made the insane drive up.

From the parking lot you could climb up a bit (the drive had already had us climb over nine hundred meters!!) to a small playground.  Now that was a surprise.  A playground on a low Alpine peak.  We went there and the girls had a nice time playing on the swings, the slide and the teeter-totters that spun.  There was a public restroom there too.  It was actually built into a cave in the mountain side and it contained the first “squatter” toilet that we have yet come across in Italy.  We have seen pictures of them back home and so knew that they existed but they are pretty rare in this day and age and we have no actually seen one in person yet, but here it was.  Just some foot grips and a hole in the floor.  Very weird.  I took a picture.  It is on Flickr already.  There is something pretty neat about having done that crazy drive and arriving to find a toilet that is just a hole in the floor in a room in a cave in the side of an Alpine summit.

From the playground a short, but rather steep, hike up the mountain leads you to a large platform with some of the best views, well, anywhere on Earth I would imagine.  The view is one of nearly one thousand meters right down on Lago di Como!  Truly unreal.  You can see town after town clinging to its shores.  You are really looking down on some of the most expensive and amazing real estate in the world.  It is a beauty that I cannot describe.  The sun was out and very bright but there was a heavy haze today so the visibility was poor and the pictures that I took, since I am using the AW100 and do not have the D90 with the haze filter or polarizing filter, are pretty bad.  I knew that they would be but at least you can kind of get an idea from them as to how amazing it was.  It felt a lot like being in an airplane, it was so high and the view was so unobstructed.

In the middle of this platform is a lighthouse.  I have no idea what purpose a lighthouse on a mountain serves but I would guess that it must be used for navigation in some way as it is clearly visible from Lago di Como as well as several other, smaller lakes.  So you could use it at night to keep from getting completely lost, I suppose.  The lighthouse is dedicate to Volta and is considered to be a Voltaic Lighthouse.  It is more a memorial than anything else, I am thinking.

If you do any searches on the lighthouse you will find that my pictures from today are already the top hits for it.  That is how remote and rare this discovery is.  But there were a few other people there too.  Two or three hikers, two teenagers thinking that they had found makeout point and an old gentlemen who I am pretty sure was the caretaker of the lighthouse.  But that was really it.

The lighthouse and its views, to me, made the drive worth it.  This was something that almost no one, not even the locals down in Como, are likely to see.  This was a very rare and wonderful experience.  I made Dominica climb up and check out the views as well while I watched the girls on the playground.

(I later learned a few things that help to explain the odd placement of restaurants, shops, etc.  There is a funiculari that runs from Como to Brunate so people living there can go up and down the mountain without a car most of the time making it great for people down in Como to come up to for that special dining or walking experience or for people living in Brunate to keep a car below and go down for the more serious errands.  There is also some sort of shuttle service going all of the way to San Maurizio – I have no idea how this is possible – so that people wanting to get there can do so without walking, bicycling or driving to it the insane way that we just did.)

We stopped by the little outdoor cafe, had some chips and fruit drinks and relaxed for probably half an hour.  The people who owned the shop thought that the girls were just adorable and wanted to hang out with them.

Then it was time to face the steep decent.  The drive down, as we knew how long it was, that there really was an end coming eventually, that we had seen each of the hairpin turns and tight passageways already was much easier, or at least, less stressful.  We made it down no problems and I really was not nervous going up or down.  Dominica was terrified going up (terrified that we were going to get stuck, scrape another car or something) and only a little bit going down.  Overall, I rate the experience as well worth it.

What was really probably the best result of today’s little driving adventure, beyond getting to see possibly the best scenery of our lives, was that I am not completely comfortable with driving in Italy in a way that yesterday I would never have imagined even attempting.  Driving through tight streets in ancient villages?  No way, are you even allowed to do that?  Yes, of course you are and that is how you get to tons of great stuff in Italy.  Avoid that and you are going to miss out a lot.  This explains all of those cars in places that I could not figure out who was driving there.  Everyone drives there.  Today was more extreme than that, but all of those towns in the hill country that we have been seeing – we can totally just drive there!  I needed today, it really made me into an “Italian driver” of sorts.  This is going to make life in Italy both on this trip and in the future much easier.

After that monstrous drive we decided that we needed to head back to Neive and our hotel.  The drive back took about two and a half hours and was uneventful.  We did note that driving through the flat Lombardi and Piemonte plains full of rice paddies was truly lovely in the late afternoon sunlight.  Italy’s Po Valley is far flatter than we would have ever imagined.  Very neat, but not where we are interested in being.  It makes driving through very easy, though.

I have to say that Italian roads are the best that I have ever seen.  The quality of all of the roads, from backroads to the highways, is really fantastic.  The roads are smooth and impeccably maintained.  Guard rails are high and useful too.  You feel much safer driving in Italy than in America, even at speeds that would be pretty crazy in the US and in very tiny cars.  Driving at ninety miles per hour in Italy isn’t odd at all.  The speed limit is just over eighty miles per hour on most highways and no one drives down at the speed limit.

We arrived back at the hotel and parked the car.  We spoke to the hotel owner briefly telling her about our day.  Dominica was not aware, as I was from having spoken to her yesterday, that she actually comes from Como so she knew the area exactly.  We explained that we drove up to Brunate and she was caught by surprise.  Even a Como native thinks that that is crazy and she knows Brunate well – her sister recently moved there!  And going on up the hill to San Maurizio… well that is just crazy.

Our goal tonight was just to have some wine and to work on updates for SGL and KAE back at the hotel.  So I dropped the girls all off and I walked into the middle of old town Neive where the village itself owns a bottega that sells nothing but local wines from the village and sells them at the same prices as the wineries charge if you go there directly.  So I walked up there and had them select their four recommended red wines for me.  They did, boxed them up and I walked back to the hotel.  I scouted out food while I was out walking around but there was no one not completely packed up on the hill so that wasn’t a good option.

Dominica sent me to the high end restaurant under the hotel to see about take-out pasta.  I did but the owner said that they would not consider letting us take food away to eat – even if it was elsewhere in the building (we were extremely confused about this as the hotel is advertised as having room service and he acted as if this was an affront to the restaurant.  How is room service supposed to work then?)  So we were quite confused and not very pleased with the attitude.  Italian restaurants really are often snotty and not very good at customer service – which actually makes them not as good as restaurants.  American restaurants are way better at some of the more important aspects of serving food even if the food itself might not be as good the process of getting it to you is far better.

So I drove downtown looking for food (this is downtown in the new town.)  I ended up stumbling on Il Camino, the pizzeria where our pizza came from our first night in Neive, so I just parked there and went inside.

Il Camino, it turns out, is the hub of evening activity in Neive.  It functions like the local diner in America with the whole town out for a normal dinner and a very large menu that goes way beyond pizza.  So I looked at the menu for a while and ended up getting some pasta to go (that is da asporto in Italian) and drove it back to the hotel and we all ate using our hands as I forget to ask for plastic utensils.  But the food was good and cheap and I figured out where the locals actually go out to eat.  A good experience.

It took quite some time to get the girls to bed.  They really have problems winding down and getting to sleep when we are in hotels.  This is tough.  We completely lose our late evenings dealing with that.  So pretty much we are falling asleep by the time that the girls are asleep.  It leaves pretty much no time to write or do anything else.

Everyone was finally asleep so I worked at getting a couple of posts done and started on today’s post.  I was talking to dad via email and he said that Oreo was really deteriorating quickly.  He was very weak and was putting almost all of his energy into just breathing.  We had known that his cough, what we had thought was kennel cough as that was what his vet had thought that it was, was coming back but this was way more serious than anything like that.  Dad said that he didn’t think that Oreo was going to make it until Monday when the antibiotics for the kennel cough would arrive.

I woke Dominica up and told her that dad didn’t think that Oreo was going to make it through the night.  We talked about what might be wrong and talked about options.  We found a twenty-four hour animal hospital in Rochester and called dad.  So dad made an appointment up there and my Uncle Leo drove up to help dad take Oreo up there.  It was about seven in the evening (Saturday evening) back in New York at this point, the appointment was for eight thirty.  Dominica couldn’t go back to sleep so sat at the computer with the phone.  I hadn’t been to sleep yet and it was really late at this point, about three in the morning in Italy, so I laid down with Liesl for a while.  She was fast asleep but I needed the snuggles – I wasn’t going to fall asleep but if I was in my bed alone I would have just been crying.

We didn’t hear anything from dad for a while but he doesn’t have Internet access on his phone and we don’t believe that our phone is taking calls while we are here – not a single call has come through in over a month – so I called dad to see what the status was.  It was twenty after nine, dad’s time, when I called.  Dad was just getting back into the car.  Oreo was already gone.  Dominica had guessed it correctly – he had congestive heart failure.  The hospital had looked him over but there was nothing to be done.  So he was put to sleep around nine o’clock tonight in dad’s arms.  He was, to the best of our knowledge, twelve years old.  We never really learned his early history and much of it was inaccurate so the guess that he was five when we got him might have been good information or may have been a complete guess by the shelter or it might have been another dog’s paperwork.  We will never know.

The hospital said that Oreo’s mange, which he has had quite badly since around autumn of last year, was a symptom of something much deeper.  Oreo had been fighting something for a while and the mange was a result of his weakened immune system.  It might have been cancer, it might have been just about anything.  We’ve known that he hasn’t been himself for a while.  He hadn’t been sleeping the same (more during the day, less at night) and wasn’t snuggling the same as he used to for weeks.

It took me several days to be able to actually write today’s post.  I will write a goodbye post for Oreo soon.  Right now I am unable.  For seven years Oreo has been a part of every moment of our lives.  This really took us by surprise, even though we really knew that it was coming.  We have been preparing ourselves mentally for a long time and this trip to Italy was really about preparing for “what we will do when we don’t have Oreo anymore.”  We had just been hoping that that would be at least two more years.  That he passed while we were on the trip, and especially during the Italy portion of the trip and during The Langhe portion of our Italy trip is an unlikely juxtaposition of events.  Thousands of miles away from home we learned of his passing in pretty much exactly the place where we intend to be living in the future while Oreo passed “back home” where he first came to live with us seven years ago after being rescued from the shelter in Houston.

So on the bathroom floor on room 100 at the Hotel Villa Lauri in Neive, Piemonte Dominica and I sat and cried over the loss of our baby while Liesl and Luciana slept in the other room.  Oreo will be missed by so many people.  He was well known and had friends that even we did not know.  He was truly the best dog that I have ever known.  In seven years with us he never once bit us or even growled at us.  He was nothing but love and snuggles.

Dominica and I have known for many years that we could never bare having another dog after Oreo.  It was when Mr. Humphries died, and Oreo was still pretty new living with us, that Dominica dealt with her first ever loss of a pet and then understood why I was so scared to have one.  It was then, I believe, that we decided that we could never have another dog after Oreo.  We’ve always known that losing him was going to be too painful.  Oreo truly made us a family long before the girls arrived.  We spent most of our marriage being known as “Oreo’s parents.”  Of our eight years of marriage, seven of those have been spent with Oreo sleeping between us every night.  That we used to snuggle with each other is truly a distant memory.  Even on vacation we naturally leave a space between us where Oreo should be.

For weeks, Liesl has a “missing Oreo” episode every day or two.  She talks about home in Texas and how much she misses Oreo.  Then she cries for a bit that Oreo is so far away.  Until tonight we thought that he would be waiting for her when we return.  She keeps talking about how we will go back and see him at grandpa’s and how daddy will drive Oreo back to Texas so that Oreo will be waiting there for Liesl to see him when she drives back a week later.  Not having him there is going to be really hard for her.  For Luciana it will be easy, even though she calls every dog that she meets “Oreo”, because she is young enough that he is just a fuzzy memory and he was never active with her like he was with Liesl.  Oreo has been “winding down” for nearly Luciana’s entire life.

Now we will return to no Oreo but a house full of memories.  Our plans for our return are, understandably, completely focused around Oreo.  Dominica and the girls are remaining in New York while I was to drive Oreo back to Texas with me early.  I was to drive him back in the GMC Acadia that we bought for him (if it hadn’t been for Oreo we would have bought the GMC Terrain instead as we only needed the extra space for him) to the house in Texas that we bought for him (no steps, enclosed yard.)  If it hadn’t been for Oreo we would likely have kept renting in Dallas.  Oreo couldn’t handle the apartment living as he was blind and we knew that we had to do something for him.  We always knew that the Dallas house was going to be very temporary but thought that Oreo was going to get to use it quite a bit longer than he did – he was completely healthy, other than being blind, when we bought it.

But you can’t make plans.  In reality, that we are away in Europe when Oreo left us is probably a very big blessing.  I don’t know how I would have handled this in person, I can barely handle it now.  Having Oreo go with Liesl and Luciana there to witness everything happening might have been really awful.  Now we have time to shelter them and ease them into it.  Oreo will already be, to some degree, a memory by the time that we return to New York.   The girls will already be separated from him by a month and a half.  By the time that they get back to Texas it will have been nearly two months and I will have had time to make sure that his beds, his blankets, his toys, his binkies, his dishes, his food and all of the other painful reminders of his life in progress in Texas will have been removed.  Dominica and the girls will not have to go back to a house full of the evidence of our friend who is no longer there.

I dread being alone in that house for a week or two, though.  That is going to be really, really tough.  That was going to be Oreo and my time to just be together.  For years now we would regularly spend time together when Dominica would take the girls for the weekend or whatever.  It was “easy” for me to be away from everyone because Oreo and I loved our quiet time to ourselves.  I was never lonely if I had Oreo.  Now I will be far more than lonely.

Goodbye my dear friend.  You will be truly missed and remembered.  We love you so much.  There is a hole in my heart that will never be filled again.

At least I know that many, many years from now a little old woman, named Liesl, long after I have passed, will sometimes remember,  probably quite vaguely, this wonderful little Boston Terrier from her early childhood who taught her about dogs and pets and snuggles and she will think fondly of him still.  He is not a dog who will be easily forgotten.  He affected people, he impacted lives.  He was very much a real part of our family.

I got up this morning and the shutters were closed on the windows in the hotel so I did not have a good idea of what was going on outside. I heard some people up and about and assumed that they were up early.  Everyone was still asleep in my room so I figured that it was pretty early since both Liesl and Luciana have a tendency to get up pretty early like clockwork.  I got in the shower and did my morning routine.  When I came out of the shower everyone was awake.

I had assumed that it was around seven thirty and pretty soon we should be heading to breakfast.  Then we fired up the laptop and realized that it wasn’t seven thirty but actually ten in the morning!  We had overslept our normal routine by several hours and were about to miss breakfast!

We got ready as quickly as we could and just took the girls down in pajamas and bare feet to eat breakfast.  I cannot believe that we overslept so much!  This is our first time doing this our entire vacation.  I think that eight in the morning has been our latest thus far.  We must have really needed the sleep to have slept in so dramatically.  There is no doubt that the vacation has been taking its toll on us and we are all tired and stressed out.  Liesl especially really wants to go home.  She misses her house, her toys and her Oreo.  Every day, as of late, she mentions Oreo at some point during the day and weeps softly for a bit about how much she misses him and cannot wait to get home so that she can see him again.  It is really touching.

We managed to get breakfast done and Dominica and the girls returned to the room and had plenty of time to get themselves settled and ready for the day while I took a ride out to the outskirts of Alba with the hotel owner as she dropped me off at Avis to rent a car for the week.  She had been kind enough to call around for us to see if she could get a better price than what we had been quoted yesterday and Avis came through with a really good deal and had a perfect car for us today.

Alba is only about five kilometers away from Neive and the Avis location was on the Neive side so very easy to deal with.  She dropped me off and then went on to Alba to do her own shopping.  Avis hooked me up with a Fiat Panda city car, two car seats for the girls and a GPS unit for the week for under three hundred Euros.  Sounded like a good deal to me.  They were very concerned that I was an American renting a stick shift car.  Apparently Europeans know us by reputation.  But I assured them that that was what I wanted.  Automatics are very rare in Europe and cost a premium if you can even find one.  I have paid attention and I feel that they are even more rare than people joke about.  You never seen one, anywhere, not even the SUVs have automatic transmissions here.

Avis got me all set up with the tiny – ridiculously tiny – Fiat Panda and one car seat.  The second car seat was at the Avis in Asti so I needed to drive from Alba to Asti to pick it up.  The Asti office, like every office in Italy, closed at twelve thirty so I was in a rush to get up there before it would be all afternoon before I would be able to get the car seat.  They programmed the GPS for me and sent me on my way with a full fifteen minutes of cushion – no sweat.

Now it is important to keep in mind that I have not driven a stick shift car in several years, not since my sweet Mazda 6 was traded in for Dominica’s BMW 330 back in New Jersey and I have not driven any car at all, whatsoever, for an entire month.  So getting behind the wheel of a five speed Fiat Panda was one thing – but doing so in Italy, the craziest place to drive in the developed world, was just plain silly.  Adding to that that I cannot read street signs and have no sense of where I need to go and this definitely takes on an air of epic adventure.

The drive to Asti actually went just fine.  Driving the Panda was surprisingly easy.  In fact, this is one of the easiest driving cars that I have ever been able to drive.  Even driving a new manual transmission car was as easy as could be.  No stalls, no hesitation – just get in and go.  It felt totally natural.

I got to Asti right on time and got the car seat, no problems.  Now leaving the Avis in Asti, I have to admit, caused a few minutes of alarm.  I could not, for the life of me, get the car to go into reverse!  This was driving me crazy.  Knowing that every business was going to close I swallowed my pride and went in and asked for help.  The guy at Avis did not speak English but we got the idea across… reverse, retro.  He knew what to do.  He came out and showed me a ring on the stick that, when pulled, would allow the car to go into reverse.  I’ve owned three stick shift cars myself, two of them decently recent, and have never seen nor heard of a feature like this.  Good to know.

The drive back to Neive went fine.  Again, no issues, not even when I got stuck on a toll road and had to pay a toll in Italien!  Italy handles this really logically and it was no issue at all.  So much better than what you would find in the United States.  Although, to be fair, the toll was pretty high.

I got back to the hotel and went in to get the girls.  Dominica went out and got the child safety seats installed in the car while I watched Liesl and Luciana and then, pretty quickly, we were off to go explore the area.  We had been talking a bit about where we should go today and we are really anxious to go see the lake country with Lago Maggiore in northern Piemonte and Lago Como in northern Piemonte and Lombardi so we thought that we would just go ahead and do these today and get them out of the way so that we could focus on the local Langhe travel tomorrow and the next day.  So we jumped in the car and took off.

While we were driving Dominica tried to put an address for Spesa, up on Lago Maggiore, into the GPS but it would not take.  Pretty quickly we realized that we did not have good enough plans to try to make it all of the way up there and back in one day without getting back ridiculously late.  Pretty much immediately we decided to postpone our lake trip until tomorrow when we can leave easy in the day rather than in early afternoon as it was today and get up to the lake district, see everything and get home at a good time.  So we decided to just start driving around today and see where the roads would take us.

We headed off towards the small, neighbouring village of Barbaresco but ended up missing that and ended up in Treiso instead and from there winding on to Alba.  We were really impressed with the options along the way.  So many adorable little Piemonte towns.  Each town was just adorable and the way that they connect to each other is so neat.  Treiso especially was really beautiful and we stopped there to take a few pictures.  Unfortunately because I was driving we were unable to take very many pictures all day so much of what we did is not recorded graphically in any way.

After Alba we decided to go see B’ra, the next biggest city in the local area.  Both Alba and B’ra were pretty nice cities as far as ~30K inhabitant support cities go.  Neither was crazy awesome but both had what one needed and were nice cities.

From B’ra we decided to get a broad overview of the province so we drove on to Cuneo, the regional capital, about sixty kilometers away.  This proved to be a bit of a drive.

From Br’a to Cuneo we were completely unimpressed with the area.  Almost entirely flat and uninteresting.  Not that any of it was bad but it lacked the look and feel that we were hoping for in moving to Italy.  So even though the drive was pretty boring we were glad that we did it because we now know, for sure, that this entire large stretch of countryside is not an area in which we are willing to look.

We arrived in Cuneo and right up until you actually arrive, the trip is boring, but the moment that you turn into Cuneo to cross the bridge you are welcomed to a charming city sitting at the base of the Alps with a river running along its frontage and magnificent bridges to cross to enter the city.

We drove into Cuneo, made a quick lap and quickly exited the city.  Cuneo is truly gorgeous in a really odd way.  I cannot put my finger on it but I am guessing that it is its odd position sitting on a river at the end of a plain with the Alps behind making it feel so strange.  Beautiful squares and fountains and a well laid out feel with really interesting twists and turns but we felt that the Cuneo region lacked what we were looking for so we are not going to consider it so we drove our pretty quickly.

Dominica was extremely impressed by my ability to get into a city, travel around and drive out again, without every using the GPS, and ended up exactly where I wanted to be and going right where I wanted on the first try.  I managed to navigate all day without having anything programmed into the GPS at all and without missing any turns.

We zipped back from Cuneo and pretty much went right back to Neive.  I was tired from a day of driving and navigating and the girls needed a break from the car.  We did not actually “see” very much today but we definitely got a good cross-section of the region into our minds and have determined large areas of which we are not interested and have determined that where I had originally picked is, in fact, remaining the right place for us based on what we have seen thus far. Cuneo is an awesome city but too far away and surrounded by very boring areas.

We got home and it was time to take the girls out to dinner.  We did not want a repeat of last night, coming in so late, so we worked hard to be up to the old town by a quarter after seven rather than an hour later than that like last night.

Dominica had suggested a few times that we return to DeGusta for the same meal that we had last night because we liked it so much.  We toyed with some other ideas but at the end of the day we did exactly that.  We just walked up the hill and went to the same place.  Tonight they had a party using the entire patio so we had to sit inside where it was too warm and the music was too loud but the food was just as good, no patio space for us..  Our food was excellent again tonight and tonight Liesl ate a ton of her gnocchi rather than just Luciana eating it.  We also opted for a dolchetto wine tonight instead of the Barbaresco like last night.  After tonight we have tried all four wines of Neive.  Dominica also tried some different dessert tonight while I stuck with the local favourite.

Our plan to get in and get out from dinner tonight mostly worked.  We were able to eat faster and managed to get back to the hotel before ten which was no problem at all.  The only issue tonight was getting the girls to settle down and get to bed.  That took a while.  Luciana likes to go crazy and run all over the room, often dangerously, until she is ready to collapse.  We always have to put her to bed at least twice before it works.

Tomorrow, we have decided, we are getting up early, getting ready and heading up to Lago Maggiore first thing so that we have all day for the extra driving and sight seeing.  We have been seeing the lakes so much on videos back home that even though they are pure touristy we have to go and see them.  And it will give us a north – south cross section of the region to help us determine, much like today, if we are looking in the right area.

After driving all over the Cuneo region, today, I must say that I am pretty comfortable with Italian driving and I totally love the Fiat Panda.  What a great car.  I love all of the roundabouts too.  They really make rural driving a lot easier.  I wish that they would adopt these back in the States.  No stopping when there is no traffic and there pretty much never is.

It was great waking up in Neive this morning.  We were up nice and early after having slept in comfortable beds and air conditioning that really worked.  It is amazing how important a nice, cold room can be after weeks of being way too warm every night.  We are getting spoiled on the luxury here in the Langhe region of the Cuneo province in Piemonte, Italy.

We picked this particular region of Piemonte, that is the Langhe, because of research that I had done ahead of time back home for months attempting to determine the most likely place that we would want to live in Italy based on many factors.  The Langhe really seemed to be the ideal combination of factors for us.  It is up north so that we would have easy access to most of Europe and the rest of Italy is not far away either.  The Alps are about two hours away, as is France and Switzerland, the Lake District is easily accessibly, three major cities in Italy are nearby (Torino, Milano and Genova) and the Mediterranean coast is just over an hour away.  Hard to beat those numbers.  Real estate is reasonable, the scenery is incredible and the food is out of this world plus it is the heart of the wine district as well as famous for cheeses and truffles.

So today we are on foot and set to explore Neive.  Our hotel sits right at the base of the western entrance to the historic town on the hill so it is really easy for us to walk up to the old town and if we want to go to the new town we can walk straight over the hill to get there pretty quickly too.  That is the same walk that we did yesterday except without the luggage in tow today.

We hung out with the Norwegians at breakfast this morning.  Their son is the same age as Luciana – born on the very same day – so he and the girls have a good time playing.  We even moved from the breakfast room out to the terrace for the incredible views and the kids played on the terrace (the main hotel terrace, not the one for our room) and played going up and down the front driveway as it is slanted and has a long stairway beside it and the little ones like to climb up and down it.

After breakfast we came back to the room for just a little bit and Dominica took care of some laundry stuff as she is dropping it off today to have it done.  No one was at the desk so she just dropped it off and we took off on foot to go see Neive.  We did see the girl from Europacar this morning when she was dropping off a Fiat 500 and we discussed how much it would cost to get a car for us for the week. The price was pretty high and we had some questions about it so we are going to look into it this evening and get back with her tomorrow if we decide to get it.  We have learned that having a car here in Neive is pretty much a necessity which we had no idea of when we first decided on this location.  We were thinking that trains and buses would take care of us getting around the region but that was a gross misunderstanding of the local public transportation network.  There are no trains and the buses are pretty tough to use.

The walk up the hill really was about ten minutes and very easy.  We walked around the historic town center in Neive which was very cool.  This is a very small, traditional Piemonte hill town with the very cool little piazzas here and there in a very old village center.  There is a self-guided tour around town using a free guide that you can pick up at the municipal building.  There are numbered historic stops which are an easy walk around, each with a nice, simple historical marker in several languages, including English, making it very easy for nearly anyone to teach themselves about the history of Neive.  I really love how European towns do this.  Some American towns do but very few and almost none do it as well as the average town in Europe.  Every little, out of the way little town anywhere in Europe appears to have taken the time to have documented its history and made it accessible to any visitor.  You can safely stop just about anywhere and be sure that you will get an interesting history, art and cultural lesson.

We did the walking tour, a bit out of order, and took a number of pictures around town.  It was a bit hot today but not too bad.  The old historic town center is really cool and easily walkable.  We did it in about an hour.  Then we headed back to the side where we had come in to town so that Liesl and Luciana could spend some time on the playground there.

When we first arrived at the playground Liesl was the only one using it.  Dominica and I took turns checking out the little chapel there.  It was pretty interesting.  Then I took a walk behind town and got to check out the vineyards there.  When I got back the little playground was full of kids and ringed with adults eating their lunches.  Apparently this is a popular spot with the locals.

Since the playground was crowded we decided to talk a walk down to the “new” town to see what we could find there since we had some basic shopping that needed to be done.  So we started hiking back down the hill that we had so laboriously climbed yesterday.  Dominica and Liesl took the steps down – the way that we had climbed yesterday (the Via dei Tigli as Google Maps had called it acting as if it was a road) and Luciana and I took the long way around, since she was in the stroller, climbing around the side of town, going through two additional piazzas and then down the looping Via Roma on the far side of town to eventually meet up with Dominica and Liesl down near to the bottom of the hill.  Nothing like yesterday but still a serious walk.

We did some walking around in the new part of town but we hit that time of day when everything closes in Italy.  Having heard about this repeatedly in preparing to travel we were not totally surprised but being American it is pretty hard to actually internalize the fact that the entire country of Italy grinds to a complete and total halt in the middle of the afternoon – nothing happens.  Nothing.  Shops close up and everyone goes home.  So completely the opposite of the American mindset.  That they close at all is amazing.  That they close at the exact time when the majority of people could be patronizing their businesses is the really amazing thing.  The opportunity to serve the tourists at the exact moment that they need it most is missed and no one seems to care, which I have read, but it is hard to believe.

We couldn’t do the shopping that we had wanted to do so instead we went looking for some food.  We found a place called the Grillo (or something like that) which was a little cafe on the side of town so we stopped in and checked it out.  We went for salads and pasta.  Dominica got a normal, mixed greens salad.  I ended up with a really amazing rice salad, which was not at all what we were expecting.  Both salads had tuna in them which seems to be an obsession all over the parts of Europe that we have visited.  Tuna seems to be eaten much more here than it is back home.  This works out well as I really like tuna.  The rice salad was totally amazing.  I can’t believe how much I liked it.  The pastas were okay, nothing special.  We got one pasta with a pesto and one with cheese.  Both were too salty.  But lunch was pretty decent and the price was good.  I would have been a lot happier with two salads, though.

After lunch we walked through town and took the route around the hill, rather than over it, to get back to the hotel.  This took us along the Via XX Semtembre which showed us all new parts of town including an entire stretch that appears to have been abandoned, for the most part.  Very odd.  It was a long, hot stretch back to the hotel.  We were quite sweaty and worn out once we returned.

Upon returning to the hotel we learned that there had been a massive miscommunication over the laundry.  Without going into too many details, Dominica thought that she was dropping off laundry for a laundry service and the hotel manager thought that the laundry was being sent out (I’m not even sure of what everyone had thought) but the result was that all of our laundry (basically all of the clothes that we have in Europe) had gone to the cleaners who is closed today and they won’t be able to get them done until Saturday leaving us with nothing to wear except for the clothes that we just got really sweating for the next two additional days.

The miscommunications ended up in an argument of apologies being taken the wrong way and all kinds of confusion.  It was really bad and Dominica was incredibly upset.  We had a really rough afternoon and were not sure if we needed to leave the hotel.  One of the big risks of traveling in a foreign country where you have no grasp of the local language is that even the smallest of surprises can result in big miscommunications.  So much body language and facial expressions and tone are used to imply intent rather than actual words that surprise can dramatically interrupt the communications process and cause real problems.

So after writing a lengthy apology and explanation via Google Translate, Dominica left me to watch the kids while they napped in the afternoon and she hiked back up over the hill and down into town on the far side to do some shopping both for the things that we were not able to get earlier in the day and also to find flowers for the hotel owner.  The other thing about traveling in Europe is that hotel stays are often very personal things and nothing like the impersonal experience typical of an American hotel where there is effectively no interaction with the staff and you pretty much never meet, or knowingly meet, the owner(s).

Dominica got back and we spent some time trying to relax and get things done around the hotel.  She had dropped off her note and flower at the desk before getting back to the room, but no one had been around.  We were in the room for probably an hour before the hotel owner arrived with wine for us.  Dominica knew just what to do and had turned a bad situation around and everyone was happy.  Sometimes good friends are only made of good arguments.  So we got to sample the local white wine, Moscato d’Asti.  We have now tried two of the four local wines made in Neive.

Around eight we got the girls ready, and pretty soon we were heading off to dinner.  We decided that tonight we were just going to walk up to the top of town (the third time today for Dominica) and see what we could find.  We had heard from the Norwegians that there was some good food up there so we wanted to try it out especially as the ambiance up there would be far better than what there would be in the new town which is not all that nice.

There were plenty of restaurants to choose from up in historic Neive but most were pretty expensive and a bit fancy for us traveling with the girls.  We ended up finding DeGusto which, coincidentally, was where our proprietress has recommended last night before offering to deliver pizzas.  We had meant to look for this place but had been confused as to where it was located so were pleasantly surprised to find it here, where we wanted to eat, and finding it to be reasonably priced.  So in we went and we were able to score a table on the patio out back looking onto the small piazza on which it sat.  They were pretty slow with just two other tables occupied out on the patio and one inside.  It is a small place but everywhere in Italy appears to be small.  I am confused as to how the economics of restaurants in Italy works.

We explained to our waitress, whom I am pretty sure is a co-owner of the restaurant, that we were vegetarian and she worked through the menu with us and offered some options.  We ended up getting two of the same meal… insalata russa as a first course, tajarin pasta with butter and safe for the second course and panna cotte for dessert along with the chef’s recommendation for Barbaresco wine to go with the meal.  Everything was excellent!  We could not believe how good insalata russa is. This we could only compare to potato salad with tuna and peas.   Really tasty.  Our waitress explained that this was a traditional local dish and she grew up with her mother making it just like this.  Amazingly delicious.

We also discovered that tajarin, a local style pasta of thin egg noodles, with butter and sage, while simple, is simply delicious.  One of our favourite pastas and while unheard of back in the States is very common here with every local restaurant having some sort of pasta, often ravioli, with butter and sage as the sauce on its menu.

The panna cotte was especially good – covered in caramel.  I had not realized but Piemonte is the traditional home of panna cotte so you can get it everywhere here and it is really special.  We really enjoyed our entire dinners.  I have to note that the bread sticks were amazing too.  We just kept eating them.  Liesl pretty much ate nothing but bread sticks.

For the girls we got a type of pasta, whose name I forget, that was essentially smaller than usual gnocchi with a simple tomato sauce.  Liesl declined to try it but Luciana just gobbled it up.  What Liesl did not eat Dominica and I were happy to take care of.

Dinner tonight ranks as one of our lifetime culinary highlights.  Really amazing food in every course in a great setting.  The only downside, as with nearly all Italian eating, is the amount of time consumed.  We would not care so much but with little children it is really, really hard to have dinner take three hours.  From the time that we asked for the check until we were able to leave was nearly forty minutes alone!

It was about eleven in the evening when we got back to the hotel.  Maybe as much as a quarter after.  The hotel owner was waiting up for us to let us in.  We felt bad about that.  We had not intended to be out so late.  We went to dinner at eight, the normal time we have been lead to believe, for the area and we ate and returned as quickly as we could and this is how long it took going to one of the most nearby restaurants.  A bit of a problem, I guess.

It took a bit to get the girls calmed down and ready for bed.  We are really struggling with them at bed time.  Luciana really needs to have her own room, or at least a separate room, so that she can go to bed in the dark, in silence without having anything to distract her.  She is so good at going to bed back home.  On the road she is a total disaster ever since Nottingham where she had her own space.  She can share a room with Liesl without a problem since they do not go to bed at the same time.

We have decided that we have pretty much seen Neive and that tomorrow we should rent a car as has been recommended to us and I will attempt driving in Europe.  Without a car we are just not going to get a chance to see the local area to any degree and we will just miss out on way too much.  We checked with our credit card companies and found that American Express, while offering great coverage for insurance for rental cars, does not provide this coverage in Italy, rather a big surprise.  On the other hand, Visa does provide that coverage.  So it is just a matter of choosing the right card tomorrow.

Our first full day in Piemonte and, while full of “adventure”, we are really liking Piemonte.  The food is amazing, the scenery is amazing and if the weather is any indication that is pretty good too.  Piemonte has been, from the very beginning of our research, the place that we thought would be most likely to be right for us for the long term and so far it is proving to live up to expectations.  It has some steep competition from the German Rhine and Tuscany, not to mention western Austria in the lake country, but Piemonte has a lot to offer in price, culture, food, wine, accessibility and effectiveness for friends and family to come use.  So we are really looking forward to getting in the car and finding out more about what is around us tomorrow.

I am writing today’s update while riding the Trenitalia from Montecatini to Genova as we zip along the Mediterranean coast. Hill towns, seaside villages, rolling farms, ancient churches and defensive towers zip by the windows as we fly along. Luciana is sleeping in her Ergo Carrier that Dominica is wearing and Liesl is quietly sitting in her seat directly across from me at our table playing with her seven ponies, six My Little Ponies and “Raspberry Sparkle” that is a different kind of pony that she got in Bern a few weeks ago. The only major My Little Pony that Liesl does not own yet is Rainbow Dash. She has quite a large collection and they all have to play together all of the time.

After having stayed up late writing and uploading pictures last night I slept in until seven thirty this morning. Actually Luciana got me up at seven while Dominica was in the shower and Liesl was still sleeping but she was happy to be picked up out of her pack and play that was at the foot of our bed and lifted into bed with me where she snuggled until Dominica got out of the shower.

It was seven thirty when I got up and got into the shower to get ready for the day and about a quarter after eight when we went down as a family to eat breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant. Before we even went in to breakfast the hotel owner stopped us and took Luciana with her so that we could enjoy our breakfast without Luciana going crazy like she did yesterday. Luciana thought that this was great – hanging out with someone new in the lobby of the hotel meeting all of the hotel guests as they checked out.

We ate breakfast with the Columbia University basketball team who have been staying at the hotel at the same time as us. They are currently 4 wins, zero losses in an international competition that they have been playing. They’ve already been several places like Barcelona and Rome and are heading off to Venice today by bus.

We enjoyed our peaceful breakfast. Luciana was away for at least half an hour if not more. Occasionally we would see Luciana’s happy face pass by the restaurant door. She is such a silly, social girl.

After breakfast we packed up the last of the hotel room and checked out. We talked to the hotel owner for a bit before leaving. We have only been here for two days but already we feel like family. Kisses as we leave – only in Italy.

The walk to the train station is only about five minutes. It was just nine thirty when we arrived and our train was the ten o’ five local “milk” train to Viareggio on the coast. So we had some time to kill and two trains would run through before ours would come. So I ran out for coffee while Dominica and the girls sat at the little station waiting for the train to come.

Finding coffee to take away in Italy is actually pretty hard. The combination of so many shops being closed at any particular moment and coffee being espresso which is very unusual to get “to go” (rather like getting a shot of tequila in a “to go” cup) means that running into a café, even if you find one, is unlikely to score you coffee. I ran past several closed cafes and made it all of the say to the middle of town before jumping over one street and heading back via a different path and luckily stumbling on an odd coffee shop in the pedestrian district there. I ran in and had a hurried and confusing conversation in a place with no English speakers trying to explain that I wanted the bizarre idea of take away espresso. There was a lot of gesturing and head shaking but we figured it out and off I went with our coffee.

Something that might strike Americans as odd – in fact I’m pretty confident that this is extremely odd to anyone in North America and even much of the world – is that coffee “to go” in Italy, since it is espresso, does not get dispensed in insulated coffee cups but instead in little, tiny plastic “shot glasses” much like Americans would use for wheat grass shots at a juice bar or smoothie shop. Very different from what we are used to . We first encountered this on the train from Venice to Florence but figured that it was the result of it being a train, but now I see that this is the usual method for getting coffee “to go” and they even have snap on lids to make it easy.

To most of the world used to brewed coffee, the idea of take away in a simple plastic cup is unthinkable because you would burn yourself continuously. But this is not a problem in Italy. The secret is that Italian coffee is brewed far, far cooler than American coffee. Even I, who drinks and eats everything much cooler than a normal person including Dominica and my father, can slam down a shot of Italian coffee without any problem at all. This, I found surprising, after reading the “Under the Tuscan Sun” books where the drinking of burning hot coffee was listed over and over again as one of those amazing things that Italians do but now I realize that in actuality the average American, waiting ten minutes before imbibing their coffee, is actually drinking their coffee dramatically hotter than Italians slamming it down moments out of the machine. Many Americans, like Dominica, would consider Italian espresso to be marginally cold.

It is also worth noting that amazing Italian coffee, consistently considered to be the finest in the world even by countries well known for their excellent coffee like Austria, is very cheap in Italy. On the first train we took it was free. In Montecatini it was just one Euro per cup. On the SBB, for example, it was four Euros! In most of the German world it was between three and five Euros for coffee.

While at the hotel this morning I took the time to ask the owner about the Caffee New York that we saw at every single coffee shop in town. We were very confused by this. She explains that the Bar New York was a local bar in Montecatini that roasted their own coffee that because locally famous and then, a few years ago, won a competition for the best coffee in the world. So it is a point of local pride that no one serves any coffee but Caffee New York. That it is called New York is just an odd coincidence that the coffee is named after the bar – which we saw as it was around the corner from the hotel. It really is excellent coffee.

So we drank our coffee quickly – you only get a few sips before it is gone anyway – and soon we were on the first train for the day, the local running from Firenze to Viareggio. In Montecatini we were actually quite a bit closer to the coast than it felt like we were and the trip was under an hour on the slow, frequently stopping local train.

The first train ride went pretty easily. We were stuck sitting one of us in front of the other again just because of which seats were available when we got on board. Liesl sat with me, Luciana was sleeping away in the Ergo carrier with Dominica already having fallen asleep at the first train station.

The ride through Tuscany was really cool. So many mountains and so many beautiful hill towns along the way. The Apennines are far taller mountains than I had ever imagined. I always pictured Tuscany as being so much more “rolling” than it is. It is actually real mountains.

It was less than an hour to Viareggio, the small coastal city on the Mediterranean used as the crossing point for the north-south trains and the east-west trains. Here we got off and had to wait about fifteen or twenty minutes before the northbound train picked us up and we were whisked along the coast towards Genova.

From Viareggion Tuscany falls away almost immediately with Liguria starting along the coast quite quickly.  Just after La Spezzia suddenly, and only for a brief moment, the tunnel opens up and you are given a glimpse of the most beautiful Mediterranean scene from the train’s position on a rocky ledge.  Unbelievable.  I hope that I can always remember that moment.  There is no way to really describe just how beautiful the Italian Riveria is along the southern Ligurian coast.

Within minutes we were in the Cinque Terre which we have been studying, thanks to Rick Steves, for about a year.  We had really thought that we would be going there on this trip and would have been stopping there today but we changed our itinerary after getting an idea of just how incredibly busy we are and how painful every extra stop really is.  The Cinque Terre was simply one of those locations that had to be cut.  It would have been a really bad location for the children as well.  But going past and managing to get a look at most of the Cinque Terre towns from the train and knowing them so well that we could identify most of them by sight definitely makes us sad that we are not stopping.

We were glued to the windows all of the way along the Ligurian coast (the Italian Riviera.)  The train ride passed by in what seemed an instant.  Liesl was playing this funny game where she would watch out the window when the view was there and anytime that we were in a tunnel she would eat cookies.  So she would ask for one but then the tunnel would stop and she would say “No, I can only eat it in the tunnel.” and wait for the next tunnel to start.  Adorable.

We got to Genova and found a train heading to Asti.  That went decently smoothly.  The train to Asti was mostly unremarkable.  We did note that the trip was extremely rural, much more so than we would have guessed, and that the ride was almost entirely through very flat, boring farmland.  We had no idea that there was area like this in Italy and if you had shown it to me and asked me to guess where it was I would have thought several regions of Italy before guessing southern Piedmont.  From Genova the train goes almost straight north to Alessandria and then turns due west to go to Asti.  The ride was so boring that Dominica was getting pretty nervous about the area in which we were going to be staying.

We got off in Asti and are done with trains for a while.  We are heading out into the world of very small towns now.  Asti is not a big city at all and it felt nice there but we saw almost nothing of town.  We saw enough of the approach to Asti that we know that we are not interested in actually living in Asti.  Just not what we are looking for.  So we were ready to head right out without delay.  Originally Asti had been on our list of interesting potential areas.

In Asti we had quite an adventure trying to get a bus to take us to Neive where we have a hotel.  Luckily Dominica knew that we had to buy our bus tickets from a news stand.  How anyone is supposed to figure this out is beyond me and why a government bus sells tickets only via private businesses, especially ones that you would never otherwise use, seems very odd indeed to my American sensibilities.

We got our tickets but finding out bus proved to be rather an issue.  We got to the bus station easy enough but once there the buses were not labeled and no one anywhere spoke any English.  There was a sign that told which bus to get on but the labels on the buses did not match the ones on the sign and the bus numbering said that we needed to get on the bus that would be sitting in the parking space number thirty… expect the system only went as high as twenty-four!

We ran from bus to bus and were beginning to panic when the girl from the newspaper stand, who had followed us knowing that there was going to be a problem, came and helped us to find the right bus and to get directions as to what to do on the following bus.  Thank goodness she was looking out for us, had she not been there I have no idea where we would have ended up going.  The bus that we were put on had no label for where it was going, no label that it was a regional bus (it looked like a private bus) and was in parking spot one!  We were never going to figure that out on our own and even the people who were local had to ask tons of questions to figure out what the buses were doing.

This first bus got us, without further incident, to the really small town of Castagnole della Lanze where we found the bus to Alba waiting for us.  We just jumped from one to the other and the next bus’ first stop was in Neive.  So after three train and two buses and a bit of a panic we are now in our destination town and ready for five days without needing to pack up our luggage or move again.

Now all we had to do was to walk to our hotel.  It would just be ten minutes… or so we thought.

We ran into a couple of issues.  The first was that we were getting no Internet access in the middle of town.  So no way to look up where we needed to go.  The second was that the map posted in the middle of town did not show where we needed to go.  Hmmm… this could be bad.

So we just decided to start walking and figure out where we were as a starting point.  We didn’t have to go too far before we were able to establish some reference points and at least place ourselves on the map (a “you are here” marker on the big map in the middle of town would be great.)  Eventually we got Google Maps working on the flaky Android phone and started making some headway.  The Android has been terrible all day and loses all connectivity every fifteen or twenty minutes and has to be rebooted to be able to do anything.  Such a poorly made device.

So I plotted a course using Google Maps and it didn’t seem that far away so we started walking.  And walking.  And walking.  Pretty soon our hike turned us onto some hills with some pretty steep inclines.  With the suitcases, the stroller, carrying Luciana, the backpacks… this was getting really, really hard and it was hot and sunny so we were sweating pretty badly.  We kept going as the map seemed to think that all was well.  This seems insane, though.  This isn’t ten minutes from anywhere.  This is some serious walking that we are doing.

We finally got up to the Via Roma and discovered that Google Maps was not accurate and that roads were missing that they were expecting to be there and the Android was not working (or Google Maps was wrong) and thought that we were far enough away from where we really were that we were not sure which road we were standing on.  So I walked up and down several roads trying to determine exactly what was going on.

Three Italian girls, high school girls we were guessing, out for a jog happened upon us and we attempted to talk to them.  None of them knew the road that we needed nor did any of them have any knowledge of our hotel.  They were very friendly and giggly and tried their best to help.

I finally figured out that the one “road” that Google was showing that we could take, the Via dei Tigli, was not a road but a stairway leading up the hillside!  I walked partway up it to make sure that Google Maps would show me standing in the right place.  This is kind of insane.  I had walked the long way up the road quite a bit and decided that the stairway looked less exhausting that the road so we hauled the girls and all of the luggage up this really long stairway.  That was painful!  By this point we were pretty unhappy.

At the top of the stairway we found a playground and a couple of Swiss tourists who talked to us and pointed out that we had just arrived in the town’s historic center.  Uh oh.  This was the center… not the place that we had started from with the bus station, the train station, the main street, etc.  So the last thirty or forty minutes of walking only now got us to the center of town from which the “ten minutes to the hotel” had been gauged.  Oh boy.

We were in terrible shape, completely worn out and really doubting Google Maps.  But I had figured out most of what had happened and had a pretty good confidence that I would still be able to get us to the hotel.  At least at this point we were able to go down the hill rather than continuing to climb up it and, from what little bit we got to glimpse, the old town center looks to be really amazing.

Now that we had figured out what we had done wrong, things went a lot more smoothly.  Now there was a breeze, some amount of shade, some great views, a downhill walk and clear progress.  Things didn’t seem so hopeless.  For almost an hour there we were pretty upset and really concerned that we might be in the wrong town or severely lost or that the hotel was dramatically far away.

It has been quite some time since we were so happy to be arriving at our hotel.  Our proprietor was quite surprised that we had walked, “You don’t have a car?  You must have a car in Neive!”  Yes, we figured that out.  She said that she would have picked us up from the bus station had she known.  There was another couple yesterday with a one year old as well from Norway who were staying in the hotel and who had come by bus and she had picked them up – they had called her and she had gone to get them.  Well, at least we got some exercise out of it.

Our room at the Hotel Villa Lauri is fantastic, though, well worth the hike over the hill.  Originally we were going to be in an attic room but she had decided that that would be too dangerous with the little ones so she bumped us up, no charge, to a nicer room.  Wow, this is probably the best room of our trip and likely the best one that we will have on the entire trip – and thankfully it is the one in which we will be spending the most time of our entire month and a half long vacation.  It is a moderately spacious room with a nice closet and wardrobe area to store the luggage and stuff.  The restroom is quite large and well appointed.  Dominica and I have a double bed, Liesl has her own bed and Luciana has a pack and play.  There is power around the room, in both Italian and European configurations, there is a nice shower, there is a bidet (our second for the trip), there is a gorgeous terrace with great views of hill top vineyards and there is air conditioning – one of the first that we have seen and way more modern than the air conditioning that we had in Tuscany.  Dominica and her Booking.com skills win yet another victory.  Maybe Dominica needs to be a travel agent.

We got settled into the hotel and then decided that we needed to relax for a bit.  We showered because, well, we were pretty disgusting by this point.  Then I went to the front desk to talk about restaurants in town or in the hotel to see what was available and got a bottle of  one of the local Neive wines, a Barbara d’Alba, from just up the street and two glasses and Dominica and I settled into our little table on the terrace and drank some of the best red wine that we had ever tasted with Liesl and Luciana happily ran around the terrace enjoying their new found freedom.  They have had a very long and very stressful travel day as well.

We were not out on the terrace for very long before the Norwegian couple poked their heads around the wall from their own terrace which is above ours and towards the road.  We talked to them that was for a little while but Liesl was very insistent that they come down and visit us, which they did.  The grabbed a few chairs from another terrace and we all sat outside drinking wine and talking.  The kids had great fun together and it turns out that their son isn’t just around Luciana’s age but they were actually born on the same day!

After a while the hotel owner delivered some pizza for us all.  She was already getting it for the Norwegians and so asked if we wanted her to pick some up for us as well.  We were really exhausted and definitely did not want to go out looking for food and the restaurant in the hotel has no vegetarian options and was quite expensive, or we might have asked them to whip something up anyway, so pizza sounded great to us.

We finished off our bottle of wine so they ran up to their room and brought done a bottle of wine from a case that they had purchased while on a winery tour early today.  We drank that gone pretty quickly as well.  It was wan’t long before the pizza arrived, we all moved into the dining room and had dinner.

We hung out for hours.  Around ten the kids and the girls went off to bed and the men stayed up talking for another hour in the dining room.  Isn’t it amazing how traveling internationally really brings people together?  It is neat how much we end up meeting people and getting to know them when we are away from home.

We went to bed on the early side.  I did not even take the time to hook up the laptop before going to bed.  I have the WiFi access code and, in theory, it is going to work in the hotel room.  It was just such a long, hard day that getting online and doing anything at this point is just not going to happen.

Tomorrow we have no particular plans.  Breakfast starts at eight and we hope to make it to that.  We always do so I imagine that that will not be a problem.  Everyone got right to bed without a problem tonight.  We have no car and public transportation is really rough here so likely we will just be hanging around in Neive and checking out the local area.

After a long day we are pretty happy tonight and Piedmont is definitely giving Tuscany a run for its money.  Although Liguria was so beautiful on the train ride coming here that we have to consider that as well.  Choices, choices.

I got up early this morning at about six and went down to the lobby with the laptop to attempt to do some work.  I had told Dominica last night that likely I would be down there working this morning so she was not surprised.

I probably got in an hour or more in the lobby before Dominica needed me to come back up to the room because the girls had woken up and it was time to bring them down to get breakfast.  I got a ton of pictures uploaded this morning which is a relief.  I actually got several hundred uploaded and have only about one hundred and two left to go before I am completely caught up.  Still a ton of videos though.   I am making those way faster than I can get around to uploading them.

I did a bit of real work this morning too.  Not much, just a little, but something.

We brought the girls down for breakfast at eight.  Breakfast is included with our room but we were not sure about that before.  Things are so different in Europe.  Getting used to when you get or don’t get breakfast is a big one.

Breakfast was quite good.  Very similar to the style of what we are used to across the continent.  Breads, cheeses, meats (not for us, of course), spreads, cereal, juice, coffee (Italian or American here.)  There are also scrambled eggs – we haven’t seen that in weeks.  If we do find eggs it is hard boiled eggs.

I took the laptop into breakfast with me and continued uploading from there which is how I managed to be so productive.  Just getting time for the uploads to run makes all of the difference.

After breakfast Dominica decided that she needed to lay down for a bit and Luciana was acting like she wanted a nap.  So Liesl and I went out for a walk around town.  Primarily we went down to the train station to deal with our seat reservations for the train tomorrow.  Italian trains needing seat reservations really makes train travel here a lot more difficult than we have grown accustomed to it being.

After dealing with our train reservations Liesl and I walked around town for a bit checking out some new areas.  Then back to our hotel.  It was probably eleven by the time that we got back.  While we were out one thing that struck me was that here in Montecatini Terme they have automats.  For those not familiar, it is like a store built out of vending machines.  These were common back in the earlier part of the twentieth century in larger cities.  They are rare today.  We hypothesized that because Italy has such a “shut down” lifestyle for much of the day that having automated facilities to dispense needed items would be pretty critical.  I am not sure that I have ever seen an automat in person before.  Very interesting.

By late morning we decided to go out for a walk and to get some lunch.  So we set out and headed east, it seemed like the way to go.  We did not go more than a few blocks when we found a place that looked really nice for an easy lunch.  So we picked a table out on the street and ate there.  We had a nice lunch of tuna sandwiches, pizza and gelato.  We also got a bag of cookies to take with us on our walk.

We headed north and ended up finding the city park right away.  It is very nice so we walked into the park and walked all around it.  We came across a very old man-made waterfall with ancient steps leading down to it, the remains of an old spa that has long been closed, a new fountain, the municipal tennis courts which are actual clay courts and a giant, beautiful carousel.  It was a really nice walk and we were out for quite a while.  Liesl walked, rather than rode in the stroller, for much of it.

We walked through the street shops for a bit and were just about to head to a playground for Liesl when she decided to be stubborn and got into really big trouble for refusing to take my hand when a car was coming.  So she ended up getting carried and not getting to go to the playground and we went straight back to the hotel.

We did some research and asked the hotel owner about getting to Montecatini Alto via the funiculari.  She said that it ran every half hour until midnight which is awesome.  After being in the German world for so long where everything shuts down super early and even getting food once the sun starts to set is difficult we were expecting the transportation to and from the top of town to stop at six or seven o’clock at the latest and assumed that we would be unable to go up there at all.  Italy is so different from northern Europe.  From a business standpoint this makes a lot of sense as this allows people to actually make use of the two parts of town and not to function like to distant towns with little associating them other than their views of each other.

So a little later on, after Luciana had taken a nap, we set out to walk back the way that we had been this morning and go a little further on to the funiculari which we took at around six to go up to the top of the village.  Liesl enjoyed the ride.  It cost fourteen Euros for the four of us to ride up and back down and there were some great views while riding it.  It is a small vehicle, apparently the tourist traffic going up and down the mountain never gets too crazy.  This really is not a tourist kind of town.  We’ve not met any English-speaking tourists while here and have seen very few tourists at all.  Those that we have seen are almost all elderly Europeans – mostly Italian with a good percentage of Germans.  Getting to the area from Germany, Switzerland and Austria is pretty easy to do.  So we feel good being in a place clearly a travel destination for the locals rather than for Americans.

It was easy to get to the funiculari and we did not have to wait long at all before us and just two or three other passengers were ferried up the mountain side.  Arriving in Montecatini Alto was, quite simply, breathtaking.  So far this is second only to the Alpine Lakes in Austria for beauty.  An amazing medieval fortified hill town, still intact, on top of a high mountain in the Apennines overlooking a Tuscan valley with Montecatini Terme down below.  Awesome.  This is what Tuscany is all about.

We walked around the hill town for a while working our way higher and higher wandering down one side street and then another.  Mostly our route was governed by where the stroller was able to proceed as many of the streets were heavily cobbled and very inclined making the stroller very difficult to propel.  There were several historic sites to see such as the old church and fortifications at the top of the hill.  It was really beautiful and quite interesting.

After strolling for a while we decided that we should eat at around seven thirty so we headed to the main piazza where the restaurants were just setting up.  There were a handful of people already eating but it was very few.  We are not at all used to this aspect of Italian life.  Being from the States where dinner is generally done pretty early, especially in Texas where we are used to the main dinner rush being around six, and then traveling in the UK and the northern European mainland countries where dinner is often earlier still we are pretty surprised when a restaurant opening at seven thirty is considered to be an early opening restaurant.  Now this is great for my own lifestyle but something that really takes getting used to.  That eight or nine o’clock is normal dinner time for people arriving at a restaurant and that a normal dinner takes two hours or more is very unusual.  The country club has acclimated us to the slow, multi-hour eating lifestyle but not the time.  The country clubs in Dallas, which are the types of establishments that one would expect to have later than usual dining hours, start dinner officially around five and often close between nine and nine thirty.

So we stopped by and looked at the menu at the restaurant at the “top” of the piazza – that is, the restaurant with the highest elevation as the piazza is on a pretty dramatic incline.  The menu looked quite interesting and the waitresses setting up both stopped by and said good evening to us.  As Americans, this pretty much makes us feel compelled to eat at a place as we are not at all used to the idea of wandering by a series of restaurants before choosing one.  To us, driving up and looking at a menu is a pretty big commitment.  So rather than wandering through the piazza and checking out the other menus we decided to just go with this one.  We are pretty much guessing at which one is going to be best anyway so it works fine.  This was definitely the last of the restaurants to open tonight.  Later I did walk through and discovered that we ate at the most expensive of the restaurants on the piazza and by far the most formal so likely the price and late opening go together as this was not a cafe or anything like that but a very nice restaurant.

We opted for an outside table, the weather is great tonight.  If anything it is on the chilly side but not by much.  We were the first patrons at the restaurant and the only ones for at least half an hour if not more.  By the end of the night only three tables were filled wit a total of ten diners, with us being counted as four.  We were the only ones to eat outside.  The inside seating was a large, cavernous room with a large opening onto the piazza so it felt mostly like being outside itself but not quite as cold.  None of the restaurants on the piazza were busy but this was the slowest of them.  I assume that that is because it is more formal and more expensive.  I did see someone stop in and pick up about five pizzas to go, though, so maybe they do some about of local take-away business too.  I imagine that people who live in Montecatini Alto are very likely to use take-out a lot.

Dinner was excellent.  We started with bruchetta that Dominica and I shared and we eat got a salad as we are always a bit low on vegetables while traveling.  Our diets have way too much bread and way too few veggies.  Dominica’s first course was a penne-like pasta in a pumpkin sauce that was quite good.  Mine first course was a simple cheese-filled ravioli with a butter sage sauce, very light.  Both were very good.  The girls shared a type of flat spaghetti in a vegetarian sauce that was really excellent.  We were pretty jealous of their pasta tonight.

For our main course Dominica and I decided to split the rare, ancient Tuscan pizza-like dish called schiacciata which is the specialty of this particular restaurant.  I took some pictures of the menu so that we could figure out what exactly it was later.  There was a wide variety of schiacciata available at the restaurant that we had chosen so we decided to try the one called Schiacciata Francesca for obvious reasons.  My mother would be really proud since Schiacciata Francesca is a form of Tuscan asparagus pizza.

All of our dinner was quite excellent and we were very happy that we chose this restaurant.  The waitresses were great too and spent quite a bit of time hanging out with the girls.  They even got their picture taken with them.  Liesl was sure to give each of them a sticker.  The stickers continue to go over really well, both with Liesl and with the people who receive them.  Dominica gets extra marks for coming up with the sticker idea and executing it and special thanks to my cousin Sara for making the design which so perfectly captures the spirit of our Liesl.

After dinner we got dessert.   Dominica got something called a gondolino which was most like a chocolate mousse with coffee on a cookie base.  I, again, did the Tuscan thing and got biscotti with sweet wine for dunking.  I just love the cookies and sweet wine thing.  I’m addicted.

With dinner, Dominica and I split a bottle of excellent red wine from the local region.  Ah, wine in Italy, sitting on a piazza in a hill town.  This is la dolce vita.

After dinner, which took a surprising three hours, we walked around town just a little bit more and managed to find a spot with phenomenal views from the “back side” of town out over the local olive groves and vineyards.  The main approach to the hill town faces the city so the view is dominated by the lights and buildings of the city, but this new view that we found is much like you imagine seeing in Tuscany.  Amazing.

We didn’t walk for long as it was getting late and we knew that we had a bit of walking yet to do before we get back to our hotel.  So we walked back to the funiculari where we had to wait about twenty minutes before the next run.  Now we got to see the view of the city in the dark with all of the twinkling lights.  Not what I expected from this region of Tuscany but quite nice.  The mountains to the south are really tall.

The funiculari filled up quite quickly and it was standing room only with everyone crammed in to get people down to Montecatini Terme.  This might be a tour group or it might just be the end of the first dinner crowd.  Way more people than we expected.

Once down in Montecatini Terme we were completely shocked to discover that now, at a quarter after ten at night, that town was far, and I mean far, more alive than we had ever seen it during the day.  Tons of restaurants and cafes were open, shops, including outdoor shops, were alive and quite busy.  The streets were packed with locals out for a stroll.  Everyone was dressed up for the evening “promenade” through the city.  I have never seen anything like it.  This is the Italian culture that we always hear about but seeing it really drives home just how dramatically different Italian culture can be than in neighbouring countries.  There were thousands of people out dressed up, shopping, walking, chatting, meeting, people watching, being seen, eating dinner…. this is the life of Montecatini Terme.

We walked through much of town and it was actually hard to get through the streets due to the crowds.  So odd to see.  I love this, though.  This is how it should be – go out late for food and end with a nice walk through town and you get to hang out with everyone.  And this is a Tuesday night too!  If this was the weekend it would not be nearly so shocking.

We got back to the hotel and Dominica and I put the girls to bed and Dominica started packing.  After everyone was down for the night and Dominica went to bed, which was a little after midnight, I went down to the lobby for another two hours to do uploads to Flickr and write some SGL updates.  Tomorrow we head off to Piedmont and while we expect to have Internet access there, we don’t really know what the situation will be so I want to get as much done today as possible so that we are not so backed up.

A lot of the Columbia basketball players who are in the hotel were down in the lobby attempting to use the Internet access with me.  There were some of them still there when I headed off to bed around two or two thirty in the morning.  Tomorrow is a very long and likely very stressful travel day as we have a lot of train and bus changes to make and some of our journey is not known yet so we have to figure it out as we go.  We will definitely be sad to leave Montecatini Terme, this was a great town.  We are very encouraged about Italy after this.  This was not at all where we thought that we would like to live and, so far, this is ranking as the best, or nearly the best, place that we have found in our European travels.  Of places that we have stopped, Boppard is really great for actually living there day to day but I think that we both feel that the Italian lifestyle suits us better.

We are very interested to see what Piedmont has to offer us.