Middle-aged flash packers

I woke up feeling that I’d slept the night in a freezer. Waking up cold in the night, I had fumbled around with the a/c control and inadvertently made the room even colder.

Most unpleasant but at least we are getting our money’s worth.

After a leisurely breakfast, we decided to walk to La Morra, a town 3 miles away that looked very pretty, perched on a hill in view of Verduno.

While ambling along, a farmer dressed in a hazmat suit but no mask, drove his tractor alongside us, spraying the hazelnut trees on his land – and us – with some noxious pesticide. Lovely, no bugs on us but I don’t particularly want cancer again thank you.

Next, as we passed a winery we could smell that smell you get when you pull a cracker at Christmas. It was very strong and quite unpleasant. Hope it wasn’t going in the wine.

Then we passed a farmer spraying his grapes, this time no mask or hazmat suit but I was pretty sure it wasn’t just water he was spraying. The lack of bugs and flowers on our walk seemed to suggest quite a high use of pesticides, however Italy now produces 19% of its wine organically so that is what I’ll be buying.

La Morra is very pretty and we walked up to the church where the view over the surrounding area is stunning with neat lines of vines and rows of hazelnut trees. Call me ignorant but I had no idea this region was famous for Barolo wine, I thought it was just truffles. It’s also famous for Ferrero Roche chocolates and Nutella, hence the hazelnuts.

We toyed with the idea of walking on to Barolo but it was quite a bit further and involved a lot of road walking so we decided to walk back and have a swim and lunch back at the apartment.

Flushed with the success of our earlier walk (apart from being poisoned) we decided to meander along to another village called Roddi. We passed a most intriguing shut up old house which had peacocks strutting their stuff in the grounds. Most bizarre. Who looked after them? Were they wild? Why were the pea hens so disinterested in them? (I do know the answer to the last one as all females do.)

Looking at the sky, a thunderstorm wasn’t far away so we cut short our walk and headed for home. We decided to have a final swim and see how long we could stay in the pool before the storm broke. We got out just as the wind whipped up. It turned from a strong breeze to a full on hurricane in seconds. We managed to get back into the apartment before the rain started and fell like a monsoon. I have only ever seen rain like that in the tropics. Everything in the garden area was tossed around, leaves were stripped from the trees, lightning was everywhere. Very exciting.

Not so exciting was when I started to think about cooking the chicken and found it was off. Salvatore cursed us to make sure we didn’t dirty the pristine oven. I thought the fridge had smelt a bit rank but we convinced ourselves it was just a slight fishy smell from the seafood salad. Upon taking the wrapping off it, it was clear the chicken was really very off indeed.

I’m quite ashamed of what I did next and almost thought about not confessing, but I’ve tried to be honest throughout my blog so here goes.

Recycling in Italy is a really big thing. There is a box for everything but Salvatore doesn’t have one for food waste. I couldn’t just leave the chicken in the kitchen bin, it would stink the whole place out. We wrapped it and all the left over seafood plus the prawn peelings from yesterday in a black plastic bag. The plan was that on the way to the supermarket (obviously we needed dinner and the restaurants here are either closed on Mondays or absurdly expensive) I would put the chicken et al in a waste bin. Unfortunately the only bin we could find was a bottle bank. So I put it in there. I sincerely hope they are emptied very regularly but I apologise profusely to anyone doing their good deed for the day and getting the most god awful whiff as they put their bottles inside the bottle bank.