S/V Tavarua

As we drove up to this Tyrolean town, the smog & weather cleared to gorgeous autumn weather. This town was still in Italy, but it was most assuredly Austrian. The menus reverted back to mostly brown-gravied items. We were served one of the stranger food items that we’ve ever encountered. It was listed as Gnocchi e Spinachi in the Italian translation of the menu, and so I ordered it with the true sadness that comes with ordering the last Italian dinner that you will see for quite some time. What arrived though, was truly an inspired dish. Two oval German bread dumplings the size of large goose eggs arrived over a puddle of green pureed spinach, with a load of chopped sauteed ham over the dumplings, dusted with white melted cheese, and for the glamorous touch… the plate edge was decorated with paprika sprinkles. (This was a fine restaurant, after all.) Well, our reaction was complete shock, then we headed straight headlong into complete dining despondence. Ah, Austria. Oh, and I won’t mention the deep fried, heart-attack-on-a-plate, gigantic elephant ear pesto flat breads that they were selling to a line of Austrians at an outdoor food stall being washed down with equally gigantic beers… whimper.

Realizing that there were soon to be no end to the number of dumplings in our future, we looked for other things to amuse us in the town. The town was gorgeous in its Autumn foliage. There was a river running through the town with the Alps as a backdrop, and in the evening, some of the smallest bats that we’ve ever seen were zipping around in a feeding frenzy along the river’s edge. We had stepped into a fairy tale set, again.

The cathedral in town had been recently refurbished with an extreme use of gold gilding over its Baroque interior, and even to our jaded, seen one cathedral too many, eyes, we considered it impressive. It even had Tyrolean painting on the outside. We kept forgetting that we were still in Italy. (Well, other than the no-smoking ban… )

And finally, for other amusements, our Hotel was a Best Western and that came with an indoor swimming pool, including a smattering of white haired old ladies and men (yes, in Speedos, with not a care in the world about fashion), a hot tub (woo!) and a swimsuit spinner (now that’s luxury, baby).

Lucca - Yuck. Lucca had way too many tourists and our hotel was full when we arrived so we ended up in an extremely smoky room. Bah. We did find a nice dinner after most of the tour buses left & the shoppers started to dissipate. Derrell got a good ravioli that looked a bit more like pot-stickers in the way they were formed. He was very, very pleased. And we were surrounded at dinner by 20 and 30 year olds, the first we had seen in weeks, so it seemed. We realized that we were getting used to the white-haired old lady, tour bus circuit, and that sort of scared us.

Volterra - This town was also busy during the day, but rolled up after the tourists took off in their tour buses. We stayed in a hotel with a pool, but the pool was too cold to consider, and as it had autumn leaves starting to drift across the surface, we got the idea that autumn was actually still with us. In general, we walked the town and took in the views, nice enough place with very low tempo. We placed ourselves at dinner with a family of loud Americans behind us. I suppose it was good that they were loud, though. Derrell came down with an allergy attack during dinner. We were surrounded by blooming things in this town, and one of them didn’t agree with him at all.

San Gigminano - We headed towards the slightly bigger town of San Gigminano, and found 50 gigzillion tour buses and tourists, more than half of them from America. What a tourist trap. The best part of the town was the walk outside of the walls (away from the tourists). The views were stunning, the weather excellent. You know, all that good stuff that nature can deliver, and not even a tour bus can take it away. (Well, unless the tour bus manages to park next to you.) We rented a nice guest room in the attic of a Tuscan house with old wood beams in the ceiling and a fine tiled floor. The room was much better than the town.

Montipulciano - We stopped in a couple of cute towns on the way to Montipulciano, at Perucia & Monteciano. In the latter, we had a nice lunch with bulgur salad with some great balsamic vinegar and ribbollita (a Tuscan bread soup), served up with a sampling of the local Barolla wine. The day was perfect weather for outdoor cafe dining. Montipulciano ended up being a steep town, again filled with a billion tourist buses. We ended up at a mediocre meal after walking in circles up and down the hill through the city looking for open restaurants. This may go down as one of the worst guest rooms we’ve rented. The bed had a plastic sheet for the base sheet, and you don’t realize just how much you sweat at night until you lay down on one of these horrible, horrible things. Ah, that’s what happens when you roll the dice by getting a room from the Tourist Information office. They usually work out… but not always.

Gubbio - Now this was a quiet town, and we felt a bit removed from the crazy tourist scene that we had just experienced over the past few days. We landed a few good meals and one absolutely insane French meal with a horrific waiter. Our French dining experience involved watching the waiter make the genteel older couple next to us move mid-meal to place four patrons at their two person table. The waiter was acting as flighty and gay as a jaybird and was actively insulting every table in the vicinity. We were searching for some Monty Pyton humor, but we just couldn’t justify the guy’s behavior to anyone. Mind you this was a Michelin starred restaurant, but it wasn’t due to the service. We still can be happy with the kitchen, although, I would never recommend this place to anyone but a sworn enemy. We managed to get out of the kitchen, some grilled veggies, parma ham layered on a fried crisp of thin cheese and fresh tomato bruschetta for a starter, then followed it with truffled capon with flakes of pecorino cheese for an appetizer, and then a pumpkin ravioli in butter sauce came out, and finally, the main course of duck that melted away in a rich dark wine sauce. We were impressed with the kitchen, but we were ready to strangle the waiter with the strangiprezzi pasta that we had with wild boar ragu sauce from our earlier lunch down the street. Ah, people do come to Italy to just enjoy the restaurants, don’t they?

Trento - We drove out of Gubbio and ended up in the Italian flat lands. It ended up being a tough smoggy day of driving. We originally thought we wanted to stay in Modena.. but it was too smoggy. The air was looking orange. So, back to the highway we went and headed north to get out of the smog. We stopped in Trento where the air was clear. The town was showcasing the regional artisan food specialties over the weekend at a Farmer’s Market style set up. It was one of the more likable towns. There were university students and the level of tourism was just a distant backnote against the business of the town. Although, we were sad that we were starting to see the end of Italy transition back into the Germanic world, the flower boxes were looking good. We ended up staying at a place called Hotel America, which seemed like one bedroom apartments complete with patios had been remodeled into a hotel. Not much to say about that hotel other than the shock of the size of the place after the past few small rooms we had rented, and, well, hey, no plastic sheets!

Ah, our food dreams come true. We have left the land of Germanic cooking. No more goulash, schnitzel or brown gravied meats for awhile. Woo!

Stresa is nice quiet, even though touristy, Italian village on Lake Maggiore, just across the Swiss border, with the Alps showing in the background. We stayed put for three nights and got some laundry done and dodged the raindrops. The area is super picturesque, but we didn’t really get a glimpse of it until the last day. This ended up being a relaxing stop and we found some good Italian food, complete with pizza, pasta with ragu, and had time to sample wines from the region at one of the new snazzy wine bistros in the town.

Not much is happening in this town, so maybe it is the small things that make your day. Take for instance the laundromat had a new feature that we hadn’t seen before. The washer dispensed soap automatically, so the cost of washing your clothes included the soap. This made for one of the cleanest public washers that we’ve seen. No powdered soap sticking all over the place. You could even use some sort of rechargeable smartcard dongle to avoid having to find the right change. All in all, quite a dignified laundromat.

And did I mention that grilled fish in butter sage sauce is a specialty of Stresa? Nope, not a dumpling in sight…

Oh my, not what I was expecting. Our group was showing signs of wearing out traveling with each other, or at least a few were more interested in hunting down the new man from the plane ride, so we divided up into 2 groups for the train ride out to Rimini. It was a nice morning and a pleasant train ride. As we got off the train, there were loads of travelers waiting for their departure trains at the train station. Families mostly, many still in beachwear and carrying various plastic beach souvenirs. This was our first clue that we were walking into a gigantic Italian tourist destination.

Rimini is painful to describe. It is so far away from what I enjoy as a traveler. As far as the eye could see, the entire Italian seashore had been turned into a souvenir vending, of the imported-from-China souvenir sort. The road along the beach front was jam packed with trinket shops and four to five story hotels. Snapping and whirring gadgets in the shops, bad disco music, cheap sunglasses, and basically loads of junk existing in a repetitive pattern of kiosks that caused our environmentally conscious part of our brains to break down in a violent sob. Did I mention Italian karaoke?

On a more positive note, while biding our 4 days stay in this horrid strand of Italian shlock, we kept seeing a family containing what may have been one of the most enthusiastic kids ever to come to this beach. The family was a German family, and the kid was a chubby red haired little guy that was toting around a bogie board as big as he was. We watched him arrive for check-in at the hotel and bounce around the waiting area with his board, another day we caught him riding the pedal airplane and coin-operated animals and finally we saw him at the end of his stay completely and fully exhausted dragging through hotel. From his point of view, we guessed that this was a GREAT vacation.

Now, back to why we were so appalled with this place. To actually get to the ocean, you needed to walk through the gate of one of the hotel’s beach umbrella reservation kiosks on a sidewalk that leads all the way across the sand to the water. At the first part of this walk, you pass a small play area (or open air weight-lifting equipment, volleyball court, or bocci ball court), then the changing rooms and pay hut, and then finally past about 40 to 50 rows of permanent umbrellas anchored in the sand. Finally, you run out of sidewalk and you are at the meager strand of beach where the tide rises. (We suppose any umbrellas planted here would wash away.) This walk is free, and swimming in the ocean is free, but there is nowhere to sit on the beach for free.

The cost being allowed to sit on the beach was about 5 Euros for one umbrella and an additional 5 Euro per chair, no towel or drink service. So for 4 chairs and two umbrellas, the group was down 30 Euros for the day (about $42 given the exchange rate.) For this lovely price you get to sit in a sea of umbrellas. I don’t think I can quite understand why I would ever desire to do that.

With a glimmer of hope for the future, there is some backlash from the locals on this renting out of the beachfront by the hotels. From the newspaper, we read that the prices for sitting under an umbrella were recently jacked up from last year’s prices, a good 30 to 50%, and the Italian government was considering passing a law to prevent the hotels from restricting access to the beach. It seems that the beaches are national property and that the hotels have no business rights to setting up beach umbrella wardens. From our train ride out of town, and various rides through town, and the newspaper, we gathered that what we were seeing in Rimini on the beach stretched out as far as the sand existed along the East coast of Italy.

Now we did have a very fine highlight in our stay there, our friend’s had a bit of family there and one of them helped organize some dinners. One of the dinners was at an agritourismo farm and was a dinner served outside under the stars on the farm with fantastic local ingredients. The conversation was good, the pasta was over-the-top good, Strozzapreti (a Strangle-the-Priest pasta), and the weather was magnificent. And for that one evening we had left the beach tourists and whirring kiosks behind, a fine evening it was.

A travel destination halfway between our EasyJet flight to Milan and our group destination of Rimini. It wasn’t the most pleasant of travel days, but not the worst either. Getting to the airport by 7:30 in the morning, after staying up most evenings until at least 2AM, was the most arduous of it all. Oh, and then a train ride that finally landed us in town in the mid-afternoon.

All-in-all, though, Parma is a low-key college town. It has an well-preserved old town center, one main street of cafes and a large central park. Outside of these areas, at least to our eyes, it looked like an industrial town. That impression could possibly come from the sole fact that our hotel was located on the edge of town in the industrial section, um, just past the prostitutes. Hey, it was a decent enough Best Western hotel, but it did come with a smattering of too many mosquitoes in the lobby.

Since we were only there for a late afternoon/ early morning transit stop, we didn’t see much of it, but we did get an enjoyable outdoor cafe-white tablecloth-dinner with overloaded plates of Parma ham and Parmesan cheese and wine (all which originated from this region). The weather was pleasant, but we were beginning to discover that our group of 6 friends was not one for expedient decisions… about anything.

One of our group had just met a guy on the plane flight over, and so three of the group stuck around in the morning to meet him and to get a tour of the town, while the other half of us moved on to the next town.

Palio is on! The town is full of chanting, marching locals.

We took an easy travel day consisting of a flight from Madrid, a train to the bus station and a 3 hour bus ride. All ran smoothly, although we were impatient to get off the bus and stretch our legs by the end of the day.

We were here to see the Palio, a horse race that has been held since the middle ages. Each of horse/riders represent one of the Contradas of the town. There is an elaborate selection process that selects ten out of the seventeen Contradas that will be in the race and then subsequently selects and matches the riders to a horse. The craziness of this race lies in the fact that the horse assigned to the rider is random and the race is ridden bareback over a dirt track in the central piazza. The amusement is the rivalries between the town’s Contradas that involves everyone in town from old to very young.

Our week was spent watching the selection of the horses, the marching through the streets, the banquets and the blessing of the horses, along with watching the flag bearers waving flags, the girls chanting and in general, the mayhem caused by congestion of the tourists and townspeople in the streets.

We considered the trial races of the Palio to be the most amusing to watch. During a trial where the horse and riders are getting used to each other, often one team would far outstrip the pack at a blistering pace to the great glee of that team’s Contrada, while the others teams trotted around the track just getting used to their horse. Then later in the day that winning Contrada would have extra spirit marching through the streets singing and chanting.

The final race on the otherhand was a rather somber affair, where viewers had to get into their positions multiple hours before the race started and then after much slow (very slow) pagentry, the race started and was finished in no time at all. As the losing Contradas left the piazza, some with teenage girls in full tears, only one Contrada was exuberant, the Unicorns. Later that evening, the Unicorn Contrada had a small pile of men marching with their green flags and drums through the streets until 3 or 4 in the morning. Mind you, the rest of the Unicorns were at a makeshift banquet celebrating into the wee hours. We were rooting for the Super Snails, but their victory was not to be.

All was not just the Palio for us, we did find some outstanding Pici pasta, a nice thick hand rolled version from Tuscany. Along with the weather, the food, race watching and general festivities made for an amazingly enjoyable week.

At the end of our week, we misjudged how crowded it would be leaving the day after the races to head on the train to the Pisa airport. As in, there were no crowds at all. It was a warm, calm, quiet morning at the train station, and so we ended up at the Pisa airport a full four hours before our flight. This became an annoying situation. The Pisa airport has no seating in the check-in area, but only provides seats after you check-in, which, of course, is unobtainable for early arrivals because you can’t check-in until 50 minutes before your flight. So, what to do, what to do?!

Hmm, we tried sitting outside, the ground next to the building is sort of an ashtray, so that didn’t work. We tried sitting on one of the stone benches outside that held only 1 1/4 people, so after a few glares at each other, we decided that didn’t work. We considered sitting on the grass, but it the temperature outside was blistering in direct sunlight. So, we ended up standing around for 2 to 2 1/2 hours.

The airport watch hand slowly clocked around and eventually graced us with lunch time, where we crowded up to the counter and ordered up a fine hot pressed panini sandwich and two drinkable espressos… where… in true Italian fashion, we had to eat standing up at a counter. Despite standing up for 3 hours, the joy of getting a damn good sandwich cheered us up, which then helped us stand through another 45 minute long line to get checked-in. Once we actually saw seating, we only had 5 minutes to sit. Overall though, the experience made us extremely pleased to get on that plane and to finally sit down.