Finally, a bad meal!

It's inexplicable really. Josh picked me up from my Italian class today and we rode our bikes toward Quirinale to have lunch (yes my back was feeling better, but still I was in pain for much of the class and subsequent bike ride). Josh had spotted a place with a lot of locals. It was cafeteria style - the Italian version of "fast food" that we've come to enjoy. This would be ideal since it wouldn't be comfortable for me to sit down for a 2 hour meal (after a 3 hour Italian class). People were waiting on-line to get in the door. "This must be a great spot" you think to yourself. You choose your food from the case. Normally, the provisions are fresh and tasty. In this case, it was horrible. How could so many Italians frequent a place like this? I didn't get it. As I was starving, I crammed it down anyway, but the bar has been set so high (in the food department anyway) that it was really disappointing.

Josh spent some time today trying to plan our vacation for the end of the month. The kids will be off from school for the last week of October. The obvious destination of choice would be Tuscany. So many wonderful towns, such great food, truffle season, wine harvest...and popular with the tourists this time of year. "Why fight the crowds?" we thought. Let's go south to Puglia. Admittedly, I wanted to check out Puglia since it's a region that I've never visited, and I have heard so many wonderful things about it. Perhaps, we'll continue with this stretch of fine weather we've been having, and five hours further south it should be even warmer than Rome. Could we possibly get beach weather in late October? We are optimistic.

It is such a pleasure to plan a trip a week or two before going. No need to get those airline reservations locked down. Just get in the car (or train) and go. The unanticipated problem with our plan is this: the "road less travelled" is also the road where hotels close for the season because...it's less travelled. So while we had a wonderful plan, we are continuing to deviate from that original plan. We started with the idea of doing an agriturismo style of vacation (which has become very popular in Italy) figuring the kids would be in to seeing some type of food production, as well as seeing the animals that many of these places have. Of course there are swimming pools and we're not far from the beach, from the forest, from cool rock formations, etc. Then we wanted to visit several towns including Ostuni, Monopoli, Alberobello, Lecce and Otranto. The good news is that when planning a trip within Italy, there is no shortage of discoveries to be made, nor a shortage of beautiful or interesting alternatives. So, I guess we'll just see where we end up...