Summer and friends arriving together.

Spring has been the most unsettled in terms of weather that we've had since being here, often with rain and strong winds. It hasn't been cold though, and it's saved us thousands of litres of water in the vegetable garden - but despite all that we were excited to look at the weather forecast recently and see that there was sunshine expected for at least the next 10 days, and temperatures of 30 degrees and more. It couldn't have come at a better time as our good friends Paul and Marie were coming over for their first visit outside of the Christmas period.

Their flight wasn't due into Pisa until around 22:30 Saturday night, so we spent the day preparing for them, cleaning the apartment, cutting the lawn, laying the last of the OSB on the office floor so that we could put the remaining junk back into the house and getting some essentials from Pescia (which, of course, included half a dozen bottles of Prosecco) and finally making sure Reggie had a walk.

We headed off to Pisa as the light was fading and were afforded a beautiful sunset from the Autostrada for our efforts, arriving at the airport just as the flight was due to land in the dark. We realised that this was the first time we'd been at the airport in the dark, which gave it an odd feel - we kind of felt like we were on holiday. All it takes is the simplest change here for that to happen: going somewhere in the dark, driving along a road we've not been down before, or friends taking us to a restaurant we've never tried (but the latter is for next week's blog).

We went into the arrivals hall only to find that the flight was late, by some 45 minutes, oh well, noting else to do but... drink a glass of wine.

The next morning after a very late night of catching up (3:30am) was a slow start for all, but Helen and I got up and took Reggie out for a quick walk while Paul and Marie took the first morning of their holiday at a slower pace.

Since we'd all missed breakfast, we opted for an early lunch under the shade of the newly finished pergola in the now 30 degree heat while we made some plans for the coming days. Since Paul and Marie have been here twice already, there are certain things they've already seen and others they'd definitely like to do, but overall, the theme of the week was to relax and have as many BBQs as we could fit in.

On the agenda for the first afternoon of their holiday was a trip to Montecatini Alto, somewhere Paul and Marie had not yet seen. A bit of a tourist trap but for obvious reasons (it's pretty), Montecatini Alto is the old part of what is now the sprawling town below. The old village sits high up on a hill a safe distance away from the hotels and noise of the town below, and can be reached by a very old funicular if you park down below - which is good fun to do, but as the day was wearing on already we parked up outside the old town and had a wander in to the main piazza which is lined with restaurants.

After buying a bottle of Limoncello and a set of little polka dotted coffee cups, we dragged the holiday makers into the currently quiet piazza for a spritz. By the time we left the bar, the square was slowly filling as lunch was well and truly over and the tourists were back out, soaking up the sun and sights.

Spritz o'clock!

After a slow amble around the quieter back streets we headed back to the car and home to enjoy a slow evening on the patio with a dinner comprising cured meats, cheeses and salad made of quinoa and our own courgette and beetroots.

An altogether more relaxed evening.

After an early night and a good night's sleep I was up and out in the woods with Reggie by 8am - early, although not by Helen's standards, which afforded Reggie and me a nice cool shady walk this morning and meant we were home, dog walk done, before mid-morning coffee for which I joined Paul and Marie in their garden downstairs - slowly we were all moving our seats to avoid the glare of the advancing sunshine which was already hot!

After coffee, Paul, Marie and I decided to head off to buy a new BBQ - we need to replace the one we bought last year for guests as it had not stood up well either to the little use it had or to the Tuscan extremes of weather, and so now was the moment to head out shopping.

We popped into Nerone in the village for a coffee first off, where Paul soon picked up an OBI brochure someone had left in there and before the milk had been frothed for our cappuccino we had found the BBQ section and a nice solid concrete type one with chimney... THAT was what we needed to permanently replace the old one downstairs.

We arrived at OBI to find the solid types of BBQ outside and soon found the one we wanted - but we soon realised it was not going into the car: firstly, it wasn't clear it was in kit form, but more importantly it was a whopping 350kg!

So it was back into store for another metal affair and we were soon wheeling the display model to the tills - a result as we wouldn't even need to build the thing, it was ready to go!

New BBQ...

...or so we thought, too big for the boot!

 After going back into OBI to buy a screwdriver in order to dismantle the legs of the BBQ to get it into the car, we were heading home for lunch.

It wasn't long before Paul was earning his keep and before lunch he was helping me fix a second layer of olive netting onto the pergola roof to block out another degree or two of sun.

So..what did you do on holiday?

With the roof upgraded we sat outside for a lazy lunch now with it being much more cooler under the pergola and decided we would attempt to fulfil one of Marie's life ambitions of having butterflies land on her head, by visiting the butterfly gardens at Collodi.

By this time, Helen was able to join the rest of us, so all four of us hopped in the car for the short drive to Collodi and the gardens of Villa Garzoni, where we wandered around the gardens after having ticked off Marie's butterfly wishes.

Not quite butterflies on her head, but Marie said this would do.

After a quick refreshment break, we made a dash to the supermarket for some holiday-style shopping, by which I mean grabbing everything that looked nice rather than working to anything resembling a sensible list. We then headed home to christen our new BBQ with the first barbeque of the week.

Number 1 of the week.

Next morning, while Helen worked at her desk, Reggie and I were back in the woods for a walk before the holiday makers arose before heading home to get ready for our day of sightseeing.

I smell something!

But before the sightseeing we were planning to head to Toti, one of our favourite restaurants, for lunch en-route. Since we had an hour or two to kill in the sunshine in order to allow the worker indoors toiling away at her computer to finish what she was working on, I roped Paul into unpackaging the solar panel so that we could temporarily fix it to the shed roof. Next, I got him to help move the inherited 3,000 litre water tank (empty of course) further up the terraces: after our history with water outages here we have been planning to put the water tank way up the hill behind the house, run the mains directly into it and then back down the hill to the house, which should mean our pressure stays constant and any outages (all of one which have lasted for less than 24 hours) will go unnoticed as we will have a 3000 litre reserve. So with calculations done and a GPS in hand to measure the altitude, we set to heaving the bulky tank up the hill, terrace by terrace, eventually hitting the last clear terrace. Sadly, the GPS only read 15 metres above the house - to get the 3 bars of pressure we currently have, we needed to be 30 metres above the house. It was clear this wasn't going to happen overnight and wanting to avoid the expense of buying and running a pump, we're faced with a lot more terrace clearing this autumn or at the very least a chat with the plumber when he returns to connect the solar panel as to what he thinks about micro-bore piping to increase the pressure.

By the time we'd done that, it was time to clean up before heading out for lunch and we arrived to an ever popular restaurant for a worker's lunch in the coolness of the old wine cellar.

When the boss arrived I asked for something gluten free for Marie, which immediately sent him dashing off to make a coffee. Weird, I thought! Maybe my Italian isn't improving after all.

I watched him flit around from table to table and chat with the cook, who then thankfully came over to talk to us, taking us through the entire menu explaining what was safe and what was not, and explaining that they had gluten-free pasta! Marie was a very happy girl and promptly ordered pasta with Ragu for first course, we had a great lunch, pasta followed by meat and side dishes, wine and coffee for the princely sum of €10 per head.

Before leaving we bumped into Dave who had brought his two nephews out for lunch, we said a quick hello, met the boys and arranged for them to come and see us in the week for a play on our tractor and went to pay. The boss got us into a chat about Brexit - not the first Italian to engage us in conversation on the topic and I'm sure certainly not the last, it seems they are very curious as to what's going to happen next and what our feelings are on the matter.

Next stop was another unticked destination: Bagni di Lucca, and the nearby Ponte di Maddalena or Devil's bridge.

We drove north up the Garfagana valley, eventually arriving at the majestic bridge where we parked up for the obligatory walk to the top to enjoy the breeze coming down the valley and the views of course.

Next stop Bagni di Lucca!

We parked up near the middle of town in the punishing heat and took a small walk around the town, first along the river behind it and then back down the main street.

On the main street, we chanced upon a ferramenta (hardware shop) just opening after lunch. Now, after not being able to re-hang our fly screen over the door at the house this year (due to Reggie charging in and out through it and tearing it to bits), we have been stumped as to how to remedy the problem and recently Helen suggested the type of curtain that has tails of beads or the like - anything to try and stop the flies coming in of a morning was worth a try.

Shortly after lunch on our way to the bridge we'd passed a house that has a 'fun' curtain of this type on its door, which the girls in the car both seemed to love and said (half jokingly) that if we found a hardware store in the town we'd try and find one... and find one we did!

After putting the curtain into the back of the car we headed for a bar in the middle of town for some shade and refreshment before deciding that we'd done quite enough sightseeing for one day in this heat and headed home for more of the required relaxation. Yes, it was going to be another BBQ - turns out Paul and Marie are no stranger to a BBQ, and while Helen and Marie were prepping the food in the kitchen and Paul was lighting the BBQ, I hung the new fly screen over the door.

We had an exceptional BBQ meal yet again, ending in banana cooked with raisins, honey and our homemade chestnut rum, genius!

After dinner we got the telescope out as Jupiter is still visible at night at the moment as is Mars, a golden chance to see two planets at once, only to find we could see Saturn as well! Seeing the rings of which never fails to disappoint or, for me, get boring.

It might be nearly midnight but we have a
table top fire pit and a light in the pergola now!

After a busy day in Bagni di Lucca we decided to chill out on Wednesday - we had invited the Phillips family for dinner this evening to return the favour paid to us the last two Christmasses when Paul and Marie have been here, so after our Italian lesson with Johnny we had some lunch (a very lazy and relaxed affair indeed) after which Helen and Marie prepared the mountain of food we had planned for the evening. While they did so, Paul and I had a couple more chilled Peroni and talked about life and the universe being far less productive than the wives were indoors (but in our defence, there is room for only two in our kitchen and those places had been taken).

The Phillips's arrived around 7pm and we sat down to catch up, managing to somehow squeeze 8 of us around the table under the pergola (made possible by leaving the buffet indoors) and we all enjoyed dinner and being amongst friends as the sun set on another sunny day in the Tuscan Apennines, a good evening of catching up and conversation and a small bit of our debt repaid.

Tired dog at the end of another late night.

We had planned nothing more for the rest of the week, wanting to leave some flexibility and there's also something about filling each day with an activity that makes it seem like the holiday ahead is shorter and ending sooner than without a blank unplanned bit somewhere in there.

We agreed that Thursday would be a lazy day, after her morning's work, Helen had her lesson in the afternoon with Samantha, I took Reggie for his morning walk after getting up, and Paul and Marie relaxed, Marie finally getting some time to read a book.

After lunch the other Smiths took a siesta (for purely cultural reasons you understand) and I went to tinker with a few things while waiting for Samantha to arrive to check my homework, yet again we were drawn into a conversation about Brexit in Italian which delayed the homework checking for almost an hour so when I finally emerged to leave Helen and Samantha to it it was about half four, Paul and Marie were up and about and Paul was itching to do something so we both ventured into the veg garden to do the obligatory weekly weed for a couple of hours, harvesting some more beetroot, more courgette, and some yellow french beans along the way until we finally got called back to the house dripping in sweat sometime around half six.

This evening we had booked a table at our friends Michelle and Mimmo's restaurant up in Macchino and so at half seven, with us all looking clean and tidy, we headed off up into the mountains for dinner on their little outdoor terrace.

We started with a Prosecco, of course, and then proceeded to share anitpasti for two between us, which we barely finished and feeling quite full already had pasta dishes, again Marie got gluten free pasta, followed by main courses of either wild boar stew or peppered steak in red wine with copious side orders. We were STUFFED by the time we rolled out of there and couldn't find it in us to share even one pudding between us, we needed to head home and loosen of the waistbands before something gave way!

On Friday morning, our lovely Italian friend Mara arrived just after 9am to help with the next stage of the 'bee plan': getting the bees out of her temporary hive and into our new hive. This has proved far from simple so far, as seems to be the way for everything here, and rather than just simply being able to place her frames from her hive directly into ours, we are now left with the seemingly only option of taking the frames out one by one, shaking the bees off then taking a saw to the frames to cut the bottoms couple of inches of frame and wax off! This sounded less than appealing to me and we were only more worried when Mara said we wouldn't need to bring a frame at a time to a safe distance we would just do it right there by the hive. If you read our blog post on the first inspection we did, in which we only tried to find the queen by simply looking at one frame at a time before replacing them and still came out of the exchange with over 40 stings between us, you might understand why we were not looking forward to doing major structural remodelling of their home like this in such close proximity - but Mara seemed unphased, so off we went.

It was a nervy and therefore very sweaty hour that followed, slowly looking for the queen on each frame before then sawing through the frame before transferring it to our hive, Helen was sting free, I only got a couple (only because I knelt on one) but poor Mara in her thin rubber gloves took the brunt with more than her fair share on her hands, but she worked through it like a pro, me applying smoke to her hands as often as I could while holding the frames as she sawed, leaving Helen to hold the next frame and looking for the all important queen.

We couldn't quite believe we'd done it, and certainly couldn't wait to get the two pairs of trousers off and the heavy jacket and gloves. Our trousers were soaked through with sweat from a combination of the sun and fear! We didn't manage to find the queen, but Mara was pretty sure she was in there somewhere because all of the bees seemed keen to go inside the hive.

As Mara left the hive was virtually encased in bees on the outside, we had hope now that they slowly got used to their new home and went indoors to continue their good work and repair any damaged we'd done in the move.

Marie, who had originally planned to take Helen's place, decided it unwise to risk it, not having the right clothing with her, so instead opted to watch us from a terrace or two above with a spare beekeepers hat on and managed to photograph the whole saga while being dive-bombed. She had clearly earned a ride on the tractor, and so while Helen sat down to her desk for some office work, Marie and I went and found Paul, who had sensibly been hiding indoors while the bees were being disturbed. We soon got Marie going on the tractor for a drive up and down the driveway while Paul alongside her was being attacked by one or two angry stray bees looking for something to sting!

The full farm experience is not complete with a tractor ride!

 After a very happy Marie parked the tractor we escaped to the safety of the patio just far enough away from the few stray bees still patrolling the car park and had some lunch in the midday sun soaking up the view.

After lunch we decided to take a tour of the valley as so far we have only shown the Smiths Vellano at Christmas time, and there is so much more to see! So, dragging Helen away from the office, we hopped in the car and made a tour of the lower half of the valley, first having a stroll around beautiful little Aramo, driving up and past San Quirico, turning down past Castelvecchio, then to Sorana and finally up to Vellano, from every point of this little valley of ours you are afforded a wonderful view, a pastime that will never get tiring.

In fact, we'd had so much fun sightseeing that we missed the window of opportunity for our planned visit to Montecarlo for aperitivi and instead went straight home for a last evening BBQ, this time with huge lumps of steak, the bones of which Reggie enjoyed (so much so, I think he'd have torn off our hands had we tried to take it back off him, such was the snarling we each got as we passed anywhere even vaguely him - which made things a little tricky as he'd decided to sit down and gnaw on his bone right next to the table!).

We had sensibly imposed a midnight curfew for the last evening of the week, as our guests' flight back to England the next morning was early and we needed to leave just after 7am so we bade our good nights and all retired to bed after a fun filled week.