Anybody Miss Me?

Ginestra

So I've been here... and "Here" is Ginestra degli Shiavoni in the beautiful Italian mountains.   And I can honestly say with hand on slowed-down-heart that it is probably the most beautiful place I've ever been to, seen or even wanted to go to.  It's beauty cannot be described, and I'm generally quite handy with a description or two - but this was breathtaking.  And I thought Dorset was pretty amazing - ha! Just goes to show how untravelled I am!

You HAVE to click to embiggen that picture because it REALLY is that gorgeous.  And yet the only visitors it gets are the children/grandchildren of the folk who live there.  Population 300, btw.  300!  I know!  This is one seriously chilled out place.
And it's not just the scenery that's beautiful.  The people who live there have to be the nicest, kindest, friendliest people I've ever met.  Old guys will sit and play cards with the kids and teenagers actively seek out the 80 year olds and buy them a drink at the (non alcoholic) street bar halfway down the main road.

I even met people there I want to know for the rest of my life - and yet I don't speak the language. Yet.  I'm working on that part.

Us

So, the place is gorgeous, the people are special - and what can I tell you about the food...? O.M.G... the food.  My taste buds lost their virginity on the first forkful the very first day we stepped into Mama's kitchen.  Homemade spinach and ricotta ravioli and meatballs with bread picked up fresh that morning from the bakery down the road. Huge beef tomatoes picked from the garden and Rum Ba-Ba's from the Patisserie that I shall be salivating after until our return.

How's this for an itinerary:
Get up (slowly)
Fruit and fresh croissant for breakfast
Maybe go for a walk, visit relatives, friends, have a laugh
Lunch
Sleep
Get up (slowly)
Go out, meet friends, family, have even bigger laughs
Repeat

It  feels like I've been away for a month because of the 2 sleeps per day.
And I  feel like a new woman ( just hope The Hubs doesn't).

I could go on and on about this place, it's just incredible. If you want to be chilled, spoilt, return to good old fashioned values and have your faith in human nature restored, then you have to visit Ginestra.  It's off the map; a different world.

This Year's Holiday

This is where we  holidayed last year.
Il Borro in the beautiful Tuscan countryside.  And it was pure five star plus luxury, right from the majestic villa (entrance top pic) to the fabulous family wedding we were a part of.
And although regulars will know of my 'realistic' outlook on most things, I actually had allowed myself a certain frisson of excitement leading up to this escape.
Which rhymes with 'mistake'.
In fact, when I twisted off a top of one of the bottles of body lotion I brought back as a 'souvenir' the other day, immediately images of  car hire hell, tiny mirror-less bedrooms, flooded toilets, unhealthy amounts of time in gyms, waterless taps, £30 bottles of wine and very shouty voices filled my whole being.  I don't know why I've kept them.  They're a nightmare in a bottle, is what they are.  And the sense of smell is so evocative, isn't it?

But  this year nothing like that is going to happen**.
And that's not because I've turned all optimistic overnight - oh no - have you SEEN how much personality transplants cost these days?! It's purely because this year we are spending our time with my husband's parents.  The Italian In-laws.  In a little place they like to call Ginestra degli schiavoni in the heart of the Italian countryside (there on the right ), 2.8 hours away from Naples airport and miles away from beaches, tourists, bars, restaurants, night life and... well... all major forms of holiday entertainment. Oh, and there's no access to any kind of internet communication, as far as I'm aware.

But that's precisely how I want it.

I'm EXPECTING the loos not to flush - hell, we might even be offloading our excess into holes in the floor for all I know - and wiping our arses on yesterday's tabloids.  Of course there WON'T be electricity -  that's why there's NO internet access.
And when our hire car runs out of petrol, we'll just have to use the friendly neighbourhood donkey (time-shared) to get to the local village bakery.
There'll be trees.  There'll be a bed to sleep in.  There'll be my incredibly lovely mama-in-law who cooks amazing food, and there'll be my gorgeous husband who is SO excited about showing me where he spent his formative years, and I'll be meeting the extended Riccio family; there's the 'Festa' which is being held for the week that we're there and I am taking no less than FIVE books with me.  That might just be the only English language available to me.  Apart from the Hubs, of course.

**we're hoping that the only Bad Thing to happen this year has already happened.  When we were looking through our travel documents the other day we noticed we'd booked our car into the mid-term park at Luton Airport.

We fly from Stansted.**

How to prepare for the Annual Holidays

The Old Days

1. Make up enough sandwiches (ham/tomato, cheese/tomato) to feed a small continent.
2. Fill at least three thermos flasks with ready-made up coffee (so that in 4 hours it will taste of nothing but warm plasticky-metal), tea and very weak cheap squash of indeterminate flavour.
3. Strap Gerbils (in their cages I mean) to table leg in caravan to ensure stability – also empty their water bottles, remember how they didn’t enjoy last year’s 6 hour shower up the A303?
4. Leave notes on every available surface for grandparent who only has to water plants by all accounts. Maybe they’re in code to make her trips more interesting?
5. Turn off the water.
6. Turn off the electric.
7. Close all curtain half-mast to confuse potential burglars into spending so long outside rubbing their chins thinking ‘are they/aren’t they’? that they get so irritated they hand themselves in before committing anything more serious than peeing in the privet due to protracted wonderings.
8. Notify the local constabulary that they’ll need to walk more slowly past No.4 for the next fortnight during their rounds. Yeah, right.
9. Strip the beds.
10. Why?
11. Defrost the fridge.
12. Again…why?
13. Alert every neighbour to be extra vigilant; thereby ensuring that any hardened criminal worth his/her salt knows precisely where Mrs Cooper stores her valuables (does a fox-fur shrug count?)
14. Leave more notes
15. Pull up ten square kitchen carpet tiles where the fridge defrosted and hang them on the washing line.
16. Leave a note for the milkman. In an empty bottle on the doorstep. Thereby announcing yet again that the property is vacant.
17. Fill at least five boxes with variety packs of cereals, dried milk, Sunny D (dried orange juice) baked beans, plum tomatoes, dried rice, vinegar, salt and enough muesli to coat a stretch of the A34 in the event of a sudden snowstorm.
18. Take Sea Legs
19. Pack blankets, sleeping bags and pillows ‘just in case’ (see No.17?) even though we’re staying with Grandma and she has beds and cupboards full of food.
20. Make a note to buy yoghurts closer to destination - just in case. Yoghurts probably haven’t made it to the corner shop in Dorset yet – they ARE a new-fangled food, after all.
21. Much like sprouts at Christmas, prepare everything 2 days beforehand and go to bed 12 hours earlier. After all, it will take over 6 hours, maybe 7 if the wheel comes off the caravan again after dad drives over one of those invisible roundabouts like he did last year and we had to stop, unhitch, drive to the nearest garage and then wait for a part to come in from Devizes to Middle Wallop.
22. An hour into the journey, remember you forgot to bring the dog, which is still tethered to it’s outside kennel looking slightly bewildered. Return, Repeat.

Year, after year, after year……until you’re old enough to realise this was some kind of sick joke on behalf of the Seventies!

Where do I begin?

I’ve decided that it’s not healthy to focus on the bad things. In truth I’m always saying that and it lasts maybe five minutes – I see a flower and marvel, my heart swells at birdsong, tears well with happiness at children’s laughter – then one of those birds empties its cute little bowels all over my freshly ironed clean white top and I’m back in the land of doom again. That’s my Yin/Yang I guess and I’m going to have to deal with it. Live with it and accept that there’s no Great Being to blame because that’s the way life Just Is.
So instead of focussing on all the negative stuff that happened in the past 7 days, I’m going to focus on all the positive stuff that’s come out of it. Here goes. *clears throat*.

1. God invented credit cards for a reason. And that reason was not to have us eyebrow-high in debt surrounded by paraphernalia we MUST HAVE right now instead of saving up for it and appreciating it more when we can finally afford it, but to be able to rent a hire car when we go on our annual holiday. And having this credit card would have saved us days of anxiety, stress, cancellation fees and hours on the phone to both hire company and banks trying to organise alternatives before realising that nobody actually gives a sh*t, they just want our money.
2. Deep breath.
3. Tears are there for a healthy release of pent up emotions. As Kleenex is there for the aftermath. As Merlot is there to assist. And when your husband calls you from the bank during the Credit Card fiasco and asks you to take the pieces of debit card you’ve recently watched him slice up with the kitchen scissors and you see your own name appear out of the reassembled pieces and realise that this was the only card you had to both your names to take on holiday, you are thankful for the tears and the tissues and the bottle of red. And yay! – isn’t it grand that we’re away on holiday in the morning… well, isn’t it?
4. Deep breath.
5. Tuscany is beautiful. Driving 2 hours from the airport to the villa, not so much. But everything else is beautiful. Breathtaking in fact. And who really needs a mirror in the room anyway? And we could always ask for toilet paper – there’s a reason we haven’t got any, isn’t there? Always a reason.
6. And lo! that reason floods unending from the toilet, under the bathroom door the following morning. Down the hallway and into our bedroom. Unending. Of course we wanted to see the luxury indoor swimming pool and gym – we just didn’t realise we’d be spending so much time there quite so soon and almost moving in there to use the shower/toilet facilities. Hey, it’s only a short walk down two flights for a pee at night – what the heck, the exercise is bound to do something for my back, right?
7. Who needs conditioner in dry, oppressive heat anyway? And tears are not a good idea on the morning of the wedding. Two bottles of shampoo does not one conditioner make no matter how many times you shut your eyes in disbelief and try to believe it could be so.
8. The Early Donna Summer look is bound to come back into fashion soon.
9. Deep breath.
10. Tuscany is beautiful.
11. Getting married in Tuscany is beautiful. The first thing on the bride’s mind is not going to be “have aunty and uncle got full use of their bathroom facilities?”
12. Deep breath. And behold the toilet is repaired. Which we have no need of until later, but still, it’ll great to be able to shower and pee in relative comfort. We are thrilled. And we all know what happens when I’m thrilled, don’t we?
13. Who needs cold water in blistering temperatures anyway?.
14. Cisterns are no longer a mystery to me. Now I know exactly how many (thankfully not made of raffia or cane or something then we’d really have been in the …) metal binfulls of hot water from the bidet it takes to fill one up before you can safely flush a toilet. Of course it doesn’t help with showering.
15. Deep breath.
16. I knew there was a reason I never joined a gym in my life. And that was because one day I’d get to live in one. Well, three days to be more precise.
17. Deep breath.
18. The villa we transfer to on the 4th day is stunning. The scenery is amazing. We have our own pool, the toilets flush and the shower, although temperamental, at least has a cool setting.
19. Aaaaaaaahhhh…..
20. Deep sigh.
21. No need for emboldening.
22. More a need for essentials. For the only sustenance we find in the entire villa is a bottle of water in the fridge and ice cubes in the freezer.
23. So even more of a need for a car because of the sheer remoteness of this villa.
24. Deep breath.
25. The main villa staff are lovely. They send over a few essentials (like food) to see us through until a hire car can be found. We appreciate this. What we don’t appreciate so much is the white panic we feel later when we are in the Tuscan equivalent of Sainsbury’s and see that the wine we agreed they could add to our bill is retailing at 30Euros a bottle and we have just opened the third.
26. Deep breath. Deeper sigh. Deep, deep deepness.
27. Tuscan Plumbers are so laid back. They don’t worry that there’s six of us who are half an hour away from needing to be somewhere for the evening and the water has decided to stop running. That’s toilets, showers, everything. So laid back. Such a lovely quality to have.
28. Those conveyor belts you put your hold luggage on are really quite fast. Especially when you’ve rested your handbag on one that’s stationary in order to have a little rest in the hope that your back will stop thumping with pain and then find yourself being chuntered away on one that just suddenly starts running away with both handbag, followed by an ungainly clamouring you.
29. Laugh? Of course they did.
30. And for my next trick…?
31. Oh, who needed those two books wot I wrote and kept on that memory stick that’s now not functioning– and that third one I’d nearly finished? No one liked it anyway – not anyone who worked in the publishing world anyway, and heck, I’m sure I can remember the general gist of them all… it’s only a matter of bashing out another three hundred thousand words or so and there’s still four weeks of the holidays left, isn’t there…? I’ve got to find something to fill the long, empty hours of non-work somehow – and these things always happen for a reason, don’t they?
32. Don’t they?
33. Anyone?
34. Beuller?
35. Jeez, I need a holiday…

Are you sitting comfortably?!

For the past month or so I’ve had a little gadget on the desktop which tells me the temperature in jolly ol’ Bedford UK and compares this with the scorching temperatures in dazzling, sun-soaked Tuscany. Invariably the temperatures have been laughably dissimilar and side-splittingly poignant because for those past few weeks I’ve been sneering and scoffing at the diametrically opposed degrees and quite simply dizzy with the excitement of leaving one for the other.
Oh, more fool she who gets dizzy and scoffs and sneers and who clearly cannot wait for the holiday in a five star luxury resort that she’s been planning and saving up for and spending money on for the past 12 months... more the fool….and more to come…let me just put the fourth wash on of the day and regroup a little more and then make sure you’re sitting well and truly comfortable for a story you’ll understandably imagine I’ve just made up. For fun. For the helluvit. (Cue ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ tune – remember that?) You won’t believe it. Seriously.

HERTZ HIRE-CAR HOLIDAY HELL

All I can say is: READ THE SMALL PRINT - before you click on ‘I agree’ when you’re booking your holiday hire car on-line in preparation for your holiday. It will be the best thing you ever did.
Believe me.
We booked our car way back in March and got a great deal - £128 for the 6 days we’re in Italy. We paid the only way we ever pay for anything – using our DEBIT CARD. We are those in the minority who don’t have a credit card to our name because we were stupid with them in the past, got burnt, got better, and wised up.
If the debit card we used to pay for this car hadn’t expired and we'd gotten a new one with a new number, then there’s no way I’d have “just had a quick check” to make sure there was no small print about having to use the same card with the same number... and that was when it hit us.
When we pick up the car at the airport, it says, they WILL NOT ACCEPT DEBIT CARDS as guarantee. Only credit. Oh, and not only that – you have to make sure you have enough credit available on your card to cover however much they deem necessary for insurance against your writing their car off or something.
All in the small print of course. Very small and way down on the confirmation thingy.
Oh… seven shades of sh*t.
And not only that, the other family we’re going with also only have debit card. So TWO kinds of seven shades….
So for the past few days we’ve tried everything from applying for a credit card (out of time to get one in under 3 days) to working out what other means of transport we can feasibly get at such short notice.
Of course we believed Hertz could help us out. Having been good customers and paid promptly, but no. Their only suggestion was that we cancel our booking. I fear our next telephone bill. I know every minuet Mozart every composed off by heart and backwards and very probably everyone's name who works on the Hertz (loosely termed) Help Desk - oh, and they will take £25.00 from us as cancellation fee.
Easy money for them.
We found out that to get a taxi to our destination from the airport will cost 800Euros (yep, that’s… oh, about £800!) or there’s a train we could catch then change somewhere else and then get a coach to somewhere else, followed by a final taxi. So with the flight we’d be travelling for about 24 hours, give or take a delay.
To Italy.
Finall, thankfully, after sweating blood and tears, other members of the Wedding party (yes, this is the family wedding we’re talking about and one of our stranded party is a BRIDESMAID no less) have said that they will drive the two hours back to the airport from the venue to pick us up.
BUT… we’re also staying on after the wedding at the place (which looks five star perfect it has to be said) but it’s remote.
Ergo: no way of getting to a shop, say, to pick up essentials like… say… food for the rest of our stay.
So as we are packing our holiday suitcases with long life milk, packets of biscuits, crisps, chocolate bars and orange juice, let’s hope to hell we still have room for… oh I don’t know… clothes and suncream etc hmm?
Did I say I was looking forward to this break?
Did I?
I think I did.
But just think, it will make great material for the next book.
It will make great material for the next book.
It will make..... (repeat to fade until I start believing this)

Ooohhhh can't wait!

This is where we'll be in four weeks' time...
And the WHOLE family is going because it's a family wedding. The Bride and Groom have booked the entire place out for everyone for three nights (wedding on the Sat) and six of us have decided to stay on a further three nights to turn it into our annual holiday. It's going to be fabulous there's going to be hundreds of us* and we are all so excited!
It's even going to have a touch of 'Mama Mia' about it because the ceremony is taking place in a church on the hill in the grounds so we're walking up to it like they did in the film - aw, so gorgeous (must take box of plasters for blisters - or maybe go barefoot?!)
And not only will the village of Il Borro (that's in Tuscany don't ya know!) be overtaken by 'the family' but so will the flight over and there'll be a particularly interesting convoy from the airport to the villa what with all the drivers insisting they know the right route to take. After all, they're Italian, so they're bound to know ALL the short cuts in Italy, right?

* tiny exaggeration

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