Sardinia Retrospective

It's been a little over a week since we arrived in Italy.  We haven't yet hit double digit weight gain, but we're working on it.

Seinfeld in Italy

"You gotta love a country where you can spend the whole day shopping for groceries and count it as a good day."  So remarked Collin, one of our guests at the villa this week as we tucked into dinner outside by the pool sometime around 10:00 at night.  As I looked around the table at our group of 13, each chatting and laughing as if they were old friends, united in throwing back a glass of Montefalco Rosso and devouring a plate of prosciutto that had been roasted in the outdoor oven and finished off in the outdoor barbeque, I had to agree.  Some might find our itinerary for the day - a drive to Norcia to buy pork for dinner - minor and trifling.  Here in Italy, though, it can seem important and fulfilling.  Because it is.

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.