Italy to France

April 4th. Leaving Orvieto...

Heading to France and our first real campground experience. Found a campground near Antibes. Surprised by all the permanent camper people with their garden ornaments and gadgets. Visited Antibes and Nice. Had a lovely time.

Miles with his new Barbapapa stuff.

Sparkle Wine Makers

Gabri met this hilarious Sicilian at the party. He’s in the army and is based in Trentino, way in the north. Funny thing is, everywhere he goes he buys wine before it goes through its second fermentation, bottles it himself, and therefore makes sparkling wine. He’s made sparkling Pino Grigio, sparkling Merlot, sparkling Chardonnay, etc. It’s really funny. We’ve never seen anyone do this. Riccardo’s dad does this too. He drives all the way up to Friuli, buys Tokai and Merlot and Refosco and makes them all fizzy. Hilarious. We were drinking it at the party. These are all serious salt of the earth people who’ve invented this funny way of bottling and drinking wine. Maybe they’re on to something?

First stop - Orvieto

Spent two great days with Amy and Riccardo. They had a party on saturday at their new house. They just bought it. Awesome location. Will take a year or so to restore. Sarah, her mom and girls were visiting too. We all went to the BEACH on sunday. The weather was gorgeous!

Day 1 Camper!!

Feeling pretty uptight and tense. The guy who rented us the camper, Paolo, was driving me crazy. After all of his hand signal lessons and persnickety instruction, he had the gall to tell Gabri that I didn’t drive well during the test because I didn’t stop at the stops. Ma vafanculo! I have a good hand signal for him! I think he thinks he’s really German. He even told us to keep an eye on Miles so he doesn’t draw all over the camper. I’ve never seen an Italian like him!

Gabri’s mom was about to push me over the edge too. She’s been following me around for two days now making sure that I’ve packed everything, that I know how to cook what Miles likes and where we’re at with the laundry cycle. Interjecting all the time too with comments about how undomfortable the camper will be. I should have told her that we could have stayed with them for 2 ½ months instead. That would have stopped her dead in her tracks.

Anyway, I need to chill out and be super happy because we’re off with the camper!! Yahoo! I LOVE it! Miles loves it too. It’s so well organized. I’m totally geeking out on all the compartments and gadgets. We bought 10 liters of Puglia’s finest rose’, Rosato, 5 liters of olive oil, cacciocavallo, friselle, puccette, mozzarella, oregano, fresh orecchiete and finoccio – all special local products. Ooh, and last night at dinner we lucked out and got to buy a bottle of homemade bay leaf liquor!!! Another super special local treat. Yum, yum and yum.

And we have loads of freedom!

Been driving 2 hours. Just passed Bari, still in Puglia. I love this landscape. Big craggy olive trees, red earth, white stones and bright blue sky. It’s so beautiful. This is my favorite landscape. The sea here is so beautiful too. It’s really clean and crystal clear. The ground under the olive trees is covered in bright yellow flowers and poppies. Every now and then you see big clumps of fichi d’india cactus plants and vineyards that stretch as far as you can see. Mmm… Getting hungry… and thirsty,,, can the camper drive itself? It almost seems so.

Marios

This is Marios, AKA Mario or Miles. Not sure why italians have a problem pronouncing Miles but Marios, which is not even a name in Italian, seems perfectly normal to them. A lot of people call him Mario too, which makes much more sense. In fact, Miles has started introducing himself as Mario. We take him to the main square here, Piazza del Campo, almost every day so that he can see other kids and play with his ball. He introduces himself to everyone and also asks EVERYONE their name, "Ciao! Come ti chiami? Mi chiamo Mario!" He's learned just what to do and say so that he gets total adoration from everyone, and cookies or chocolate if he's lucky. He is so popular that pretty soon there may be a poster of him in the Piazza.

Mario is doing really well with his Italian. He has totally honed his whine and cheekiness so that within seconds he usually gets what he wants. Yikes. Gonna have to totally re-educate him. He knows all the variations of dolci here and seems very sophisticated in his desert ordering skills. Besides total re-education, he's gonna go into some serious sugar withdrawl too. I've been slow to come around to all the italians slipping him some sugar treat when I'm not looking. This is the italian phenomenon of the "merenda" or snack. Loaded with refined sugar and chocolate they are marketed as FULL of vitamins and MILK. Everywhere you turn here you see ads of good parents giving their children healthy merenda snacks. Even Gabri's mom gave me the evil eye when I asked her to stop giving Miles kinder sorpresa (a chocolate egg with a surprise inside) after every meal. The message here in Italy is that you are either a complete failure as a parent, or a total foreign freak if you do not give your child a steady supply of packaged treats during the day.

Carnevale!!

Sunday we went to Colle val D'Elsa for a carnevale festival for kids... heavy metal band in the main square with everyone standing around not sure what to do, and 4 sad little "floats" that looked more like diaramas that were perched on the back of Piaggio Apes (see pic).

Francesca bought Miles a Barbapapa "Barbaforte" costume. Everyone could recognize it because it's a well known and long running cartoon here. Miles is so desperate for kids that every time he sees someone shorter than 4 feet he yells "kids!" and runs dead at them. Anyway, he's good at making friends.

Tuesday was the real carnival and we went to the Piazza del Campo in Siena. Loads of fun. Confetti everywhere, kids everywhere, good (and appropriate) band music, games, puppet shows, horse races (see pics and watch video.) Miles was in his element.

Day 5, ZooSafari

ZooSafari, huh, not even sure what to say. The main part of the park is a zoo, sort of like a normal zoo but without cages, that you drive through. It was an interesting cultural experience for all of us, Gabri included. Predators like lions and tigers are seperated off into their own areas by high fences but the main part is a giant field of old olive trees where elephants, ostriches, giraffes, horses, donkeys, zebras, etc. all roam around together. You drive through the "safari" with your windows rolled down and if you're Italian you will most likely feed them cookies or rice cakes. Or at least that's what I witnessed. It was pretty sureal for me to see carloads of gawking people feed giraffes through their windows. The lion and tiger domains were pretty impressive because they had loads of animals, at least 15 each. Anyway, at the end we sort of sped through so that we could leave that weird world behind, and enter another one.
The monkey camp. We were shoved inside of a little cage with wheels that had 3 rows of benches where 9 or 10 people were crammed together. Our cage was then locked from the outside and driven at break-neck speed through a monkey camp. Hundreds of monkeys ran around the cages screaming and shoving their little hands though tiny holes where some people were giddyingly giving them cookies and potato chips. Gabri and I were terrified (check out that look in GAbri's eyes) but Miles seemed to think it was fun.

After we were freed from our cage we took the MetroSafari which is a little Jetsons like looking train that is perched precariously above the monkey camp and other parts of the zoo and zooms and wobbles around.

We decided after that that we'd better leave the zoo. Besides after all that action we were HUNGRY and very, very thirsty. Down to the coast again for some more fish and rosato. We recovered quite nicely.