The move to Tuscany : Old maps and new pumps

Monday was a fairly uneventful day here as I went into the next valley to aid Brunetta (owner of the pool house) in finishing painting her new loft conversion, returning home in time for lunch and a visit from Dave and Sarah who had popped in with a bag of ripe figs to swap for one of our cabbages.

Tuesday was altogether at the opposite end of the spectrum as I started at the pool house at half six as per usual before heading to Vellano for the morning to do a bit of work with David, mainly in the form of yet more wood staining.

Small grass snake taking a dip.

After lunch back at home, Helen and I spent the afternoon making a start at installing the hydraulic ram pump I'd built down in the river. Helen carried the precious and somewhat fragile pump while I dragged a 30 metre roll of tubing through the woods with me.

Snagged yet again!

Blurry but seemingly happy

Dragonflies!

The river bed is full of fallen trees

Crayfish!!

SUCK!

version 1 too leaky!

So as the photos show, we had some measure of success in laying the so-called drive pipe from the natural pool up river and sucking hard to get the siphon to start getting water to not quite the location we needed it - seems I couldn't measure precisely enough with strides when negotiating a rocky riverbed - but for now at least it was enough to test version one of the pump. I call it version one as it soon became clear that once enough pressure had built up in the orange pressure chamber, leaks were appearing, releasing the required pressure. So that was as far as we were going to get that day, and another shopping trip elsewhere in town would be needed to find some better and high-pressure-type tubing with appropriate adaptors.

Wednesday, feeling a little weary from clambering around in the river the previous day, I opted to try and tick off a job from our ever-growing list by heading into to Pescia to get some car insurance quotes. I first headed to Allianz, where our friends Paul and Kathy had been getting good deals which was also very conveniently located next to two possible high pressure tube outlets... or so I hoped.

After walking out of the insurance office with a quote of over €1300 (€250 more than we paid last year with our current broker), which was apparently a reduced price for having a smart box fitted to the car to monitor driving style, amongst other things! What happened to insurance being a risk business? Must we expect a future of completely automated cars that we still have to pay to insure? Out of principle I wouldn't take one of these boxes anyway - it seems insurance companies like banks these days want their cake and they want to eat it, the inevitable outcome of having shareholders to feed?

[THUMP] (the sound of me jumping down from my soapbox). [Sigh] - the sigh of relief of my wife.

So anyway, the plumbers merchant had no tube to serve my purposes so I went to the irrigation shop where I had initially bought the rest of the components for the pump - yet again it was another lesson in asking for something even if you can't see it. I hadn't seen this type of tube when I bought the valves and other bits and pieces so had left without this bit and instead bought what turned out to be sub-standard bits from Frateschi. Had I just asked in the first place, I would have been furnished with what I left with that day (the correct pieces for the job) and would have saved myself €40.

Next stop was Pescia to the insurance broker named Cattolica, who Paul and Kathy were now insured with and had an even better price from.

After helping an American couple work out how to pay for their parking using a credit card (a new experience for me also), I headed to the Cattolica office, only to find their computer system out of action and be told to return after 5pm in the hope they had it fixed by then.

It seemed I wouldn't be getting a tick on our list after all!

As I was walking back to the car I passed the state archive building in central Pescia and noticed it was open. As with most places here in Italy, they do not have regular hours and opening times change on different days of the week, so spontaneously I decided to poke my head in and ask how we might go about finding some information about our house - mainly, if nothing else, when it was built.

It had been suggested to us that, if we took our purchase contract and paid a paltry fee we might be able to have access to whatever info they had about our property, so I wanted to finally confirm that, and maybe put the wheels in motion rather than just saying 'we should pop in there sometime', as we do almost every time we drive past.

It got the impression that the staff in there have slow days, and before I knew it large maps were being produced for me to look at to identify land parcel numbers, which would then correspond to entries within the old-looking books they had... What I thought would be a two-minute conversation in fact lasted for around two hours as both members of staff went around the place generally making a mess on my behalf. There were maps and books everywhere, and after an hour and a half we had seemingly hit a dead end where we couldn't decipher a handwritten number, combined with the confusion of land parcel numbers changing in the early 1900s when our part of the valley switched from being under the control of Vellano and fell instead under the jurisdiction of Pescia.

Things were approaching lunchtime, and I'm not sure whether it was this or the fact the members of staff had something to do that had them both so animated - either way, things were going at a speed now and I found it hard to keep up! Just as I was about to thank them for trying and walk out leaving them to tidy up before lunch, the lady (whose name I never got to learn) had a eureka moment and found a mention of our house changing hands. This gave us the magic number that we couldn't decipher and meant we could easily go back as far as their records allowed, which was 1825, showing that the house had changed hands, but within the same family, three times over a century or so.

That was then our deadend, I was worn out after two hours of that carry-on and left with a piece of paper scribbled with a few lines of relevant info that should now enable us to head to the state archive office in Lucca to go back even further. A job for another time, and another day, but exciting to have got so far and now know we should easily, in theory at least, be able to get back to the origins of the house.

The rest of the day I spent in the relative coolness of the house (27 degrees) to write up the previous week's blog, as i'm doing right now on the following Wednesday afternoon.

Thursday was another full-on day. I started at the pool house in the early morning before heading up to Vellano for a morning's work with David, coming home for lunch before heading back to the village of Pariana to help Brunetta with yet more painting for the afternoon.

That evening we spent a lovely couple of hours with our guests Katie and Greg, not forgetting Reggie who really quite enjoys a visit to the guest garden despite the presence of guests - in fact it seems to really help the bonding process along. I say 'bonding' in the loosest possible terms, of course, where Reggie is involved although he was readily offering Katie kisses before the night was out and even took a treat, if somewhat reluctantly, from Greg.

The week had somehow disappeared in a blur and after a slow start to the morning on Friday, having slept like the dead, I went to sell some of our excess veg to Amanda, filled the car with fuel and the went again to Catollica for an insurance quote, only to find that on Fridays they close earlier for lunch and I had missed them by 15 minutes!

After lunch I headed into Pescia to do the weekly food shop, as is the norm to allow us a free weekend.

Saturday morning after walking Reggie we headed to Sandrino's for coffee and pastries before deciding that, it being such a lovely morning and it being so nice to be out together on such a glorious day, we should not head straight back home just yet, and that maybe we should take a trip out to try and find some replacement garden furniture for the apartment.

Breakfast!!

While here two weeks ago, Mom and her friend Yvonne had done a great job with some wood glue, a hammer and nails fixing up the current guest patio furniture which, over the winter, had become a little worse for wear. It still looks great but the some of the arms had become detached at various places and if you leant back with any weight you would find the chair arms detaching - not ideal, and while they are suitably fixed for this summer, we thought it would be better to replace the furniture sooner rather than after a disaster later.

As it was, we headed in the direction of Lucca to find the hidden away Carrefour from which David and Sarah had bought their lovely garden furniture. Sadly we found very little left by way of garden furniture, but we left with four outdoor cushions and a new mosquito trap for the bedroom. Having satisfied our desire to see a bit of the outside world, we headed home for lunch.

After lunch we took the new and improved ram pump version two back to the river to see if the new pressure chamber would hold out.

The pool of crayfish.

Drive pipe.

Ram pump version 2.

It did!! And after half an hour of priming the pump it started clanking away automatically! I was so amazed by this thing I had put together actually doing what I had seen these pumps doing on the internet I didn't care at that point whether water was coming out the pipe further up hill. In fact it wasn't, but that did nothing to dampen my feeling of accomplishment. I left the pump running for a couple of hours to give it time to fill the 80-90 metres of delivery pipe in the hope that then we might see water arriving out of the tube 14-15 metres or so higher.

After that small success, and with Mara and Franco due for dinner, I decided to have a go at making one of the blinds I had been pondering over for the pergola to block the blinding sunshine that we now get of an evening in the hope that it would make it bearable to eat outside that evening.

With the help of Helen we managed to erect the first of three blinds in less than an hour and we tidied up before heading indoors to start cooking.

Helen cooked a lovely meal for us all using one of our somewhat demanding curry kits from the ever reliable Spicery, introducing yet another style of curry to our intrepid culinary explorers.

The pudding we tried was not from our kit but from a cookbook Helen bought some weeks back and although the taste was lovely and in keeping with the Indian food we served, it look terrible. Had the caramel not stuck into the pan, remaining there when the flan was turned out, it would have passed as a reasonable dessert. Thankfully it seems even Franco can be polite about food and nothing but complimentary noises of 'mmmmm' were heard around the table.

Blind number 1, version 1.

Pudding disaster!

Sunday started with a walk up the terraces with Reggie from where you can now clearly see the state of the dying silver fir tree in front of the house, I see a new drama in the near future involving this tree, but that will be for another blog post in the winter.

Spot the dying tree.

Sunday was hot and humid. With heavy, overcast skies (but not a drop of rain), the heat felt intense and oppressive and while I retreated to the bedroom for a couple of hours of catch-up sleep, Helen busied herself cooking up some of our glut of courgettes to put in the freezer.

By the middle of the afternoon, it was so hot and muggy that we decided Reggie needed his cool coat on, so we wet it as required and put it on him. He immediately went into a sulk and went off to his bedroom to prove it.

I HATE MY COAT!

...and now i'm going to sulk

...and sulk some more!

While Reggie sulked, we sifted through the piles of leaflets and information on the area we have accumulated in the apartment and filed it all into a nicely organised document box file. Thrilling, I know, but it's a job we've been meaning to do for a long time and we did have a glass of wine while doing it, which made the process almost enjoyable.

Information overload.

After that small achievement we gave in to Reggie's sulking and took his coat off him, which saw him immediately spring back to life. It seems as if he sees the coat as more of a punishment than a cooling aid!