Right on our doorstep

Much of today has been fairly unremarkable. I got up at 7am (too tired to get up with the alarm at 6.30am, thanks to another night's sleep being disturbed by feeling excessively hot), fed the cats, then went for my usual morning's outdoor workout. When I got in from my workout, Stuart was already up and checking his emails. After a shower and breakfast, I headed for the office, while Stuart - who seemed tired already (not a good start to the day) - headed outside for some strimming.

The morning passed with nothing much more exciting than a telephone call from Vodafone. I answered it, but failed spectacularly to communicate with the person on the other end, and had to rush outside to bring Stuart in from his olive tier to take the call. Turns out that our Vodafone contract (starting with our 10-day free trial) will begin on 11th July - until that point we are still 'with' Telecom Italia (who have cut us off for non-payment of bills we haven't received). Fortunately, we are still able to take incoming calls.

After strimming until there was no more cord left in the strimmer, Stuart went down to the apartment to start making some room for the sofa bed to be delivered tomorrow, and to attempt to fit a new lock to the door (which should hopefully mean that one is able to access the apartment without having to virtually kick the doors in each time).

At lunchtime, I was pleasantly surprised to find such a lovely day outside - it's often hard to tell from within the confines of the dark office just what sort of day it is outside: whether it's cloudy and windy, or sunny and baking hot, it's anybody's guess unless you actually venture out the front door! We ate lunch on the patio as usual, in the warm sunshine. We were both a little subdued - Stuart because he was feeling so tired and wiped out, and me because, unbeknownst to Stuart (until he eventually spotted the plasters), I had just accidentally rammed an exceedingly sharp knife into my hand, which had cut pretty deep and was feeling pretty darned painful. I didn't dare mention it to Stuart as I knew he was already not in the best of moods, and just hoped things would sort themselves out without my thumb actually dropping off. (Thankfully, after about an hour of throbbing, the pain eased off and it all seemed much less dramatic.)

After lunch, we both headed for the office. Despite the fact that Stuart was feeling particularly tired today, he refused point blank to take it easy and sit and relax for the afternoon, so instead opted to work on our website (with his headphones on).

My own work was very pleasantly interrupted by a phone call from Allison - it's always lovely to hear from Allison and to pass the time of day with her, and my spirits feel lifted for having had a good old natter. We could easily while away the entire afternoon on the phone, but sadly work gets in the way!

After the call, I headed back to my work for another hour or so, before deciding that enough was enough and my week of work was DONE.

I announced to Stuart that I was clocking off, and between us we decided that what we should do was to go and visit Pietrabuona. This was partly because Pietrabuona is our closest village, yet it's one of the dieci castelli we haven't visited since we arrived here, but also because I was curious to go somewhere where we would have a view back towards our house to be able to see exactly how much progress we had made on clearing our terraces. I was hoping that we would be pleasantly surprised!

As we left the house, I took a picture of our terraces - with my hedge trimming efforts of last night, combined with Stuart's efforts with the strimmer this morning, the terraces behind the house are looking pretty neat:

Really starting to feel quite pleased with our efforts!

We also have a very neatly strimmed section of land on the hairpin bend in the road, thanks to some guys (paid by the council??) who came by a few days ago strimming all of the roadside verges. This really odd sized/shaped parcel of land on the hairpin bend belongs to us, although what on earth we could do with it is anyone's guess. Maybe offer it as a site for campers to pitch a tent?!

The trees are ours too, although strimming man didn't stretch to pruning the trees. 

Anyway, we headed down the road to Pietrabuona, parked up at the bottom of the village and started walking upwards. The cobbled path into Pietrabuona is possibly the steepest we have ever come across in all of our experiences with Italian hilltop towns. It took quite some effort to slog our way to the top, but it was well worth it once we got there.

We'd visited Pietrabuona last year when we came looking at properties, but we had quite forgotten how beautiful it was:

Pietrabuona appears to be one of the few (the only??) of the dieci castelli still to have surviving remains of a castle.

When we rounded the side of the hill that faces our house and looked out, we were stunned to see views of our house that REALLY showed how much work we'd achieved on the terraces - not only on the lower ones that have been strimmed to within an inch of their lives, but also the upper ones that so far have only been roughly trimmed and still await their buzz cuts. It gave us an enormous sense of satisfaction to see that our hard work was so very visible from afar!

Our house, and the cleared terraces behind it, are on the RH side, roughly halfway down the photo.

Our house & terraces visible on the RH side. 

Close up showing our house (hiding behind oak trees, white garden umbrella just visible to the right of it) and all the cleared terraces behind it!

We really enjoyed walking around Pietrabuona, and decided it was far more picturesque and interesting that we'd remembered it from our previous visit last year - which made us feel even happier about living so close to this pretty little village.

Once we'd got back to the bottom, we walked along the road a couple of hundred yards to the bar we'd had a coffee in yesterday (opposite Frateschi's builders yard) and sat with a beer and a packet of crisps enjoying taking in the view, watching the goings on (lots of people pulling up in the builder's yard either to meet people, or to pick some materials up, or just to pop into the bar for a quick drink), and supporting our local establishment.

After finishing our drinks, we made a quick stop at Amanda's alimentari for some more bottled water and a quick catch up. She was friendly as ever, so I hope we will frequent her shop as often as we can. It's clearly a little dearer than shopping at the supermarket, but for the odd thing or two it's well worth popping in for a friendly chat with someone who knows both Italian and English and who can hopefully help teach us a little of the language each time we visit!!

We eventually headed home to enjoy the last half hour or so of sunshine on our patio. The wonderful thing about it being Friday is that we don't feel the pressure to rush indoors sooner than we would ideally like in order to get dinner on, the blog written and so on - we know that we can afford to have a small lie-in tomorrow, so there is less of a mad panic to make sure we are in bed before the witching hour!

Tomorrow, we should be taking delivery of a sofa bed for the apartment in the morning, and in the evening, the plan is to head up to Goraiolo, the village above Vellano, for this evening of African music (bongos night). Watch this space!!