Apologies to Rupert

Bill and Suzy's Excellent Adventures goes all Wall Street Journal on you!  A single weekend edition (because news likes to take the weekend off, too) just like Rupert's Excellent Adventures (soon to be prison blog?).  Hope you enjoy the new format.  We have updated our pencil sketched photos in favor of real pixels, too!

And now to the news . . .

A Three Hour Tour

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from this tropic port
Aboard this tiny ship.

Faith Rewarded

I am a Red Sox fan. In 2004, after 89 years of World Series futility, the Sawx made an improbable comeback from a three game deficit in the American League Championship Series to beat their archnemesis Yankees and advance to the World Series, sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals for the title. A few weeks later a documentary was released (a copy of which sits in my house in Washington, DC) chronicling their magical season. The documentary was titled "Faith Rewarded," a reference to the faith of Red Sox Nation, which carried them through eight decades of penantless seasons. I liked the title.

Yesterday we experienced our own version of Faith Rewarded.

When In Sardinia Do as the Sardines Do

One of the appeals of coming to Sardinia for us was the opportunity to experience and understand its strangeness, its uniqueness. Like Sicily, Sardinia, at least from afar, seems a place of mystery, a land flying the Italian flag but more than Italian while not quite Italian. A little off center, wild, rough, exotic.

Round Two Let's Get Ready to Rumble

Three and a half months ago, we finished up our idyllic Italy trip of a lifetime. Five weeks of exploration, discovery, and fun, an itinerary that took us from north central Trentino to the wine region of Friuli, to Carnevale in Venice and along the coastline of Le Marche. Along the way we made time to visit our friend Rita in l'Aquila, stay at our villa in Umbria and catch up with old friends there. Oh, yes. We also bought ourselves a Mercedes in Stuttgart.

Vai Gators!

Bill and Suzy's Excellent Adventures is intended to chronicle, well, our excellent adventures. Wherever they take place.  But since its inception, we have pretty much restricted ourselves to writing about our adventures in the place we love the most, the place we feel is our second home -- Italy.  It's not that we don't travel to other places and it's not as though we don't have excellent adventures in those locales.  It's just that the Italian experience is the one that so animates us, that so excites us that we feel a need to bang words into a keyboard so we can share those experiences with you.  The "Italian" experiences are the ones we feel are worth posting and (hopefully) worth reading.  So it was just a little bit strange when earlier this year, we wrote to you of our excellent adventures in Germany on the way to Italy. Wilhelm and Zuzanna's ausgezeichnete Abenteuer.

Fiola!

If you want to be a writer, don't have a day job! It's been two and a half weeks since we returned from our five week Italian odyssey and despite truly best intentions of posting some follow up stories and photos, writing about our Iron Chef tour of the Eastern seabord and musing about the difference between life in Italy and America, my keyboard has been silent. Life has a way of intruding.

But I would be absolutely remiss if I didn't at least post the briefest tease and an ode to what I am absolutely confident will become one of Washington's hottest restaurants - Fiola di Fabio Trabocchi.