In Love with France, At Home In Italy

OOPS! Ivy-covered walls in the Italian countryside are picturesque, but not always as innocent as they look. We thought it would be a good idea to hop into our 1999 Renault to take it for a spin. After all, the poor thing had been sitting there for far too long exercising its primary function as a fruit dryer. If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that the windshield of this proud French vehicle is the linchpin of our efforts to manage all the fruit we produce. The method goes like this: put the fruit of the moment in a foil-covered IKEA roasting pan on a sunny Umbrian day, and you're good to go. Or rather, you will be going nowhere for a while, while that fruit caramelizes nicely.  The red-lit "STOP OR THIS VEHICLE WILL EXPLODE!" did not deter my optimistic husband in the least. "This car is so old that it often says alarming stuff like that, but doesn't really mean it." But I was not convinc...

Everything was unusually calm and well organized at the airport. WHAT? Where was all the chaos that always tells us we're back in our adopted country? Instead of having to run around like a nut in order to find a porter with a cart big enough to hold our dog's crate (which happens to be larger than some Paris apartments), we stumbled on a cute guy named Luigi who said he'd be back for us once our luggage and dog arrived. The typical situation is that our dog Murray gets unloaded first and is plopped down in front of the "large and irregular baggage" department. It's usually no problem to find Murray because once he hears our voices, he starts barking very loudly, conveying the internationally comprehensible message, "GET ME OUT OF HERE!" This time, before we knew it, the bags had all arrived, and lovely Luigi brought Murray to us, whisking our entire load to where our friend, Roy, was waiting to pick us up with our car. Could ...