travel

Beautiful Saluzzo

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

I didn’t tell you about our trip to Saluzzo last Saturday. We drove up through the back streets instead of taking the autostrada, partially to avoid the toll, partially because the countryside is so beautiful. This is the route our bus to Church (link) in Cuneo used to take when we lived in Saluzzo, so we’re also sentimentally attached. We even took a little turn through Lagnasco. The trees all around are loaded with red and green apples.

Saturday in Saluzzo is market day, so we bought some cheese from our favorite vendor and were invited again to visit their farm up the Varaita Valley, near Melle, Tony’s ancestral home.… Read more

Back in Italy

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

We’ve made it home to Italy. That’s really how it feels. I couldn’t believe how beautiful everything was as we saw familiar landscapes unfolding themselves outside. The journey, unfortunately, was fairly miserable, although we only had one actual meltdown, in the train station at Nice. Axa and Raj had a large meltdown, and Tony and I had a smaller, more socially acceptable one. And then we all had some fabulous French pastries and felt better.

The reason the trip was so bad (at least from my point of view) was that I’d been sick in bed for a week previous to it.… Read more

Surprise, surprise!

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

I picked up my passport yesterday, completed by the Florence U.S. Consulate in just over one week. It’s close enough to walk from our house, and they emailed me when it was ready (they would have sent it in the mail, but I’m not over-fond of the Italian post). Not bad, I’d say. Easier and quicker than doing it in the U.S. Cheaper too. It costs an extra $100 to get it in two weeks in the U.S. Considering all this, I suppose I will forgive them for the fact that my picture is quite blurry. For some incomprehensible reason, they took my perfectly sized photo and blew it up until my head almost fills the whole square.… Read more

Finally in Florence

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

So where was I? Oh, yes, sitting on the suitcases. Turns out, Tony’s car reservation was actually NOT a real reservation, and when we tried to run our debit card to rent the car, it was declined of course, since we’d withdrawn all the money from our American account so we could have cash in Italy. You can’t rent a car with any amount of cash, apparently, at least not any amount we were prepared to offer.

So after a few hours of tense deliberation, we rode the bus into Torino, spent the night there, worked out the car problem, and were driving down the autostrada just 24 hours later than we had planned.… Read more

Travels (or should we say Travails?)

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

The course of true love never did run smooth. I am sitting at a stop at the end of the the Torino airport bus line. Our nine pieces of luggage, stroller, and two gigantic car seats are piled all around me. Actually, Axa is sleeping in one of those car seats. Tony has a sleeping Raj on his back and is off in search of a hotel. I must make a funny picture sitting on an overstuffed suitcase, typing away unconcernedly on my laptop as if I didn’t stick out like a tie-dyed giraffe.

We’ve had quite a day of it.… Read more

Plane Tickets

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Happily, happily, after several more calls to AirOne Airlines, we are now in possession of four beautiful confirmation numbers (one for each of us) on return tickets to Italy. March 26 is our lucky day!

Everyone here tells us how lucky we are to live in Italy, and I heartily concur. We’ve just been away way too long.

Tony and I started reading our first literature in Italian today. Cuore, by Edmondo De Amicis. Wish us luck! We only got through a couple of paragraphs, and we didn’t understand everything. But it made us miss Italy.… Read more

Gelato on a cone?

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

We are supposed to be in Italy. The week before we were to return home, between two weddings, Christmas, and New Year’s, we realized that we had substantially overestimated the number of things we could accomplish in three months, even at a frenetic, positively Southern Californian pace. So we called our Italian airline, AirOne, which as you remember, considers carseats unsafe for children. It appears that AirOne employs one lone Indian customer service agent. It took us a few days to catch him on duty.

When we finally did, he said there was no way he could look up our reservation without a code from Expedia, where we’d purchased the ticket.… Read more

Not so Christmassy at all

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 rewired my five-year-old mind. It’s not so much a visual image that I remember, but the description of the charred glove found at the scene. From then on, I was horrified by anything to do with outer space. Though I was a confirmed bookworm with varied tastes, for at least eight or nine years afterward I religiously avoided the little rocket sticker that designated science fiction at our library.

I had a similar experience a few months ago. We had been searching for a new business supplier and considering a factory in Pakistan.… Read more

Underdressed in Milan

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

No, make that severely underdressed.

On our way out of Italy, we decided to make a day of it in Milan. We planned to take the 7:45 bus to Cuneo, then a 9:00 train, which would leave us in Milan around 12:30. However, for some reason Raj woke up at 4:45 in the morning. He lay in bed, quietly humming to himself with his eyes wide open, for the next half hour. Finally, we decided to get up and leave on the 6:10 bus and get there an hour and a half earlier.

So we madly packed up the clothes that hadn’t been quite dry the day before, did our last-minute cleaning, and finally got the children up.… Read more

San Diego

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

We’ve ditched the Italian schedule. No more dinners at 7:00. We need to get this family to bed at a reasonable time. Tony was thinking yesterday that most of our productive, happy family time is in the morning. Afternoon is for naps. So we’ve decided to lengthen the morning at the expense of the afternoon. Instead of having a three-hour morning and a seven-hour afternoon, we’ll have a five-hour morning and a five-hour afternoon, and spend some time in the afternoon doing things like tidying the house, setting out everyone’s clothes, and fixing a picnic lunch for the next day.

For the past year or so (since our second child was born, coincidentally enough), we’ve had something of a schedule fetish.… Read more