In Italy di nuova

This picture is the departure lounge at London Gatwick airport. We arrived there at about 4:30 pm local time after transferring by bus from London Heathrow where our flight from Seattle landed about 2:20 pm. From Gatwick we took a flight direct to Pisa, picked up our rental car and made it to the house by 11 pm. All in all, our entire trip from Seattle to Partigliano was as easy as any twenty-two hour journey can be. Both our flights took off on time and arrived early. I even managed to sleep for four to five hours on the SEA-LHR flight thanks to a departure time of 9:25 pm and an anti-anxiety pill (which work better for me than sleeping tablets when I fly). That is the most sleep I've ever managed on a flight and it resulted in me being pretty chipper the rest of the journey. The downside was still being wide awake at 1 am local time (4 pm in Seattle) but another dose of pharmaceuticals (a real sleeping tablet) and I got a fairly decent seven hours sleep.

This morning we woke up and turned on the heat as it was quite cold inside. We huddled in bed until the chill was off the bathroom. It was 10 am before we left the house but that is often par for the course when we are here. We went off to Diecimo for coffee and pastry at Bar Bini, stopped to see our friend Anna at the ferramenta (hardware store), and then headed off to supermercato Esselunga for groceries. We ran into some neighbors there and chatted with them. It is amazing how quickly the Italian returns once we are back here.

At home I put away the groceries before we tromped through the fields to survey the grapes and vines. Here is another photo taken from our patio that shows how overgrown everything is. The yellow flowers behind Dom would be over my head if I stood among them and many of the weeds are waist high. If it was not for the paths the cinghiali (wild boar) have tromped across the terraces it would be difficult to get around out there. We discovered that what few grapes are left on the vines are pretty well gone. I took a small bunch inside for lunch. In the grocery store we learned that the cinghiali ate most of the grapes this year but it really did not look like there ever were very many. It seems providential that we decided not to make wine. In contrast, the olives look great. There is very little sign of olive fly and hopefully that will remain the case. The trees are heavy with the tiny green fruit which need to plump up and start turning dark purple in the next month or so. If all goes well we should harvest as much or more than our largest crop two years ago.

The rest of the day has been taken up with lunch, making flaxseed muffins for breakfasts and cleaning the house. It is amazing how cobweb laden the house gets after it is closed up for the summer. Now the worst of the cobwebs and the dead spiders and flies are gone and I can take my time doing further detail cleaning.

Since I am dozing off as I write this it seems a good time to give in to jet lag and go take a nap. Tonight we will go out for a real Italian pizza and I want to be awake enough to savor every bite.