Sheep Guarding Llama

We did nothing this morning but sleep in and stay in the hotel room in Milan until it was time to head out to go to the airport.  We walked over to Milano Centrali which was right across the street from our hotel, got a light breakfast at the station and caught the shuttle bus that runs from Centrali out to Milani Malpensa, the airport from which we will be flying to Barcelona.

The shuttle took about an hour and the ride on the shuttle gave us a chance to see, by far, the most of Milan that we got to see on this trip. It still was not very much, the shuttle didn’t pass any important sites.  Oh well, hopefully we will see Milan far more often than we event want to very soon.

The airport was mostly uneventful outside of a bit of confusion around checking in to our flight.  We are flying through Iberia but they have us handled by Vueling, one of their partners.  So when we went to the Iberia counter to check in… no one was there but the counter was officially “open”.  There were a lot of people having this problem.  There was a bit of a panic but I took the lead and talked to the information counter and found out that Iberia had multiple check in counters and that the one for Barcelona was in a completely different part of the airport.  That was extremely confusing and having their main counter completely unmanned so that there was no indication whatsoever that we were in the wrong place didn’t help anything.

After that, everything went smoothly.  We had gotten to the airport nearly two hours before our flight so had time to relax and eat some snacks while we waited for the flight.

The flight itself was pretty short, just over an hour.  It is not a long flight from Milan to Barcelona.  I had a great view out the port window nearly the whole time and was able to identify The Langhe, the Maritime Alps, the French Riviera, etc.  Pretty amazing views from the plane.

Unfortunately we had an incident on the plane.  I was feeding Luciana food from our snack stores and she gagged a little on a pecan sliver and threw up while we were in flight.  She has a really touchy gag response, always has.  Any little thing and everything comes up right away.  What a mess that was.  All over her, all over me, into the seat behind us.  Not fun.

Other than that the flight was good.  The seats were very tight with no legroom at all.  It was actually quite a bit claustrophobic.  Having to hold Luciana on my lap in such a tiny space was very awkward.  Good thing that the flight was really short.

We landed in Barcelona and took the first shuttle bus that we could to the city center.  Just that drive was pretty neat, Barcelona is a really attractive town.

We got to the main plaza and then took the Metro from there to the stop near our hotel.  It really wasn’t bad.  The Barcelona Metro is really quite nice.  Clean and easy to navigate.

We got off at the Barceloneta stop and walked to our hotel, the Hostal Nuevo Colon, which was very close to the Metro stop.  An easy walk.  The air was brisk and cool but the sun was really hot.  Bliding, in fact.  The sun in Barcelona was really intense.

The hotel was pretty nice.  Directly across the street from Estacio d’Franca and right on a main drag with tons of restaurants and shopping right outside.  Our room had three beds and a pack and play for Luciana.  We are pretty happy with it.

After getting settled in to the hotel room we headed onto to find some authentic Barcelonian tapas which we have been wanting for years.  We love tapas and we haven’t had good tapas since moving out of Newark and eating tapas regularly in the Ironbound.

We found a little place called Adriatico right down the street from the hotel and settled in there. We sat on the street and Dominica sent me in to order.  She speaks Spanish better than I do but she panics when dealing with things in another language so makes me deal with things whenever possible every since early on in Italy.  So I ordered us some coffee and a ton of tapas.  We were really hungry and excited to be eating real tapas in Spain.

Dinner was excellent.  We really liked it.  From there we just went back to the hotel.  Officially we don’t have Internet access in our room but in reality we do and it works great.  The girls were worn out from traveling so we spent a while just relaxing in the hotel.

Dominica wanted some supplies so sent me out to do some shopping.  So I went for a bit of a walk and discovered that our hotel is right on the water front with ships and the harbor and everything right down the street.  I walked around for a bit completely stunned by the beauty of Barcelona and the Mediterranean.  Really impressive.

I found a small “corner store”, somewhat oddly referred to as a supermercat here, that had what we needed, most importantly chocolate milk for Liesl, and I returned home.  I am very happy to discover that chocolate milk is so popular here that there is a large brand made right here in Barcelona so it is really easy to find.  Everyone carries the local brand and it is really good.

If I ever have to open my own chain of “super markets” in the region I will have a merecat as my logo and call it the Super Merecat Supermercat.  At least no one would forget it.

We had some snacks from the grocery and just relaxed.  The girls were busy playing with their toys and harassing Dominica as usual.  Dominica was very impressed with my ability to get out and find what we needed just walking around in Barcelona.

Dominica also did a bit of tour bus research tonight.  We are just tourists here in Barcelona so our plan is to actually use the tour buses and get out and see the city.  We have no agenda other than to see the sites.  I’m not much into being a tourist but there is no opportunity for us to get into normal life here and there is a ton to see in this town.  So likely we will be riding the tour buses all day tomorrow.

Today is our wasted “travel day.”  Originally we were supposed to only have to go to Torino today, a thirty to forty five minute trip, where we would catch the night train to Barcelona.  So we had planned on having most of this day in Neive to relax and do some light, local sight seeing before taking a local train to Torino.  Or, more likely, we would have gone to Torino in the morning and spent the day walking around the city to see it.

But Trenitalia, for some reason, has taken all of the night trains off of their schedules so we are left high and dry.  Instead we are taking a several hour local train trip over to Milan, staying in a hotel by the train station and tomorrow morning catching a quick hop flight over to Barcelona.  Not ideal but it works.  So today is pretty much completely lost as we have to travel and don’t have the time or energy to unpack everything just to pack it back up the same day.  So today is a nothing day in the middle of our travels.

We got up at a good time this morning.  I went and had breakfast first while Dominica kept getting things ready.  I talked to Christian and Marita for a little bit and we got hooked up on Facebook and with email.  They are heading back to Norway today and are leaving two or three hours ahead of us.  It worked out pretty well that we were in the hotel together for almost the entire week – they got in one day ahead of us – and that we are leaving the same morning and that their oldest and our youngest were born on the same day.  So they were off for the train station in Alba at around nine.  That is when Dominica came down to get breakfast and I watched the girls.  We’ve given up on having Liesl go down to breakfast too.   She is well behaved but eats basically nothing but takes forever doing it.

We got everything ready and were outside before ten to make sure that we were able to get to the train station as soon as possible.  We have a bit of running around to do this morning and our train leaves at five after noon so we want to be quick about getting everything done.  We have to wait for our hostess to return from the train station as she has our baby seat with her so we are just stuck waiting as we need that both to get Luciana to the train station as well as to return the car.  The car has to be returned to Avis by eleven thirty but only with the car can we get to the Alba train station so we have a very serial set of events that have to take place to make everything work.

We had planned to leave the hotel around ten to make sure that we had enough time to make it everywhere but our car seat did not make it back until ten till eleven.  So we were cutting it really close.  We closed out our hotel tab, got the baby seat loaded back into the Panda and were off for Alba as quickly as possible.

I dropped the girls at the train station and we raced back to the Avis shop which is about halfway between Alba and Neive.  I had to run to the gas station to get the tank topped up before dropping it off too which was adding to my panic about the time table.

In the end we got the car back to Avis with about ten minutes to spare.  Nothing like cutting it close.  Everything was fine and she drove me back to the Alba train station and I was there by eleven thirty.  So we had thirty five minutes to relax and wait for the train.  It is a very small station at Alba so very easy to deal with.  The train was already at the platform so we loaded up and dropped off the luggage and I ran into the bar to get our morning coffees to take on the train.  I am starting to really get the hang of getting Italian coffee.

The first train was decently short, just running from Alba to Cavallermaggiore where we transferred to a line running north up to Torino.  Unfortunately our train stalled along the way to Cavallermaggiore to wait for another train that was running late.  But they waited so long that we missed our connection at Cavallermaggiore by about fifteen minutes.  It is pretty bad when a train is late by about the total amount of time that it is scheduled to make a run – so about one hundred percent late.  That sucked.

So instead of having a five minute layover at Cavallermaggiore, we were stuck there for an hour.  And Liesl had decided, at the very last second, that she needed to use the bathroom.  So I tried to find her one at Cavallermaggiore’s station but discovered that they only had the “squat on the floor” style toilets.  I took Liesl in there and not only is she unwilling to even discuss using one but she is actively scared of them!  This isn’t good.  So she had to wait an hour for the train to come to use the bathroom on the train.

Once the train arrived we were horrified to discover that it was one of the really old trains and it had no toilets on it!  This is not good for Liesls!  So Liesl had to ride all the way to Torino without being able to use a bathroom!  Trenitalia is not scoring points today.

We got to Torino and Dominica was able to whisk Liesl right off to the restroom and the crisis was averted.  This was a very long afternoon for Liesl.

The delay at Torino was long enough that we were able to eat a meal there. The only restaurant was a McDonald’s but we figured that some fish, larger than usual drinks and a taste from home would not be a bad thing.  I didn’t want to deal with moving everyone somewhere with all of the luggage so I just got us “eat in” food and we sat down in the middle of the train station and ate there.  Looked weird but it was useful and we were next to a sign so not in anyone’s way at all.

The longest part of our ride was the Torino to Milan run but that part went just fine.  We got into Milan in the early evening which was really annoying as the distance is pretty small and we have been working on nothing but getting there since nine o’clock this morning.  Had we been driving we could have been in Milan an hour before our first train pulled out of Alba!

Our hotel room in Milan was right across the street from the train station in a tiny little urban place.  It was a rickety old building with multiple “hotels” located within it.  Ours was on the first floor and our room had views of the train station so clear that we could see two of the arrival boards, see the occasional train come by and hear the platform announcements.  The room is pretty spartan and there is no bed for Luciana.  The bathroom door has no latch so you just have to hope that it doesn’t blow open and there is only one room key and the room door doesn’t latch so it is either deadbolted with the only key or it is swinging open – that means that there is no reasonable way to come and go unless all four of us do so together.  Not ideal.  But there is Internet access in the room which is nice.

We tried going out for a quick trip to see some sights.  The plan was to catch the yellow line to the city center so that we could see the galleria and the duomo.  But just as we headed out for the evening it started to rain and then it started to thunder.  Dominica decided that since we will be living close to Milan in the near future that it was not worth trying to go see it tonight when we could just relax for a bit.  So we turned around and went back to the hotel room and wrote Milan off completely.

We stopped in the Milan train station and got a quick dinner of pizza at one of the fast food places in there.  Nothing special but it wasn’t bad.

Back at the hotel I had the hotel open our two bottles of wine that we had lugged with us from Neive and we drank those tonight.  I put in a bit of time on Facebook and SGL getting things updated.

This was, most likely, the most uneventful day of our entire trip thus far.  No fun stuff today and really nothing even interesting.  So much for our final day in Italy.  Tomorrow we are off to Spain.  Only two countries left to see before we go home.  I can’t believe that we are this far into this huge adventure already.  It doesn’t seem possible.

It is hard to believe that our little girls have already been to eight countries in their lives (and neither has ever been to Canada or Mexico which would be the obvious ones!)  Tomorrow they will be up to nine and next week they will flip double digits.  Kind of crazy.

I am pretty excited about going to Barcelona.  I have long wanted to see it.  This is one of my big “city destinations” in Europe for myself.

Dominica and I got hardly any sleep last night and what we did get was poor.  Maybe two hours at best.  We spent most of the night crying interspersed with talking about memories of Oreo.

We went to breakfast this morning first just Dominica while I watched the girls and then Liesl and I while Dominica watched Luciana.  Luciana is just so naughty at breakfast that we cannot really handle all going at once.

After breakfast we got the girls ready for a day out driving.  The last two days of long distance driving was neat and gave us a good overall view of the region that we are in and, mostly, allowed us to rule out large portions of the area that we are definitely not interested in.  Today is our final full day in Piemonte and we need to really look at the local area carefully to make sure that we have a good feel for it.  This is our only chance and this was the primary mission of this entire vacation.  That is not to imply that we were wasting time the last two days, ruling out those areas was quite important as no matter how much we might love one place if we were wondering if the grass was greener just over the fence we would be no better prepared to decide that if we had not looked at all.

Dominica and Luciana headed out to play on the main terrace for a bit and I sat down with Liesl to have a talk about Oreo.  I didn’t want her to ask about him, like she often does, and us be caught either having to lie about him or to suddenly have to tell her what happened.  This is Liesl’s very first exposure to death and so this was pretty hard.  She talks about dying from time to time and even yesterday she said that the whale, a plastic ride-on rocking toy at the playground on top of the mountain, had died and she was sad and would not ride on it, but to her death is way too abstract and confusing.  So we talked as best as we could about Oreo.  Liesl and I cried together for a bit but then she was suddenly fine and wanted to go outside and play with Luciana.  We are assuming that this will be an ongoing discussion but we wanted to get it kicked off as soon as possible so that we would have as much time as we could before we return to New York so that there is no chance that she is expecting Oreo to be waiting for her in the car when we get off of the plane – which is pretty much what she had been planning on up until today.

Our driving today is over a very small area geographically but the roads are very windy and you move quite slowly so even going just a few miles can be quite a big undertaking.

We started by heading over to Barbaresco which is very small and right next to Neive.  We took the “back roads” although this can be a very confusing concept in Italy as, quite often, there are no main roads.  I think that Barbaresco is completely devoid of main roads but I am not sure.  Barbaresco was really nice, but really small.  Probably too small for us.  It would be like living in the country with us needing to go into Alba for every little thing.  That would be easy as it is really close, but we are hoping to live in a place where we can walk or bicycle for day to day things like basic groceries.  So we didn’t stop in Barbaresco but drove right on through just looking around.

We worked our way down to Alba, the main city in the region, and did more driving around than we had done the other day.  We got a bit of a feel for the city.  It is quite small for a city, about thirty thousand people, making it very similar to Ithaca including the hills and the wine.  We didn’t stop anywhere in Alba, it was a quick pass-through drive, but we wanted to see some of the different areas in town.  While what we really want is to live in a small village there is a decent chance that living right in Alba will make a lot of sense for us, at least initially, because we will have modern facilities there, can do everything on foot or on bike, can rent easily and can use it as a base for figuring out exactly where we actually want to live.  So we need to consider it and the neighbouring city, B’ra, quite seriously as well.  B’ra is only minutes away and is just a tiny bit smaller at about twenty seven thousand.

We drove south out of Alba and went through Rodello.  This was our first town where we actually turned off of the main road and went into the little town itself.

Rodello was great, but boy does it look expensive.  It is a lot more modern than most of the little hill towns.  It is big enough to have its own resources yet is right next to Alba.  It has great views too.  Probably not an option for us.

We were driving south of there on a big, winding country road where, on the side of the road, there was a gelato truck, just out in the middle of nowhere.  Well, we just had to stop then!  So we did.  We pulled over, there was actually gobs of parking, a great view of the towns that we were trying to reach and a picnic area with granite benches and tables (longevity overkill for a picnic area, I think.)  The gelato was the best that we have had since Boppard although Dominica and I both feel that the shop that we used the most in Boppard, just one block towards the river from the main square, remains the best that we have had all month.

As we were eating our gelato I noticed a Ferrari coming up the road below us and head towards the bend that would bring him past us.  So I walked over to the road to get a look.  Nothing like a Ferrari screaming by in the middle of the Italian countryside.  But, it was actually about twenty or thirty Ferraris in a massive convoy!  I’ve never seen so many exotics all at once.  They just kept coming and coming.  There was even a Testarosa.  Several of them honked, revved their engines or acknowledged us in some other way.  The girls working the lonely gelato stand said that this wasn’t really uncommon.  Only in Italy.

From there we drove out into the country onto one of those back roads and it turned into a steep down hill climb that started to remind us of our adventure on the mountain yesterday.  In reality it was nothing like that and not stressful but had we not done what we did yesterday, it might have been.  Single car width little road, really steep descent, hairpin turns, no end in sight… it was great.  We stumbled on some really cool places and ended up in Sinio which was a pretty neat little town.

At this point Dominica needed me to find her a restroom which is a surprisingly big deal in rural Italy, nothing like in the States where you can always find a restroom, so we attempted to get back on to the beaten path and see what we could find.

We came into Montelupe and I drove on up into the old town on the tight cobblestone streets and found a gorgeous square where we parked the car and let the kids out to play on a really great playground that they made there.  The main village square has tons of parking and they built a “terrace” for the village residents that has some of the best views that we have seen yet in Italy.  On a clear day, a sign read there, you can see the Matterhorn!

There was a public toilette advertised in town but the doors were locked.  Uh oh, that isn’t good.  So we tried the only restaurant in town (we tried to eat there.)  They said that they were full and could not seat any additional people and would not let us use the restroom (Italians are really friendly but restaurants in Italy, by and large, are not.)

We left Montelupe and decided to run back towards Neive and, if we had to, use the hotel.  We could drive around small towns for hours and never find anything if we were not careful.

As we passed back through Alba we decided to try the train station there.  Dominica ran in but there was some confusion about finding or accessing the restrooms so she gave up and we raced back to Neive and our hotel there.  Pretty silly, but it worked.  So we got there and everyone took a bathroom break as we were not going to let that happen again.

Then it was back out to explore some more.  This time we took the main road right into Alba to speed things up.  We went past the Avis shop so Dominica now knows where that is in comparison to everything else.  This time heading through Alba we found a Lidl grocery store which had worked for us a few days ago so we stopped and did some quick grocery shopping.  Finding groceries in Italy is pretty hard, these shops are well hidden, and on Sunday only the biggest ones are open and not very busy – possibly because the people who are most likely to shop on a Sunday are also the ones who don’t know how to find them.

We got through Alba and headed south to start looking at villages again.  Retracing some ground here but attempting to go through Alba via a different path.

We knew that Borolo was supposed to be really nice because that town is both very famous and has the regional wine museum which we really wish that we could have gone through.  We drove into Borolo, parked in the main parking area for town and walked around the old town, up to the castle and around the back streets.  We wanted food but even in a tourist town it is nearly impossible to get food on a Sunday afternoon in Italy.

We found a bar (called a cafe in the States) that was open and serving sandwiches but no pasta.  We really wanted pasta but made do.  It had just started to rain when we got there but we sat outside and enjoyed a soft rain (we were under a roof but open to the air) and ate a light mid-afternoon sandwich there.  Liesl spent a good deal of the time dancing around in the rain and playing with the water that had collected on some of the tables that were not under the roof.

From Borolo we wanted to head for home but La Morra was marked on our map by out hotel owner as a place that we should go and it was, more or less, on the way back so Dominica let me detour there to see it.

We pulled into La Morra thinking that it would be a quick drive-by town but it was really neat so I pulled over and found some parking near the middle of town.  We got out and started walking.  This town really looks to be quite cool.  They had quite a crowd of tourists milling about here and there.  Tourists in these kinds of towns seem to mostly be people from the local area but from other villages.

La Morra was a little bigger than other hill towns that we looked at so far.  They are a bit more touristy as well, but not terribly so.  We walked around the town checking out the back streets, the side streets, new parts of town, old parts of town.  They had several really cool, old churches and a neat little garden with hedges and paths between the hedges.  Just the right height for a Liesl to run through.  So I took her through there and she was quite happy.

We walked up and up until we came out in the top of town where they have a large square.  It turns out that La Morra is the highest point in the area and has a commanding view of The Langhe region.  They have a large platform area to stand and look out over the region with a neat map showing the directions of the different towns so that you can stand there and figure out what everything is out on the horizons.  Very cool.

Up at the top of town there was a farmer’s market still underway.  The last few vendors were just closing down.  One was selling fruit, one was selling cheese and one was selling hazlenut products like cakes and truffles.  So we stopped by the hazlenut products vendor (you don’t get to see these in the states!)  They had really amazing stuff and we bought a bit of it like truffles, honey cookies and a hazelnut cake that is a specialty of the region here.

Dominica has hypothesized that Europeans use hazelnuts in the same way that Americans use peanuts. In the States, peanuts are in everything as is peanut butter.  In Europe the peanut butter thing is replaced by Nutella and other hazelnut spreads and hazelnuts are absolutely everywhere.  Very odd.

We are very glad that we decided to stop in La Morra.  So far, this surprise gem is our leading contender for places that we would like to live and it appears that it has the housing necessary to actually live there.  Many towns look great but would logistically be impossible as there are no houses or apartments to live in so the point would be moot.  La Morra actually has new buildings and old too.  Very well done from a town planning standpoint, and it has great outlying “suburbs” as well.    Hill town suburbs are a funny thing, tiny hill towns of fifteen hundred people with outlying suburbs of maybe fifty people.  Looks really neat though.

From La Morra it was back to Neive and the hotel.  Our last day of sight seeing and touring around the region is over.  We returned to the hotel so that Dominica could get to packing.  Tomorrow we have to leave for Milan.  The evening was spent trying to pack and keep the kids under control until everyone fell asleep.  Much of the evening was Luciana and I out on the terrace with me trying to keep her out of the way as she tries hard to unpack everything as Dominica packs it.

I drank one of our surplus bottles of wine tonight.  Only two left to ship to Milan with us tomorrow.  That did not work out as planned.  Oops.

Our hotel owner stopped by and borrowed one of our car seats so that she can use it to drive the Skaiaas to the Alba train station in the morning.  They leave to head back to Norway a few hours before we leave for Milan.  It worked out well that we had the car seats available.

Another late night tonight.  Tomorrow morning we have to drop off the the girls at the Alba train station, then I have to return to Avis to drop off the car then our hostess will drive me back to the train station.  Then it is a couple of trains from Alba to Torino to Milan where we will spend the night.  The day after that we have a flight our to Barcelona.

The night trains from Torino to Barcelona being cancelled really messed up our plans.  That made for a lot of unnecessary stress and a ton of work as Dominica has been trying to figure out how we are going to get to Barcelona for days.  Very frustrating.  We have no idea why all of the night trains that were scheduled along this route are no longer available.  It appears that the run has been canceled.  We bought our Eurail passes based on using them this way.  So now we waste a day of travel trying to make up for that.

We are very sad to be leaving The Langhe.  We really hope to be back here, very, very soon.

At the end of it all, Dominica cannot believe how well I did scouting out locations remotely.  I appear to have pinpointed exactly where we would most want to live down to just two to three miles in all of Europe.  I had done a lot of homework on this to determine that this is where we wanted to be.  It was no small task but I had been pretty confident that the Alba regions was what we were going to like.  There is little doubt now that this is our target region.

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.