Tuscany

As you can see, we got some fog.

But I won't complain.  I say it's payback for all of the Italians (and others) who come to San Francisco in June to see the glory of the Golden Gate Bridge and do nothing more than stare into the grey abyss that is San Francisco Bay in summer.  Cameras resting unused in their hands, shivering uncontrollably in their sandals and shorts, peering with despair into the mid-day twilight and asking each other in Italian, French, Japanese or what have you: "What is this murky soup that surrounds us?  Do we have to pay the Americans an extra fee to get them to clear it away so we can see?"
I've witnessed this cruel scene more times than I care to recount so if we got a little fog and a little rain during our stay in Tuscany I can't utter one word of discontent.  We were there in November after all.  And, being a native to California's Central Coast, I am comfortable with fog.  I know how to interpret shadows in the mist.
In truth, it was everything I could have hoped for although I confess I keep my expectations low when I travel because I hate being disappointed.
An added joy was having Linda with us so that when the fog did break I had someone with whom I could leap from the van and race along the road to get that perfect photo I had seen just a couple of feet back which always turned out to be more like a half km...tell me you do this too.
On this note let me say that I love Rick Steves' programs and his whole approach to travel (relax, keep it real and don't be a jerk to the locals. Words to live by) and I know he says that when you drive the off-roads through Tuscany there are plenty of places to pull over and get photos.
I guess we weren't on those roads.
Unless his definition of "a place to pull over" is the middle of your lane on a two-lane road.  But I think Rick Steves is a lot smarter than that.
It's well known that Italians and Romanians share the same gene that controls the ability to perceive what is safe when it comes to driving.  So unfortunately every time we stopped for a photo we felt like we were taking our lives in our hands. But since that's what it's like just walking back and forth to school in Obedin, we were okay with it. On the scale of 1-10 Glamourous Ways To Die, getting hit by a car in Tuscany outranks getting hit by a car in Obedin any day.
In any case, who wouldn't risk their lives for views like this?

Someone was very impressed.  Nothing like kids to keep everything in perspective, huh?

The Beauty Farm

We were sitting upstairs one evening, Mihai, Linda and I, trying to plan our trip through Italy.
Linda was consulting her memory of past excursions as well as friends' recommendations, Mihai was online looking for hotels and I was searching through Sandor Clegane fanart images, browsing through La Tartine Gourmande diligently studying Italian road maps.
At that point our agenda wasn't very concrete, all we knew was that we were sure we wanted to spend a couple of days in and around Tuscany.  That meant we were wide open for suggestions on places to stay so when Mihai peered at the monitor and read "San Lorenzo A. Linari Beauty Farm and Health Spa" we felt no need to take such a preposterously-named option seriously.
Except it turns out it was one of the few places that wasn't $500 a night or in the middle of a city with no parking available or a place where we would be sharing a bathroom with 7 other guests (I'm pretty adventurous but at the end of the day I want to have my own toilet. Don't judge).
Our light-hearted jocularity turned into head-scratching serious contemplation: a beauty farm and health spa?  Try as I might I could come up with no realistic image of what such a place might look like.  Somewhere floating around in my brain was a sort of Italian version of a mega-plex we had stayed in outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming.  Ugh.  But if it was cheap and we could park there, who cared?  We weren't going to Tuscany to look at the interiors of hotels, right?
A night in San Lorenzo A. Linari was booked and then promptly forgotten until our last morning in Bologna when the question arose: where are we going tomorrow?
I consulted my notebook (on rare occassions I can be organized) and read: "San Lorenzo A. Linari Beauty Farm and Health Spa".
Huh?
Oh yeah, (laughter all round) that beauty farm place!
When Mihai typed the address into the GPS, it would not recognize it as a viable, exact location, only the general area was found.  We asked the concierge at the hotel in Bologna but he was mystified as well.
Ah, no matter, we shrugged with the confidence that comes from standing in a well-known place in the daylight. We'll figure it out. Who cared about some mega-plex that was probably located right off the highway next to a McDonalds and a Billa?
I've forgotten exactly what we did that day, I'm sure Linda recalls, but the fact that is most germane is that by the time we headed off to The Beauty Farm, dusk was setting in.  By the time we took the road to San Lorenzo, it was dark.
A mega plex off the side of the highway?  Er, no.
Try a farm house in the middle of no where off a narrow, twisting cobblestone road and then a dirt road and then a dirt path off that.  No strip mall, no McDonalds, no lights.
Now I'm not saying I wanted to see a McDonalds or a strip mall because I did not but some kind of street sign or human inhabitant would have been comforting at that point.
You can imagine the conversation in the car as we drove around in the dark:
"I don't think this is the right road."
"What did that sign say back there?"
"Do we even have the address right?"
"Why didn't we get more details before we left Bologna?"
"This can't be the right road."
"What kind of place calls itself a beauty farm?" (the last was an irrelevant bit spoken out of frustration, I confess).
It turns out it was the right road.  But first we had to drive up and down it several times stopping about 50 meters (I swear I'm not kidding) from where the building was and turning around before we convinced ourselves we must be in the right place.
This is what the road looked like.  Only in the dark. Imagine.

We walked up the little hill, met the bespeckled proprietor and were shown to our rooms as if the preceeding dirt-road-in-the-dark-driving-confusion had never occurred.

Do the photos do it justice?  I don't know.  Would we have been so impressed if we hadn't been expecting a strip mall next door and floral-print polyester bedspreads in the rooms?  I don't know.
One thing for sure is that we regretted not knowing more about the accommodations because if we had we would have bought some wine, a good loaf of bread and some cheese to eat on the awesome wood table in the awesome room pictured above.  And there we would have celebrated our. wedding. anniversary.  Seriously.  It was almost completely forgotten.
In acknowledgment of the date we ate pistachios and finished off a bottle of mineral water we'd bought in Siena and together with Linda and the boys, talked about our favorite memories from that day fifteen years ago (how time flies).  Kind of a mini-party without good food or music. So kind of not a party at all. But other than wishing for some cake to go with the pistachios, I had no complaints.  Life was sweet that night at the beauty farm.
Or in any case it was better than the alternative which would have involved being lost and sleeping in the car.

The next morning after breakfast by a crackling fire we examined our accommodations in the daylight. Even with the fog and the dampness we remained impressed and wished we had more time to spend.  Alas, we'd been prepared for instant coffee and the sounds of the freeway nearby so we imagined we would be happy to rush off with nary a backward glance.  I'm sad to say that it was impossible to linger longer than 10:00 am that morning.
Take home lesson: never judge a hotel by its ridiculous name.

I can only imagine this place in the height of the Tuscan summer when the pool is open and the table tennis tournament is going full swing and all of the dining areas are filled with guests eating the aforementioned cheese, crusty bread, and sipping wine.

Oddly enough, this image made me wistful not for a chance to extend our year-long adventure so we can visit Tuscany next summer, but to return home.  Home as in California.  Where we will spent the height of the Santa Cruz summer (which is to say September) drinking wine and eating crusty, cheese drenched pizza and watch Stefan and Razvan running around on the lawn with Mircea and Lucian and my parents will have their grandsons with them once more. And all of the other members of our large and much-loved clan of friends and family will be only a phone call away: hey guys, the coals are hot, the dough is ready, come on over.
They say the best vacations are those that make you happy to go home again. For the first time since we left Santa Cruz I felt that way.  I suppose that was the real beauty from San Lorenzo A. Linari.

By the way, Linda has the down-low on the incredibly interesting history of this place.  I'm sure she will share it on her blog so use the link and look for it in the coming weeks. (no pressure, Linda, take your time <wink>)

Messina

Messina was the first stop on the cruise (remember I warned you that I wasn't going to go in order).
Until that point our traveling SOP consisted of looking up 3 restaurants, jotting down their address and then hitting the streets and trying to find them.
Sounds lame but it worked.
But then we did the cruise which meant we started from a ship.  And then we became tempted by these things called land excursions.  And then we listened to fellow-cruisers talk about their experiences and we began to doubt ourselves and our abilities to be tourists without guides and buses and people speaking English.
In short, we were thrown off our game.
Or maybe it's just that Messina is not all that interesting.
I shouldn't say that.  Probably it was us.  Yes, I'm sure it was us.
Unlike other ports we visited, the city is directly across the street from where the boat is docked.  As in, you walk across the gangplank and are unceremoniously dumped into Messina.  Auto, bus and train traffic, vendors hawking their wares and even a nice little cafe within a stone's throw of your cabin window.  Sounds simple, right?
The easier it was, the more confused we became.  I have no explanation for this.  At least none that is in any way flattering for Mihai or I.
We exited the ship in the middle of heaving mass of people which promptly made me so nervous and agitated that I said "whichever way the throng is moving, we must go the other direction."  (Fear of closed spaces, fear of crowds, fear of snails, I have a nice little list of phobias to my credit).
In any case, after 20 meters we stopped for a coffee break.  Must be some kind of record for us.  But at least we got a photo of Mircea looking sophisticatedly world-weary with his cappuccino.

From the barista Mihai obtained the names and whereabouts of 2 local restaurants.  So we should have been set, right?  Right.  But no.  No, somehow it all went wrong and we walked around for hours not only unable to eat anywhere (one of the restaurants was closed and the other we could just never manage to find) but also not seeing anything really that interesting. We were trying to see something of note, we were trying to be impressed.  Really. It was our first port, of course we were trying to have that moment when we were stopped in our tracks, looked at each other and said with big smiles "Wow!"
But what we saw was a lot of this:

Yeah.

I know that one of the reasons I write this blog is to provide a moment of escapism for my friends and family back home but I also am a big proponent of keeping it real.  If I tried to tell you it's all-glamour-all-the-time I would not only be embarrassingly pretentious but lying as well.
In any case, you would not be fooled because I already confessed about the head lice a few months ago.

Here's the fact: the best views we got of Messina were from the boat.

But I'm still standing by my statement that it's not Messina, it was us.  We were just...off somehow.  We should have followed the crowds.  Surely they were onto something, right?
However, all was not lost: we at last found a restaurant where there were no menus in English and none of the staff spoke English and so we ordered blind.  That in itself was cool (even if I got 10 times the amount of protein I would normally eat in a week.)
I had what I believe is the best wine I've ever tasted and it was 3, yes three Euro a glass. Numbers don't need translation.  3.
And then later we found a cafe and had a splendid espresso and cappuccino which cost (drum roll) 0.80 and 1.20 Euro respectively.
Huh?
Why can't we do this in the States?
So bravo for your excellent quality and outstanding pricing on wine and espressos, Messina.  Bravo.
Oh, and your awesome views from afar.