Tag Archives: Laundry

Castles to Terraces

So dinner last night was only OK. It was nice to eat just protein and not a pasta.  That being said, Dave woke up in the middle of the night with stomach pains.  Maybe the seafood wasn’t good?  Luckily, it just cost him a little bit of sleep. When he woke up, the stomach pain was gone.

‘This morning, we hiked up to the Castle Rocca Minore.  It is about a 10 minute walk from where we are staying mostly uphill. The castle looks over the entire town of Assisi and has some good views.

From the top we can still see some snow on the top of the hills from the freak snow storm that hit last week.  After catching some views, we hiked back down to the town.

Today the sun is actually out and it is nearly 60 degrees. From the wet cold days of before, this basically feels like summer.  We grabbed a bottle of wine and some to go focaccia and took it back to our place to sit out on the terrace. We spent the rest of the day up here enjoying the sun.

Tonight we go to dinner at Osteria Piazzetta dell’Erba. Tomorrow we have our longest drive yet to Rome at 3 hours where we will be meeting up with Matt and Anna. We are quite excited!

Francesco I think they mean Francisco

This morning we woke up with the plan to see the large church built to house the remains of Francesco.

 After walking through the town, we made it to the church and queued up our Rick Steve’s guided tour audio and set about the church.

It is quite impressive how large and the number of Frescos here.

Francesco started the Franciscan movement and also appreciated nature including animals.

After the church, Sara wasn’t feeling too hot.  The cold we both battled has turned out to be quite a doozy.  Therefore, we took a scenic walk back to the apartment and stopped to get the fixings to make some vegetable soup. After lunch, we tried to take it is easy so Sara can rest up and feel better.

Tonight we have to dinner at Ristorante il Vicoletto.

Change of Plans

This morning we woke up to a winter wonderland up in the little medieval village. The forecast had snow overnight but we were very surprised by how much stuck, about 10 cm by 7am when we first opened the shutters. It was going to be an interesting ride out down the hill to the highway.

As Dave was warming up the car we got a message from our Airbnb host at a farm in the hills above Lucca. They were completely snowed in and their road was impassable, a big snow storm like this really is out of the ordinary here and so they offered us a refund and recommended we stay in the city where the roads would be cleared. We decided to head straight to Florence and called the hotel where we had booked the weekend. They said no problem the room was ready so we said good bye to the little medieval village and started the drive down the hill.

Luckily Dave has lots of snow driving experience as the road was narrow, twisty and unplowed. We got about halfway down before we hit a small uphill section and couldn’t get traction. Unfortunately the chains the rental agency gave us did not fit the car so we had to go without. It took us about 30 minutes of trying to get up the small, steep incline without sliding accidentally off the side and down into the valley but we made it. After that it was pretty mellow down to the autostrada and then once we got on that it was really easy, everything had been freshly plowed and the road was completely clear as if it hadn’t snowed at all.

It took about 2 hours to get until Florence (a much easier experience than getting into Genova even with the weather.) All the schools are closed and a lot of offices so everyone was out and about playing with sleds and getting in snowball fights. Our hotel is very close to the historic center but has a private parking lot. The room is nice and comfortable with a pretty view of the hills.

We had a boatload of laundry to do so we found a laundromat and had a very nice lunch around the corner while we waited for everything to finish. Lunch was at Trattoria Cantinetta Allegri.

Now we are back at the apartment resting and warming up before heading out this evening to see some sights and have dinner.

The Road Less Traveled

Today we took the long, scenic trip from Verbier to Chamonix. Normally this would be a 45 minutes to 1 hour drive via Martigny but this being the mountains, Mother Nature had other plans for us. A week or so before we left a huge mudslide took out the road and it’s closed until Spring. Dave posted on the Chamonix Facebook page asking for alternative routes so that we could avoid going all the way down to Geneva and a very nice person gave us the backroad way via Portes du Soliel and Cluses. Yesterday when we checked google maps, the app recommended that we go over into Italy and back through the Mont Blanc tunnel but since we are travelers with no set time limits we opted for the longer and what we hoped to be more scenic route through France.

It did not disappoint. Sweet little Alpine villages nestled into valleys along the Rhône River between dramatic peaks and snow covered larch forests, the road took us through the Haute Savoie region of France up over the Pas de Morgins.

On the way we stopped in Cluses, by far the largest town we drove through, at a giant Carrefour to load up on essentials and get a French SIM card. So far we’ve found it very easy and relatively inexpensive to get a local number and (at least some) data.

After leaving Cluses we joined one of the main highways for about 30 minutes before turning off for thr Mont Blanc Tunnel/Chamonix/Milan/Turin exit. We immediately started to climb again, passing though smaller tunnels, past frozen sheer rock faces and over waterfalls.

We arrived in Chamonix around 2, dropped our bags and groceries and went out to grab some lunch and check out the town. This time we are staying in an apartment with a kitchen and washing machine. It’s very centrally located to the Aiguille du Midi cable car and the center of town.

This town is very cute and it is full of hardcore mountain people. People who are strolling around with their touring skis, harnesses, climbing ropes and crampons like it’s just their regular thing they do on Saturday.

We had lunch at a pizza place called Restaurant Le Boccalatte with great people watching, the food was just ok. After lunch we walked up to the Main Street which has a store from every possible outdoor company you could imagine and lots of charcuterie shops. We stopped by a second grocery store to grab a few small extra items for the apartment then we headed back to the place to rest and do laundry.

We decided that we wanted to hire a guide for Tuesday after looking at the snow forecast and when the guide that was recommended to us by our guide in Zermatt was unavailable we went back into town to the Bureau of Guides to book one. Second trip, still early and still interesting.

Our French is non existent so it’s no surprise there was at least one misstep during the grocery store outing. Coming back to do laundry we realized that we had purchased fabric softener instead of detergent. Ooops…back into town for the correct bottle that could face our dirty ski clothes. This trip clearly cutting into our happy hour time was not as enjoyable.

This evening we cooked a dairy free dinner, attempted to do laundry and watched French Olympics coverage. Tomorrow will be our first day skiing in France.