Friends, physical work and feasting

Saturday: Good to be Home!

It was with a huge sigh of relief that I landed in Florence last Saturday after my week away at the VB conference in Prague. The week was busy and tiring, and although it was good to catch up with my old colleagues and friends from the world of computer security, I spend much of it yearning for my Italian life - the scenery, the fresh air and of course Stuart and our furry friends. Having not seen the outside world or breathed any fresh air between arriving at the hotel on Monday evening and leaving it on Saturday morning, I couldn't wait to get back to Tuscany. The two-leg trip, in which I flew from Prague to Vienna and then Vienna on to Florence, was mercifully less stressful than my outbound journey, although the size of the planes seemed to keep decreasing, with the final leg in a propeller plane. The weather gods clearly pitied me for having spent a whole week inside a dingy hotel and welcomed me home with clear skies and bright sunshine. On stepping out of the plane, it struck me that, yes, Italy was definitely the warmest of the three countries I'd been in that morning!

By the time Stuart had driven me back to the airport and I'd got home, said hello to Reggie and the cats, and I'd inspected all the work he'd done while I was away last week, time was ticking on and I was feeling increasingly weary. We therefore spent the rest of the afternoon and evening sitting on our patio, taking in our beautiful view and catching up with each other's stories from the week just past.

It's SO good to be home!

Sunday: The arrival of a guest

Sunday morning started bright and early as we had a guest to prepare for and collect. After an hour or so spent cleaning the bathroom and kitchen and a final hoovering of the living room, we set off for Pisa airport. Once at the airport, we barely had time for a quick cappuccino and pastry each as breakfast before the flight from Bristol was announced as having arrived, and soon our good friend Louise came smiling through the doors towards us.

We drove straight back to the house, where Reggie gave Louise his customary barky welcome. She had been well briefed though, and sat quietly at the table avoiding eye contact with him and he soon changed his tune, coming over to sniff her, and then testing the water with a hasty lick of her hand. Once the dust had settled, we decided it was time to take Reggie for a walk - which seems to be one of the best ways for him to get used to new people and relax in their company. We drove up to the cava track, and on arrival found another car parked up at the start of the track - a very familiar car. Our enthusiasm at realising Donatella was also out walking at the cava was quickly tempered with concern about how we would be able to manage another encounter between Ray and Reggie - Reggie not having ingratiated himself with Ray the last time they met. Stuart quickly called Donatella's mobile and ascertained that she and Ray were on their way back down the track, so we agreed to keep Reggie on the leash until we'd met and passed them.

Sure enough, we soon came across them, and Ray gave Reggie a good snarl and growling at, while Reggie completely ignored his "keep away from me" messages! We walked together with Donatella and Ray for a while before they turned back and we carried on, finally able to set Reggie free to run around off leash. We had a good walk with him, before heading back to the car and back home for a spot of lunch - bought on the way back from the airport from Amanda's.

The afternoon saw the thrills of a trip to Esselunga followed by a couple of drinks at Bar Pulter and some relaxing on our patio - and for dinner we cooked up a delicious roasted pumpkin and gorgonzola risotto.

Monday: Permissions and wood splitting

Monday started with a multi-purpose trip into Pescia: we had an appointment to see Andrea at 10.30, we needed to walk Reggie and we decided that a coffee at Francos would be a good way to start the day. We parked up in the square and headed first for coffee at Francos, after which we drove over to Andrea's office, leaving Louise and Reggie looking after each other in the car. Andrea needed us to sign some paperwork and chat about various things, but the main thing to come from the meeting was that he told us we could now start work on all the projects for which we've been waiting for permission for so many months! This means it can now be full steam ahead on building the new shed, erecting the solar panels (on the shed), erecting a polytunnel and building a pergola! (Not all at the same time, of course!) We've been waiting so long for the permissions and jumped through so many hoops, that finally finding out we had permission to go ahead actually seemed like a bit of an anticlimax - I think it just took a little while to sink in.

After our meeting with Andrea we rescued Reggie and Louise from the car and had a nice walk along the river. Today, for the first time, Reggie very tentatively put one paw on the scary footbridge that he's always refused to cross (or else had to be carried over), and then another one, before dashing across it as quickly as he could - it seems he has conquered his fear of the iron grill footbridge! That enabled us to walk on a little way further than usual, giving us a nice change of scenery.

By the time we'd finished our walk and headed back up the hill it was lunchtime, so we sat down to tomato bruschetta in the sunshine on the patio.

After lunch it was time to roll up our sleeves. Louise may have come out to visit us for a holiday, but she was game for putting in a bit (make that a lot) of work. The one thing she'd told friends and family she thought she'd be doing this week was chopping wood, and we couldn't let her go home without having done any, so Monday afternoon was dedicated to wood chopping and splitting.

Stuart took his chainsaw up to the end of the drive where logs were still piled up from the trees that fell across the gate in the big storm we had back in March. While Stuart sawed the logs into smaller, splittable pieces, Louise and I barrowed them back down the drive to the wood storage area where we set up a chopping block and began splitting and stacking them. After a while it was clear that with only one splitting axe, one of us would always be slightly redundant, so to maximise our efficiency Stuart headed off to Frateschi's to buy a second splitting axe, and Louise and I spent the rest of the afternoon splitting logs in tandem. I have to take my hat off to Louise: not only did she pick up the wood splitting technique within minutes (it took me at least two separate occasions to get a feel for it), but for her first experience she had a large pile of some very hard, very dry acacia logs to tackle - while wood splitting can be one of the most satisfying jobs I've yet to do, splitting hard, dry wood is definitely not the easiest or the most enjoyable!

After a couple of hours of splitting wood, we'd increased the wood pile by a decent amount and felt we'd earned a drink on the patio and truly earned our dinner!

Tuesday: Mists and a foggy head 

Tuesday started with another Reggie walk - this time, we headed to Sorana. There had been some wet and thundery weather overnight and as we made our way along the valley we were treated to some stunning views as the mist hung eerily in the valley, picking out each individual ridge and making it look like an elaborate stage set. I'd quite forgotten just how beautiful and magical our valley can look at this time of year when we get autumnal weather.

Magical mists.

We were heading for the woods just beyond the village, and once we were parked up Louise gamely held Reggie on the leash for the short section of the walk along the road - I think she felt that it was more like Reggie was taking her for a walk rather than vice versa, such is the strength with which he pulls (all 27kg of him) when he wants to get somewhere or go and sniff at something! He had a good run around off the leash once we got into the woods though, allowing us to walk at a little more relaxed pace, although all three of us had to keep jumping to the side of the track to avoid being splattered in mud as 27kg of dog came thundering through the muddy puddles.

Is Louise taking Reggie for a walk or is Reggie taking Louise for a walk?

After our walk, we drove to Nerone's cafe in Pietrabuona for a quick cappuccino each, before heading back to the house to start on work for the day. On getting back to the house, Louise turned her hand to making a delicious spiced roasted pumpkin and tomato soup (using the rest of the pumpkin that we'd roasted on Monday as well as tomatoes from the garden) while Stuart and I made a start on cleaning the apartment as we had guests due to arrive the next day.

The soup was delicious - definitely one we will be repeating, especially as we have plenty of home grown pumpkins and tomatoes to use up! After lunch it was a quick clear up before Samantha arrived after finishing her shift at Amanda's for my weekly Italian lesson. Stuart and Louise headed down to the apartment to finish the cleaning process, leaving me to struggle through four different Italian tenses with the ever patient Samantha. I don't think that a week away in Prague being surrounded by English speakers did anything for my Italian language skills and I felt as if I spent the ninety-minute lesson desperately trying to get my brain to play catchup!

By the time I'd reached the end of the mentally exhausting lesson, Stuart and Louise were just finishing up in the apartment. There wasn't enough time to get stuck into anything much more, so Louise and I busied ourselves clearing out the drainage channels in the drive and barrowing the rest of the cut wood from the gate down the drive to the wood pile, ready for splitting.

We had another enjoyable evening relaxing with a glass of wine and food and good company.

Wednesday: Wood chopping and feasting

For Wednesday's dog walk, we decided to try and find a spot a little further along the river. The riverside walk becomes more attractive the further out of town you head, and we wanted to try and find if we could get onto the river bank a little further along it. We found a spot near to the da Vita agraria and climbed down onto the river bank. We had a very enjoyable walk, with Reggie bounding up and down the banks. The walk was enjoyable, the scenery interesting, but were soon all melting - initially it had seemed like a cooler morning, so we'd all dressed in long trousers and sturdy shoes, but as the sun broke through we roasted in our weather-inappropriate attire and fantasised of pairs of shorts and sandals while enviously watching Reggie run in and out of the babbling river.

Kiwi vines.

A field of kiwis!

After our walk, we decided we'd earned a coffee, so headed into Pescia and parked up next to Bar Pulter. We were going to leave Reggie in the car with the windows open (it was in a shady spot), but much to our amazement, he climbed happily out of the boot despite the square being busy with cars! We didn't want to push our luck though, so headed straight to a table outside Bar Pulter, where Reggie happily sat and waited while we drank our much needed coffees! He wasn't quite so happy when we walked a few doors up to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread though, reverting to his usual panic on seeing pedestrians on the pavement - he is definitely still not a town/city dog, so we won't be making a habit of taking him into the square.

On getting home, we put the finishing touches to the apartment (adding the welcome pack and doing a final once-over of the floors) before sitting down to a lunch of leftover soup and cheese. Louise and I decided over lunch that we would spend the rest of the afternoon completing the wood splitting task - we had barrowed four barrow loads of logs down the drive which were now waiting to be split, so we went to change into our work clothes and pick up our axes.

While Louise and I struggled through yet more hard, dry acacia, our language getting progressively less ladylike (actually that was probably just me, I shouldn't tar Louise with the same brush!), Stuart made a start on blocking up the old doorway that used to lead from the kitchen through to the old mancave. Now that we have all of our permissions through, we are free to go ahead and permanently block up this doorway - which is also the first job that needs doing before we can make a start on building the woodshed.

After a hard afternoon's work, Louise and I had finished the pile of logs (with the exception of a few particularly knotty pieces which will take someone with more strength and expertise - or else a chainsaw - to get through), reckoning that over the two days of chopping we'd probably increased our winter wood pile by maybe 20%. We were just starting to pack away when our apartment guests arrived, so Stuart and I welcomed them, before heading indoors to shower and change - this time into nice clothes (for Stuart and I, 'nice' means not work clothes, not dog-walking clothes, and not clothes that are covered in doggie slobber - it's an increasingly rare occurrence for us to be wearing nice clothes...). Louise was treating us to dinner!

We headed out to Sorana, trying our luck at Da Sandrinos (not having booked a table). Luckily they had room for us and we enjoyed a wonderful feast of a meal: Tuscan antipasti to share for starters, then a delicious steak with mushrooms for me, pork escalope in lemon sauce for Louise and Tuscan sausages for Stuart. We even pushed the boat out with pudding, all three of us being tempted into the delicious ricotta and pear torta. We virtually rolled out of the door and headed home to bed feeling thoroughly fed and satisfied.

Thursday: Cheesecake!

Thursday was another industrious day but in a different way: I needed to turn my attentions to my office work for a few hours, while Stuart headed off to Sorana with David to do some gardening work for the morning. While we were busy with our respective jobs, Louise turned her hand to creating a chestnut cheesecake - using a recipe from the Esselunga magazine. More on that later.

By the time I'd finished my office work, Louise had finished her cheesecake, so the two of us headed to the vegetable terraces to do a little weeding. It was while weeding that I unexpectedly came across some fully grown, fully ripe aubergines that had been completely hidden from view beneath a forest of tomato plants - what a find!

We hadn't been weeding long when Stuart and David returned from their morning's work, so we all sat and had a chat before David headed home and we turned our attention to lunch: egg mayo sandwiches (on the patio, of course).

After lunch, Louise and I changed into work clothes and this time headed up the terraces above the house. The plan was to start doing some more clearing but in fact we ended up doing a different type of clearing that desperately needed doing: our enthusiastic attempts at clearing the upper terraces last winter and spring has left piles and piles of twigs, branches and small trees lying around that need disposing of. Frustratingly, these quickly get covered in undergrowth, which makes it impossible to cut through and difficult to extract. Louise and I therefore spent the afternoon pulling branches and trunks from the undergrowth and cutting/snapping them into easily burnable pieces which we then stacked ready to burn.

Stuart, meanwhile, did more work on blocking up the doorway - this time making it thoroughly draft-proof.

We all downed tools at 5pm and headed for showers and 'nice' clothes again - at 6pm we were being collected by David and Sarah, who drove us into Pescia for a trip to our friendly local enoteca (wine bar). We were soon joined by Donatella as well, and the six of us had a great time drinking delicious wine (the enoteca serves really decent wines for just €5 per glass - way more expensive than we would usually pay, but the free buffet adds value and the wines are really a step above what we have become accustomed to drinking). We were thrown out of the enoteca at 8pm - not for our rowdy behaviour, I hasten to add, but because the table had been reserved by someone else and they needed it back at 8pm, so we headed to Franco's and enjoyed another bottle of wine there before leaving when we noticed we were the only ones in there and the poor proprietor looked like she wanted to lock up and go home. We said goodbye to Donatella in the square where she'd parked her car before being driven home by David & Sarah - we'd all had a really wonderful evening, full of fun and laughter, and I think Louise enjoyed herself as much as the rest of us did, a true sign of a really good and welcoming friendship group.

It was a little after 9pm when we got back to the house - we hadn't had a 'proper' dinner, but we'd all munched our way through the various buffet offerings at the enoteca and free nibbles at Francos, so we topped ourselves up with some cheese and chutney followed by... the tasting of the cheesecake.

Louise's culinary skills are way beyond those of mine and Stuart's (in fact she excels at all things creative, she's one talented lady), and through a combination of translating a recipe from the Esselunga magazine and using her own knowledge, expertise and culinary flair, she had created a delicious chestnut cheesecake, incorporating the chestnuts Stuart and I had picked last autumn and soaked in brandy/rum (we'd made chestnut liqueur, which over the course of the year we had finished, leaving us with a jar full of alcohol-soaked chestnuts). The cheesecake was a triumph and utterly delicious. (In fact, I thought it was better than the very delicious pudding we'd eaten in the restaurant the night before.) For the details of how she made it, please do check out her blog.

Chestnut cheesecake...

... delicious.

Friday: Burn, baby burn (pyromania)

Friday seemed to have come round quickly. I had more work to do in the morning, but we were able to head out mid-morning for our daily (this week at least) coffee fix at Nerone's in the village before heading further down the road to walk Reggie at San Lorenzo.

Lunch on Friday was a home made leek and potato soup from the freezer, after which it was all hands to the deck for an afternoon of pyromania.

All three of us headed up the terraces to the piles of wood Louise and I had made yesterday. Louise and I had requested that Stuart come and supervise the bonfire process as we were both relative novices. We were pretty glad we'd asked him to come when the fire eventually took just as a large gust of wind blew through, sending the flames licking up the sides of the bank and setting fire to everything in their path. For a few surreal moments, Stuart ran around with the pitch fork trying to hit the fire out while Louise and I pointed out new firey routes up the banks - Louise stood at the ready with a canister of water while I grabbed the rake and tried to use it to stamp out some of the escaping fire before eventually it all calmed down and we got things under control. It really made it crystal clear why burning in the summer time is such a bad idea (and illegal here) - even after a considerable amount of rain, the grass on the banks of the terrace caught in an instant and spread like, well, like wildfire. Thankfully the wind calmed down after that, and we spent the rest of the afternoon with Louise feeding the hungry fire while Stuart and I cut down more acacias and brambles and created even more piles of vegetation that need burning.

Louise keeps the fire under control.

Cutting yet more dratted acacia.

After the excitement and drama of the afternoon, not to mention the intense heat of the fire, we all felt drained and felt ready to call time on the afternoon's work as early as 4.30pm. Nevertheless, we'd burned through a good pile of vegetation and cleared another good section of terrace - good progress overall!

We collapsed at the table on the patio for a soft drink, before opening the wine. Not long afterwards, we were joined by our apartment guests, Denise and Kathy. We'd invited them up for a drink and spent an enjoyable hour or so chatting with them and getting to know a little more about their 30-day trip around Europe.

By the time Denise and Kathy left to go and get their dinner ready, the temperature had dropped, so we all headed indoors and cooked our own dinner. This evening's dinner was another triumph: roasted tomato and mozzarella risotto with home grown cima di rapa. Cima di rapa are turnip leaves - a member of the brassica family, the leaves have a lovely iron-rich taste and made a delicious addition to the risotto recipe. Of course, we followed the risotto with another helping each of Louise's chestnut cheesecake.

Once again we headed for bed feeling as if we'd really earned a good night's sleep!

Saturday already?

Saturday started with a dog walk - with the obligatory stop at Nerone's for a cappuccino beforehand. Today, we decided we'd try the Pescia to Collodi walk again and had a lovely quiet walk from one town to the other, showing Louise the spectacle that is the ostrich at Collodi, and meeting the donkeys up close (for Reggie the donkeys were up a little too close and personal, and we had to drag him away before he tried to bite one on the nose). The weather today was a bit iffy, with showers forecast throughout the day, but we managed to stay relatively dry, with just the odd drop or two but not enough to warrant reaching for the waterproofs.

Reggie wasn't quite sure what to make of the donkey.

We came home from our walk via Amanda's once again, to stock up for lunch. Today we had meatballs in a lemon sauce, polenta gnocchi in a cheese sauce, stuffed tomatoes and roast potatoes. She makes such good food!

Louise is due to return to Bristol tomorrow - she will probably be relieved to get home for a rest and will I'm sure enjoy the peace and quiet and cleanliness of a dog-free zone. It has been lovely having her here this week, we've really enjoyed getting stuck into things with her at our side and really have appreciated her help - not to mention her cooking!

Home alone...not counting anything with more than two legs.

This week was the week Helen was leaving me for the Gothic sights of Prague, or more accurately the inside of the Clarion Congress Hotel for the annual Virus Bulletin conference, her 15th!

Helen's flight on Monday wasn't until lunchtime so that meant it wasn't an unsociable hour when the alarm went off and after breakfast we were Florence bound.

We arrived a little ahead of time, something like 2 hours 20 minutes before the flight time which meant Helen could check straight in at the bag drop without queuing, it didn't take long to realise there was something of a problem as they tagged her bag but gave it back to her and requested she returned in two hours time as there were strong winds and the captain was having to do some form of weight & fuel calculations before any more bags or people were loaded, to work out how many more passengers and bags he wanted to take with him to Munich (turns out you can't fly directly from Tuscany to Prague). A lucky few had already checked in for the flight as usual, but from Helen onwards, it was a case of having to wait and see. For those he decided he couldn't take on the flight, there would be a coach transfer to Bologna for another flight to Munich - a potential nightmare!

Now, while Florence airport has been modernised and expanded over the last few years there is precious little seating and only one café land-side which made for a painfully dull two-hour wait. All the time the number of passengers to Munich were increasing and with their numbers so was the confusion and subsequent tension in the airport.

I don't know why, but one of the universal rules of life is that ALL airports are totally inept when a problem arises: they fail to communicate properly with passengers and fail to manage the situation at all well, and so the tensions and confusion escalated until eventually a hassled young Italian in a high-vis jacket turned up to start calling out names and handing out boarding passes to the chosen few who had been deemed suitable to fly to Munich, each of whom promptly ran off to get through security for a flight that had been scheduled to depart 15 minutes earlier and which, according to the information board was already boarding.

After emptying his hand of boarding passes he called all the remaining passengers to another area away from the check-in desks - it seemed like the writing was on the wall and Helen and the others had been bumped onto the coach and my mind turned to driving her to Bologna myself. That was until the young guy went to the counter and took a handful more boarding passes - Helen's was amongst them and after quickly dumping her bag onto the belt for loading we dashed to security and made a hasty goodbye.

I've since learned there has been a cyclone out in the Mediterranean somewhere causing trouble, which must have been the cause of the problems - that and the fact that the flight was operated not by Luthansa (through which she'd booked the flight) but by Air Dolomiti, nope, I've never heard of them either.

It was mid-afternoon before I got home, stopping to grab something to eat on the way back and as poor Reggie had been house bound for hours I loaded him straight into the car to head back into Pescia for a walk along the river.

Shortly after arriving home Stefano - the guy from the tractor/dumper shop - arrived. Stefano had called me while I was at the airport to ask if we could meet to talk about the mini-dumper we were on the cusp of buying from him (my latest round of questions about the machine had caused some confusion so he wanted to talk it through face to face), I'd asked if he would come to the house to see the terrain for himself and he had agreed.

As we approached the bottom of the mule track that we plan to use to access the woods for wood cutting, Stefano was already shaking his head Not only did he think the distance to and from the house was too far to go with the dumper (it being so slow), he also thought the track was too uneven as it was would mean not much wood could be loaded into the bucket before making it top heavy and liable to tip. Having got so close to buying a dumper from him this felt like a close call, but I had been starting to have my own doubts, hence the delaying of making a deposit payment.

Stefano took out his mobile phone to call a friend who lives in Sorana to ask him to come and have a look some time to see what he thought was best and whether even a small tractor would be suitable. As it happened, his friend, Romeo, was down in the valley near one of the paper mills so Stefano headed straight off to collect him and was back at the house in no time for the three of us to repeat the walk to the mule track. Romeo was very complimentary about how much clearing we have done on the terraces - he told me that he has noticed its progression since we moved in as he drives past regularly.

Romeo immediately agreed that a mini-dumper was not a good idea for our terrain. I asked what he thought about a small tractor - which he said would be perfect! Stefano said he would be too scared to drive a small tractor up the mule track - which caused Romeo to burst into laughter, telling me again that a small tractor would be perfect so long as the tracks were cleared a little first, and even offering to bring up a mini-digger to clear it for us (for a fee, I'm sure). He was a really nice guy and I warmed to him immediately and even managed a couple of jokes with him before he left. Stefano told me he would email a price and photo of the only suitable tractor he had which had the all important 'good brakes', although he said it was nowhere near our price range (which I already knew from my first visit to him months back), so it seems like we're back to square one for now and destined to be collecting wood the hard way again this winter.

With the day rapidly vanishing I re-connected the irrigation system after fixing a small leak before heading down to pick some tomatoes that were lurking amongst the plants. I emerged an hour later with a crate full: 12kgs!!

It was now time to call it a day so I sat down to do some research on our water harvesting system including various types of 'first flush' mechanisms to keep the tanks clean. This kept me busy until well into the evening, leaving just dinner and an hour and a half on Duolingo before retiring to bed.

Tuesday was a much earlier start. Under normal circumstances, Helen is up early to exercise and therefore deals with the animal routine, leaving me in bed for an extra hour. Of course, today she was too far away to do any of that so it was me who Lucca woke up for his breakfast and me who he woke again to be let out at 7am.

This being the earliest I'd been up for some time, I decided to capitalise on it and head straight into town before the sun rose on Pescia to walk Reggie and then go straight to the supermarket to shop for the week. My start was so early that I'd done both and was home unloading before 9am! It felt great and I was looking forward to having a full day ahead of me to get some work under my belt.

Angelo, the builder, soon called asking if he could pop in to see me, I'd asked him to come by and talk through his quote for repairing the driveway with me. Reggie yet again took exception to him, escaping out of the gate and running at him in full bark mode, Angelo disappeared somewhere to hide - not that I can blame him, if you don't know Reggie he can be an intimidating sight when he's barking at full volume, spit flying from his mouth.

I grabbed Reggie and put him in the car so that Angelo and I could talk in peace before he left to go an price up another job somewhere in the valley.

NOW I was clear to start work... or so I thought. Just then, Paolo the oven repair guy called and asked if he come straight away to look at the oven in the apartment. I'd asked him to come over to have a look at it this week as it has been leaving a terrible black soot on anything you place over the flames on the hob.

I gave him the instruction manual in Italian to thumb through, and he said that the jets needed changing over to use GPL as the oven had been supplied Methane-ready (as normal in Italy) so he rummaged in a box of bits trying to find 4 GPL jets while I went to try and fine the box of IKEA bits and pieces I had collected from when I fitted the kitchen. Luckily I was able to put my hand straight on it and inside was a bag with four shiny new jets - could they be the correct ones? Sure enough they were and in ten minutes we were cooking on gas, so to speak. With 30 euros in hand Paolo waved me goodbye and left me to start my own working day - although now it was lunchtime already!

After enjoying the leftovers from dinner the night before on the patio with a beer, I set to work decommissioning the downstairs bathroom. When I say 'downstairs bathroom', I mean the middle floor of the building, which is the ground floor of our part of the house, not the apartment. There is a perfectly good and fairly new bathroom on the top floor with the bedrooms - perfectly good, that is, except that the water doesn't get very hot. This is not a problem in summer, but last winter was miserable when the bathroom temperature dropped to 10C.

Anyway, the 'downstairs' bathroom is now full of stuff we need to store, cleaning products, dirty boots, vegetables and so on. It's also the same room into which we fitted washing lines and used as a drying room last winter (with the aid of a dehumidifier), so it has become a utility room for us - a multi-purpose room from which we'd already removed the toilet and basin in March with the help of Zach, one of out HelpX-ers.

As part of our planned new water heating system and associated works we'd asked the plumber to move the water heater in the downstairs bathroom from right by the door (a place perfectly chosen to maximise the number of times you could hit your head on it on entering and leaving the room) and to site it out of the way in the shower area, hooking it up directly (and only) to the shower which we intended to leave in there as a doggie shower facility.

After receiving the quote for the new system last week and talking it all through with Helen, we decided we would scrap the doggie shower idea altogether and reclaim the entire room for storage and drying - largely because we've had Reggie for 11 months already and he has yet to have a single shower, so keeping it seemed something of a waste of space.

It didn't take long to demolish the glass brick wall and remove the tiles (such was the quality of the workmanship), which left me just the plumbing to tackle, removing the water heater and shower mixer and either capping the pipes or reconnecting them if they still needed to go elsewhere.

Plumbing is not my forte, but I have a little experience of it under my belt so was happy tackling this job. Nevertheless, a very confusing few hours followed, along with three different trips to get different fittings and connectors as the job required. By the time six o'clock arrived I had done what I needed, capping off most pipes but reconnecting one that fed the bathroom directly above. Along the way, I realised that the plumbing was set up in a rather unconventional way, as the upstairs heater and the one in the room in which I was working both fed the kitchen tap and the shower via T-pieces. I'm not convinced this is good practice as you could effectively be sending hot water from one heater to another without any form of non-return valve involved (of which there were none). I was secretly hoping that this might turn out to be the cause of the pipes squeaking when taps are turned on.

I headed upstairs to the working bathroom and took what was by far the best shower I've had since moving here - the water was so hot I could easily have been scalded had I not dived out of the way. I could barely tolerate it at 50% heat! Was it a coincidence that I had just disconnected it all from the downstairs bathroom?

Afterwards, I cooked dinner and sat down for another hour and a half on Duolingo - after which the interactive language website informed me that I was now 17% fluent in Italian. I have no idea who decides what represents 100% fluent, but it was encouraging news nonetheless.

On Wednesday I was summonsed back to Amanda's grocery store in the village to take her more tomatoes. I'd been in yesterday and sold her half of the 12kg I picked on Monday and now she wanted more. When I got there it turned out that it was her mum who wanted the tomatoes, having failed to get her hands on any of the ones I sold to Amanda yesterday, so Amanda took the other 6kg before I headed out to Frateschi to buy some materials in the form of concrete blocks and bagged concrete.

I spent the rest of the morning playing with stone to find the right pieces to build up the floor behind the house which currently slopes down towards the patio - which is going to be a problem when I'm trying to build a shed along the length of the house! Some building up was required to about the depth of two courses of concrete block which cunningly would leave me a nice big hole to put some freshly made hardcore straight from the old bathroom.

After lunch I spent the rest of the day laying some stone and blocks to give me somewhere to start throwing the rubble I'd made in an attempt to start slowly putting the house back together, it was mid-week already and I still had a lot to do including cleaning the house from top to bottom.

By the end of the day I'd cleaned out the utility room, and headed upstairs for a shower - which was yet again scalding! Two nights in a row now, I was starting to believe I'd inadvertently fixed the shower in the main bathroom, but it still seemed too soon to count any chickens.

This evening I had been invited to the Phillips house for curry, so with the animals safely indoors I busied Reggie with a chew and made my escape to head into Pescia for a lovely meal and good company - finally dragging myself away from an indepth discussion on immigration just before midnight.

Lucca gave me something of a lie-in on Thursday morning so I wasn't cleaning my teeth until 8.30am when I heard my mobile ringing downstairs. I dashed down thinking it was Helen calling before work started in Prague for the day but when I checked the number it was not hers but another Italian mobile. I called it back and spent the next five minutes guiding a courier to our house to deliver our new washing machine!

When he arrived at the house in his long wheel base van he had a look of terror on his face and stumbled out of the cab exclaiming 'MAMMA MIA!' (the first time I'd heard a real Italian say this cliched phrase). He was clearly unhappy about bringing his van down our driveway. I shrugged and told him we'd had bigger at the house while I helped him offload the machine, signed his form and sent him on his way.

After breakfast I spent the next couple of hours putting stuff back into the utility room. Despite being far from finished, I had no choice but to start tidying the house now, I didn't have anything like the time needed to re-plaster the room or fill the hole in the floor that was under the shower, so these will be jobs for another day, another month even, as all being well we should have permission to start our other jobs next week, and the new woodshed will take priority.

After lunch I unhooked the old washing machine, ripped out the sink and nasty cupboard that was built around it and reconfigured the plumbing to take the new machine before David arrived having offered to help move the new machine indoors.

With the old one out and the new one indoors we chatted over coffee before he headed home having invited me for dinner that night - it was shaping up into a bit of a social week.

Having connected the new washing machine I put a load of washing on, which gave me a rare hour of waiting around so I sat with more coffee to check emails until the wash cycle finished so that not only could I hang the clothes up to dry in the utility room (it was a damp day today) but also make sure that nothing leaked. Of course it did leak, but not from anything I'd done: our predecessors had attempted to connect newer pipework to the old lead waste pipe, and botched the job, which explains the state of the floor underneath the old machine when I moved it. It wasn't a huge leak, which is why we've never seen evidence of it, so for now, a plastic container will have to live under the leak to catch the drips until the machine eventually moves out of the office and to its permanent resting place outside.

With the washing drying I headed out to Montecatini for a dual purpose trip: primarily for a TV wall bracket. Not content with having a few spare hours I now decided that I would finally get the TV off the old freezer in the living room to try and push this room slowly towards being sorted too. As well as the bracket I bought a piece of wood to make a shelf to hold the DVD player, and a new tyre for Helen's road bike as the current one had just died at the hands of the turbo trainer.

It was  five o'clock when I got home, so there was just time for a little bit more work before showering (a hot shower again) and heading up to Vellano for dinner at David and Sarah's.

Yet again I had a lovely meal in good company while we chewed over the trials and tribulations of life in Italy - a common topic you'll not be surprised to hear. We enjoyed a veggie shepherds pie followed by crumble, a portion of each of which came home with me around 11pm for my lunch the next day.

Friday was a less exciting day - I'd set aside the entire day for cleaning, but not until I'd hung the TV, after which I worked my way from upstairs down, starting as always with hoovering the ceilings (I really was working from the top down).

After a busy day which included a dog walk in Pescia (by the way, Reggie has had a walk every day this week) I yet again escaped under darkness while Reggie had a chew in his mouth to head back to Pescia for another dinner at the Phillips's: fresh free range eggs, with peas and chips and of course bread and butter! After a tasty belly full of food we retired to the sofa to talk tractors and house heating options until almost midnight when I left them to go and check whether Reggie had undone all my good work (fortunately for both of us he hadn't).

What a week! I'm looking forward to having my wife home on Saturday afternoon who as I finish this blog post is sat in the airport in Prague waiting for the first of her flights.

An unusual weekend

Saturday morning started (after Helen had exercised and I had snoozed) with a coffee at our local
bar in our village. The 'Da Nerone' coffee bar is attached to a very nice little restaurant/pizzeria that until quite recently we'd never tried - opting instead to try offers further afield knowing we could try the local at any time - a silly mistake that goes against our 'keep it local' mentality (not that we were going very far afield, but without this restaurant, the builders' merchant and Amanda's grocery store, Pietrabuona would be a very different place).

It was with this in mind that after a couple of cappucini we asked to book a table for dinner at the restaurant on Sunday - something of a momentous occasion for us as this will be the first time we've had dinner out together, just the two of us, since last May, well over a year ago!!

Sunday would also be the date of our 'original' anniversary when we first met in New Orleans, so a very appropriate time to choose to have dinner out, and if any extra reason were needed, Helen is off to Prague tomorrow morning for the annual Virus Bulletin conference, leaving me home alone (with the dog and cats) for almost a week - something I know she's more worried about than I am.

With coffee dispatched and a table booked we headed a little further down the hill towards Pescia to walk Reggie behind the San Lorenzo hotel.

With the walk done, we headed home to drop Reggie off so that we could go back out to do a little shopping - but not the usual sort that would grace our Saturday list of events. With Helen heading off to Prague tomorrow, I said I'd do the supermarket shopping on Monday after dropping her off at Florence airport, so instead of heading for the supermarkets, we were heading Montecatini-bound.

After our walk last Sunday with Carlo and his dog Riegel, we had decided to try and find 'Pet Mania' - another pet shop that we'd been told was cheaper than the other two we have been using. Not only did we need some basic supplies, but we wanted to upgrade Reggie from what is now a too-small crate in the boot of the car to some bars, giving him the whole boot to stretch out in.

We found the place without too much difficulty (for a change!) and parked in a less salubrious car park than we would have done at either Arcaplanet or Isola di Tesori, but that's not what we were there for, it was the products inside. We wandered around for a little while not finding the bars we were after, and ended up having to ask the guy working there who took us to a small spot on the shelves reserved for a small selection of bars. We were soon approaching the till laden with a set of universal bars for the car, a net muzzle (more for show than for actual use as apparently it's a requirement for walking along the river in Pescia), a couple of bones and some cat food, and after filling out a form for a loyalty card we loaded the car and headed homeward bound.

Once unloaded we sat outside on the patio to eat lunch. It was not the usual relaxed Saturday affair though as we knew we still needed to head up to our neighbour's house to meet him at 2.30pm, after which we had to head back into town - without a washing machine, we had clothes and a heap of bed linen and towels to clean!

Come 2:30pm, we pulled up outside our immediate neighbour's house and were soon joined by two other vehicles, containing Paolo and his daughter Martina. They opened the electric gates and in our three vehicles we climbed  in convoy up their enormously long drive - it must be easily three times the length of ours!

On reaching the property, we all piled out of our respective vehicles and greeted each other properly, before Paolo and Martina showed us around their property. They don't live here, but instead rent it out as holiday accommodation and had been asking us for some help with marketing it to Brits - as well as wanting some help for Martina with polishing up her English, in exchange for her speaking Italian to us!

After a tour of the four separate apartments and a lot of very fast Italian speaking (by them, not us!), we left believing that we have agreed to help market the property and that we will also arrange to meet up with Martina once a week for an exchange of Italian and English languages/cultures!

After all that concentrating and trying to understand what was going on, we were in need of some light relief, so it was with eagerness that we headed into Pescia to do our laundry! Just like last weekend, we arrived in Piazza Mazzini while the rest of Pescia were waking up from their siesta, so were able to park right outside the laundry and head indoors with two enormous piles of washing.

After ramming full the only two working washing machines with laundry and coins we walked up to Franco's bar for a glass of wine while our laundry was done. Just like last time, our wine arrived along with a complimentary plate of snacks, and as we sat and relaxed, the locals began arriving one by one in their cars to open up their shops, use the ATM or come for a coffee.

Once we'd lazily finished the glass of wine and snacks we unloaded the washing and headed for the train station - our friends David and Sarah had used the very same launderette during the week to clean their duvets, but had been advised by a local that the dryers in this place were terrible and that they should use the ones by the train station instead. So it was with this sound advice in mind that we headed for the train station - except, on driving past, we could see no launderette! Having been through the one-way system that passes the station at slow speed twice, we gave up and headed home to load the washing onto the washing line in the sunshine and into the winter drying room, giving the dehumidifier a taste of things to come.

With all of our chores for the day done, we changed into working clothes and set about trying to reclaim our vegetable garden from the ravages of the surrounding greenery that had been given way too much time to go about its own business while we fixed soil pipes and adapted the fencing to version 3 to keep Reggie from escaping. It really seems it's one step forward, two steps back sometimes here, and you can't afford to stand still for a moment!

The weeding had some rather unexpected results by way of a nice little harvest of potatoes we had no idea were still down there amongst other things. With the exception of the tomatoes - which continue to proliferate - though that is the end of our summer veg for the year.

Pumpkins, cucumbers, potatoes, courgette and sunflower seeds - the last of the summer crop bar the tomatoes.

Sunday started with another coffee at the local bar before heading back up the Forfora valley (we learned this afternoon, while shopping for shampoo, that 'Forfora' translates into 'dandruff', meaning the valley is literally called the 'valley of dandruff', a legacy of the very old paper industry maybe??). We drove a little way beyond Sorana to walk Reggie along a route we hadn't done for many months.

After a lengthy section of quiet road, we finally got into woods where we could let Reggie off lead for a good run around - and run around he did, none more so than when he found puddle that was hanging on to dear life in the track of a tyre. Reggie took enormous delight in charging through this puddle, turning on his heels, then charging back through it, time after time after time.

With one very filthy dog loaded back into the car, we headed home for lunch before making small and unavoidable foray into Esselunga as tomorrow's traveller needed toothpaste and shampoo.

The day was warming up by the time we got home, and we decided we should yet again change into farming attire and hit the terraces with hedge trimmers and strimmer and complete the reclamation of our veg garden. We did this in good time - such good time, in fact, that we then ventured around and behind the house and up the terraces to extend the scope of works until 5pm sounded on the church bells in the village across the valley at which point we sat down in the last of the direct sunlight with a chilled glass of wine before retiring indoors for showers in readiness for dinner this evening.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY DARLING :-D xxxxxx

The arrival of autumn

This week has been another busy one - for me, it's been a week at the computer helping tie up the loose ends in preparation for next week's Virus Bulletin conference in Prague, while Stuart has put in some hard graft working with David in Sorana as well as back home both on the computer and in the garden, finally finishing the anti-Reggie-climb fencing.

We had a day of rain this week (well, a morning of very heavy rain), and the weather has definitely taken a decidedly autumnal turn. This week saw the first day in perhaps 5 months that I have felt compelled to dress in jeans, woolly socks and a jumper rather than shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops. We've even considered lighting the fire, but haven't caved into that just yet. Having said that, when the sun comes out during the day it can still be scorching - this is definitely a time of year to be dressing in layers to accommodate all extremes!

Autumn sunshine.

We finally received news on the whereabouts of our new washing machine this week - it turns out that it was damaged when it arrived with the courier, so they waited to see what we wanted to do about it... but without asking'/telling us. After chasing it up with the shop and finding out where it was and why it had been delayed, we were offered the chance to re-order a new one (with another 6-9 day wait for delivery), to cancel the order completely and have a full refund, or to accept the damaged one (it has a couple of scratches) along with a €30 voucher in compensation. Not being fussy about what my washing machine looks like (I'm more concerned that it does the job of cleaning clothes), we've opted for having the damaged washing machine in the hopes that we might actually take delivery of it before next week is out...

Thursday this week saw us saying a very fond farewell to our New Zealander guests Chris, Craig, Robyn and Roger. They are lovely people and we've really enjoyed their company and having them around. We even finally got Roger close enough to Reggie to take a look at the inside of his ear and give us his professional (vet's) opinion on a small, slightly inflamed sore that he's had inside his ear for many weeks. Saying that, the only way Roger could advance on Reggie was for Stuart to pin him down (Reggie, that is) on the lawn while I tried to calm him down. It seems that making friends with a vet was one step too far for Reggie in the space of just 6 days. Maybe given another 3 weeks he might have had a breakthrough...

We were somewhat mortified that, as we were saying our final goodbyes to our Kiwi friends, Reggie over excitedly jumped up at Robyn and planted his paws on her - leaving huge muddy paw prints on her pristine white top! Thankfully, the very kind and patient Robyn took it in her stride and laughed it off - I'm not sure I would have been so forgiving!

Thursday afternoon saw our next 'community day' with David, Sarah and Donatella. This time, we were focusing on work for David and Sarah, and instead of starting work in the morning and finishing up with a lunch, it was decided we would start in the afternoon (mainly for my benefit as I still had work to do in the office) and finish up with dinner. David and Sarah don't have any land of their own as such, as they live in a village house in Vellano, but they do 'borrow' land from another ex-pat couple, Paul and Veronica, for a vegetable plot (orto), and Paul and Veronica - who don't live here full-time but who visit several times a year - had also told them that they were welcome to take some firewood from their land in exchange for tidying up some of the fallen/felled trees and leaving enough processed firewood ready for them to use when they come to the house for a visit in November. Thursday, therefore, was Operation Firewood.

While Stuart and David went off with their chainsaws to start cutting up a couple of fruit trees that had come down a while ago, Donatella and I set up chopping blocks and got to work with our splitting axes, while Sarah, who is currently somewhat incapacitated with an excruciatingly painful shoulder injury, started the process of stacking the wood.

Synchronised wood splitting - could this be a new Olympic sport?

We all worked away at our various stations for a good solid couple of hours until we finally called time on the day's work with a respectable pile of wood to show for our efforts. Unfortunately even this much will barely last a week to ten days, so there's still a lot more work to be done here, but it's a good start!

One afternoon's efforts.

We headed straight from Paul & Veronica's land to David and Sarah's house, where we revelled in the relative warmth (the wind had turned remarkably chilly) and the comfort of a beautiful home and Sarah fed us tasty snacks followed by a delicious dinner of vegetable lasagne (made with vegetables from their orto), salad, and fig and rosemary cake. The food, which was already amazing, tasted all the better for knowing we'd earned it, and we had a lovely evening happily eating, drinking and laughing until it was time to head home and rescue the animals.

Our newly invented 'Community Days' seem to have a double benefit for us - in fact more than double, multiple benefits. Not only do we get a huge amount of work done when it's our turn to host the work, but we also find that when we work at someone else's place, we come back to our own house & land feeling more inspired and more motivated to get on with things here. Other benefits include the camaraderie and social aspects of the day, as well as getting to eat amazing food at other people's houses!

Friday actually saw us both somewhat on the tired side, but after I'd finished my office work and we'd taken Reggie for a walk at the cava, we decided we would turn our attention to our own orto - which once again has started to resemble an acacia/bramble/nettle jungle. We spent a good couple of hours cutting down the beans and cucumbers, which have now (finally!!) finished, weeding the beds, cutting back some of the acacias and putting straw over the weeded beds. We still have plenty more to do (more jobs for the weekend), but it was a good start.

Happy weekend!

New friends and good times

After a thoroughly enjoyable evening at Manero's restaurant in Vellano with Donatella, David and Sarah on Friday night, Saturday morning started out somewhat bleary eyed for us, but we soon kicked that into touch with a pot of coffee in the fresh morning air - which we shared with our latest set of guests, the New Zealanders Christine, Craig, Robyn and Roger.

It was no surprise to find that the four Kiwis are all really great, friendly people whose company we really enjoy - Chris and Craig are the parents of Nick, one of our HelpX helpers who stayed with us for a fortnight last November (along with Tess), so we already felt as if we were halfway to knowing them, and their friends Robyn and Roger are just as friendly and engaging.

After a leisurely coffee or two and lots of chatting, we decided to do something a little more productive with the day - our guests are only here for a limited time, after all, and had yet to see anything of our area - so the six of us headed, together with Reggie, into Pescia for a walk along the river. After a very pleasant stroll along the banks of the river, Stuart and I left our guests in town, pointing them in the direction of the weekly Saturday market in the main piazza, while we headed home to put our mind to more mundane tasks.

After a quick bite to eat, we headed back into town to do the weekly supermarket chore, then straight back home to unpack before heading up the road to our neighbour's house. Our neighbour, another Paolo, had chatted with Stuart a little while ago and apparently wanted to meet with us to show us around his property and to talk to us about helping him market his holiday rentals to English-speaking folk. Stuart told me we were due to meet at 2.30, so we duly drove up the road, parked the car and waited. And waited. After 25 minutes of waiting, we decided he probably wasn't going to show up, so returned home - at which point Stuart re-checked the message from Paolo and rather sheepishly told me that, actually, the arrangement might have been for next Saturday...!

After finding ourselves with some unexpected spare time in the afternoon, we decided to continue on the theme of crossing chores off our to-do list, and head into town to the laundrette. Despite having ordered a new washing machine two weeks ago, which had been promised for delivery within 5-9 working days, we haven't heard a thing from the company from which we ordered it. Riding high on the success of having restored our bathroom to full working order (after rebuilding the soil stack), which seemingly had fixed the odour problem in the apartment, and having our oven and hob fixed, the arrival of the new washing machine seemed one thing too many to hope for within the same week, so we'd allowed it to slip to the back of the list - which meant we had reached the weekend with another pile of washing and no means to clean it.

I stuffed an enormous Ikea bag full of clothes and towels and we headed into Pescia for our first experience of an Italian laundrette. After the morning's market, Piazza Mazzini was more or less the quietest we'd ever seen it, and we were able to park right outside the laundrette. After fathoming the instructions, we selected the machine with the largest drum - into which we were able to pile all of our washing (with room for more, if we'd had it) - put our coins in, set the machine going, and headed to Franco's bar just a couple of doors down for a drink to while away 40 minutes while we waited for our washing. We ordered a glass of wine each - and, as seems to be the way here, were brought our glasses of wine plus a plate (for which there was no charge) piled full of tiny squares of pizza, olives, slices of meat, pieces of bread and other items to soak up the alcohol. We decided that living without a washing machine might not be such a hardship after all!

Doing laundry has never been so enjoyable.

Once the time was up on our washing, we piled the Ikea bag full of damp clothes and headed off. We'd decided to take a print-out of our order to the shop (Trony) from which we'd ordered (online) our new washing machine to see if they could help us with chasing it up. Unfortunately, they looked at the paperwork and simply told us we'd have to email or call the number on the order as the online Trony is a separate entity from the physical shop. Well, at least we'd tried!

We therefore headed home to hang the washing out to dry before settling down for a relaxing evening. It wasn't long before our Kiwi friends returned from a trip around some of the villages in the valley, and of course we ended up chatting with them again, and then all sharing some drinks, this time on the guest patio downstairs. While we chatted, Reggie ran around cautiously sniffing our new friends and gradually seeming to relax. The influx of four new people seemed a little too much for him at first, and we were treated to a lengthy round of barking - but it wasn't long before he was relaxing around almost everyone, reserving a large dose of suspicion and fear for just one person: Roger. Roger happens to be a vet, which left us all wondering whether Reggie can tell that this is a person who might just stick needles in him and who'd recommend having him neutered!

As time marched on and darkness fell, our guests decided that they would like to go out for dinner and asked for our recommendations for a local restaurant. Before we knew it, they had invited us along to dinner with them, in return for Stuart doing the driving - it was a very generous offer indeed, and of course one we couldn't (and didn't) refuse!

We headed initially for our closest restaurant, Da Nerone in Pietrabuona, but found it fully booked, so we swung Plan B into action and headed instead to Sorana to Da Carla. Da Carla was the busiest we have ever seen it, but they managed to find room for the six of us, and we had another thoroughly enjoyable meal with great company. To top the evening off, we managed to "find" (purely by chance) three red deer standing on the verge at the side of the road on the way home - a local wildlife spotting opportunity for our Kiwi friends!

After our second night out in a row, Sunday morning was another bleary-eyed affair for the pair of us, but we had to be up at a reasonable time as we (and, more to the point, Reggie) had a date to keep. Once we were up, we decided to head out for a coffee to try to wake ourselves up a bit, so after we'd loaded Reggie into the back of the car, we trundled down as far as Da Nerone in Pietrabuona, where we had a much needed cappuccino and a breakfast pastry each. The morning air was fresh, but we started to warm up as we sat in the sunshine outside the café.

Coffee cups drained, we continued on down the hill into Pescia, parked up in the car park next to Lidl and as we parked we spotted our "date" - our Italian dog-walking friend Carlo and his dog Riegel. Reggie seemed pleased to see Riegel and the five of us set off along the river.

As we'd discovered last weekend, walking with Carlo and Riegel has multiple benefits - Reggie gets more exercise than usual because he runs around playing with Riegel, while Stuart and I get an Italian lesson from Carlo. Carlo does speak English, having spent a while working in Bangladesh when he was younger, but he only uses it to communicate with us as a last resort - preferring instead to speak in Italian and help us to learn. Two particular words we learned today were riccio - hedgehog (and also the word for curly) and istrice - porcupine.

As we walked along and chatted (I should point out that Stuart and I only understand a small proportion of what Carlo says, but it seems to be enough to carry us along), we soon reached the small footbridge that Reggie refuses to walk over because of the metal grid under foot. Even with his friend Riegel on the other side, he ran back and forth with no intention of putting a single paw on the bridge. In the end, Stuart scooped him up (all 26+kg of him) and carried him over the bridge, after which he carried on happily as if  nothing had happened.

Thanks to Reggie's refusal to cross the foot bridge, we'd never walked along this stretch of the river before, and found it to be beautiful, with some really lovely views. We walked, and we walked, until eventually I suggested that maybe we should turn back - by this point the day had really turned up the heat and I for one was starting to flag, never mind our 70-year-old friend and the two panting dogs. At least the dogs could run in and out of the river to keep cool!

Reggie and Reigel.

On the return leg of the journey we ran into another dog-walker, Luca, and his dog Giotto, who we'd also met last week, and they walked with us for a while until they reached the point at which they turned off the path to head home.

By the time we finally reached our cars back at Lidl again, we had been walking for 3 hours - easily Reggie's longest walk! We said our goodbyes to Carlo and Riegel and got into the car exhausted - 3 hours of concentrating on listening and trying to understand another language takes it out of you, as does a long, slow walk in rising temperatures!

Reggie was well and truly pooped after his long morning of excitement!

It was time for lunch when we got home, so we made some sandwiches and refuelled ourselves. Stuart and I both felt exhausted and almost went for the option of having a Sunday afternoon siesta - but instead we made the decision to carry on with Reggie's anti-climb fencing in the garden. This was a job that needed doing, and it wasn't too physically (or mentally) demanding, so it seemed just about achievable to our tired brains & bodies! Somehow, in the process of doing the fencing we both perked up considerably (maybe it was the fuel of our lunch working its way into our system) and before long we were motoring along - at least we were until we ran out of materials!

Fortunately the running out of materials coincided with the time at which we were planning to call it a day anyway - we were due at the Phillips's at 5.15pm, so we headed indoors to get ready.

The reason for the visit to the Phillips's was that our guests had expressed a desire to watch the New Zealand v Argentina rugby world cup match. Knowing that the whole Phillips family, and Chris in particular, are big rugby fans, we'd asked Chris whether he knew of anywhere locally that our guests would be able to go to watch the rugby - and as is typical of our lovely friends, they had simply invited the whole lot of us around to watch the match with them at their house.

So come 5pm, we and our guests headed into Pescia in convoy and descended on the Phillips household. Not being the world's biggest fan of ball-based team sports, I wasn't all that bothered about watching the game - so Sue joined me and the pair of us sat on their terrace enjoying a chat and a glass of wine while the rest of the crew (4 New Zealanders and 4 British ex-pats) watched the match.

Everyone had a great time - it was so kind of Chris and Sue to open up their house to four strangers, but they all seemed to get on very well and come 8pm we had to drag ourselves and our Kiwi friends away - after all it was a school night for the boys, and we had yet to feed ourselves!

On getting back to the house, we said goodnight to our guests and retired to our respective abodes to cook dinner. I don't know about them, but for us it was time for a much needed early night in preparation for the week ahead. It had been a wonderful weekend with new friendships and lots of good times.