Day to Day Travel Diary
Updated May 19, 2013, by JB Leep (Google Profile)
It is now Friday, May 17 – this must be Umbria.
We are staying in a house outside Montegabbione – that’s the town on the hill here. We will be here 7 weeks. We haven’t really gone anywhere exciting yet – except to the local market… because we’ve been settling in and it’s been raining.
JB fixed us pizza for lunch today – the first time we’ve made pizza – using a refrigerated rolled up crust and then he added toppings. It looks good, right? It was! Yum!
The funny thing is that I told him that we didn’t have a pizza pan and that we’d have to use that cookie sheet that I found in the oven. Lo and behold, when he unrolled the dough, it fit the ‘cookie sheet’ exactly. So – they do a lot of rectangular pizzas here! No round pan needed!
This is 
the view of the one-acre yard (completely fenced) from our 2nd floor front door. Great views to the surrounding hillsides – all covered in forests. This area is called the “Lungs of Italy” because of all the trees.
We are completely out in the middle of the forest. No other houses around for a long way. This is an airbnb.com find – and it’s a winner!
Our house – we have the whole top floor – 3 bedrooms/2 baths. And some interior shots. We are very comfortable. Of course, we have converted one bedroom into a computer room/painting room. The light here is wonderful.
Big windows throughout the house.
Another shot of the living room, the ‘office’ and our bedroom – note the portable dog crates on the right.
Tomorrow, we are going to drive 2 hours to Siena – to finalize a sporting event for early July. More on that later. From now on, we plan to do something ‘touristy’ every third day or so. We will plan according to the weather forecast.
There is still a lot of rain – although the sun does make an appearance here and there. The pups like it here. And for those of you who have never heard a real “cuckoo” bird sing, you should come join us here – because they chirp all day long – and they sound exactly like the clocks! It’s a bit strange.
We like it here a lot!
Love to all,
Carol and JB
Thursday, May 16
Hello all,
We arrived here yesterday (Wednesday) about 4pm and right now (Thurs 1:45pm), we are mostly unpacked. Boy, it is really strange going from living in ONE room to a 3 bedroom flat. Oh boy. And the light is great. They have a TV monitor with a big screen that JB can hook right into. The internet speed is faster here. We are VERY remote – out in the middle of a forest – literally. Nothing else around us except TREES and more Trees. The people here, (Paola and Paolo) are very nice. They have 2 dogs and 4 cats – all animals are getting along very well. Whole property is completely fenced, so we will be able to let the hounds out and about. Except that P&P free feed their dogs and there is a big container of kibble down there, which Louie discovered yesterday. We shall see. Today, it is raining and so we’ve been for a short walk, but mostly just hanging out inside – napping. The past couple days have been VERY stressful for dogs who of course think that a suitcase out means that you’re going AWAY and they will be abandoned alone in the desert, or worse, be left somewhere terrible to pine away and wonder what’s happening in their world. So, there is relief all around today. Whew!
I am just about to start a “Watercolour Secrets” DVD class (by Bob Davies).
Monday, May 13
JB and I caught the train to Florence for the express purpose of going to see the Galileo Science Museum. What a wonderful place!
I wrote a Trip Advisor review, but that was the abbreviated version of my enthusiasm for this amazing spot.
On display were the instruments and inventions that made such a difference in the scientific world – by Galileo and others. Wonderful navigation and astronomy stuff!.
And the audio guide (shown on the right) was just invaluable – it sensed where you were standing in each room and offered you the info about that specific display case.
AND then more info showing a video about how the instrument worked and details about the inventors – really good. Everything was in Italian and English – with great video displays in each room as well.
Here’s JB standing by a large device built to show all the orbits of the planets and stars around the earth.
Now, obviously they had it wrong because most objects don’t rotate around the earth, but it’s pretty spectacular nevertheless.
And these globes that I’m standing in front of – one is a globe of the earth, the one on the right is the sky – with all the constellations –
because at that time (in the 1400-1500 time frame), people thought that the earth was the center of a large sphere and that the stars and planets they saw were out there on the plane of the sphere.
And here is JB with the only TWO remaining telescopes that belonged to Galileo! Amazing.
The first telescope was invented by a German in 1608, but Galileo was the first to perfect its early design and use it for astronomy.
Here’s an early microscope on the left. In each room, there are video screens that explain the history and significance of many of the important pieces in the room.
And on the right, a calculating machine – think “The first computer”… That they could think of this and construct these beautiful instruments in the 15th century is mind-boggling.
And there were all sorts of wonderful examples of early thermometers and videos showing how they worked.
Here are other examples of telescopes – they are beautiful and BIG and LONG!
Here is JB with 2 other important telescopes.
Then I was HUNGRY (now!) so we made the tourist mistake of going to a sidewalk café right around the corner from the museum.
We got these two foccacia sandwiches and 2 sodas; the bill was 25 Euros – that’s $32.50. Too much.
But we consoled ourselves with a chocolate gelato a bit later. Walking back to the train station, I couldn’t resist this picture – the clouds looked painted on – that’s how beautiful it was!
Back at home, we posed the pups with one of the symbols of “Le Due Volpi” – the 2 foxes. So that it became “The Three Foxes!. So cute. But then I’m just biased.
Love to all, Carol and JB and the pseudo-foxes too
May 5
We elected to get a hotel in La Spezia and then take the train to Cinque Terre. Once in La Spezia, we wanted to check out all the things we had to do the next morning to park and get on the train. There h
appened to be a parking place for our rental car, a motorized roller skate (actually a Fiat 500 ‘Cinque Cento’) right across the street from the hotel.
It was 1.50 Euros (about $2.00) per hour, meaning a few hours would cost us about $2 a foot or more for parking till it became free at 8 pm. We thought that was sort of steep and would require a lot of coin stuffing.
After about 10 minutes of additional driving around, we found a cheaper one where we could go back in the morning, a quick 5 minute walk, and drive 5 minutes to the train station. Our only baggage for this 2-day trip was a day pack.
The train station underground parking is cheaper at 1 Euro per hour. What’s more, it is right at the trainstation. This would save a lot of wear and tear on the feet, and let us make a quick getaway when we returned to go pick up the dogs at Cane d’Oro, the dog boarding place in Barberino.
There is a train ticket for 10 Euros (about $13) that allows you to get on and off the train in Cinque Terre anywhere you want, and trains run about every 45 minutes to an hour.
So you get on one, stop at a village for an hour, and then get on the following train, sort of leap-frogging from town to town. Finally you return from the end. Our whole trip would last from 8:12 am to 3:03 pm. We got two tickets. It’s a trip of about 3 minutes average between villages.
The remainder of this section has been moved to…
Cinque Terre – the Italian Riviera ‘Five Lands’
Travel Blog Daily Diary by JB Leep and Carol Martin