Today we relax at our lovely house. I need to recover from the long drive from France and that drive up the mountain! I tell Howard I am NOT driving into town for groceries, so what we have is all we get. Fortunately our host, Masimmo, left us with a great loaf of Italian bread, olive oil from the groves in our front garden, pasta and wine. (Although the wine is long gone by today.) We did bring enough wine and a miss-mash of leftover food and pantry staples so at least we won’t go hungry today.
The weather is gorgeous! It’s warm-hot but the terrace has plenty of places for a shady resting place.
There is no fencing to corral the dogs so we get busy creating barriers around the terrace. We find a large, heavy, A-frame laundry dryer. Opened up it creates a pretty large barrier. The chaise lounge pads can also be propped up against the plants at the edge of the terrace. Finally we fill I the gaps with some folding chairs. It looks pretty good but not perfect. Before we know it, Lucky is whining and that can only mean one thing: His best friend Toby has escaped.
Toby is not an obedient dog so calling him is futile and we are panicked. We eventually find him more-or-less trapped on one of the grove’s terraces. He fortunately found that he could not go further down the hill but could not get back up from where he came. But Toby is not the only escape artist! Lucien can jump incredibly high and surprises us by staring at us from the other side of the barrier. Each time there is an escape we try to fortify the “ramparts.” It is a constant effort.
Howard fixes great sardine pasta for dinner–yum! (Our motto since arriving on the trip is “always have dried pasta and canned sardines and the pantry and scallops in the freezer.”) A sardine pasta dish seems like a quintessential Italian meal. There are fixings for a nice salad too–pears and avocados are a good match in a green salad. We adjourn to bed to read long before the sun goes down. We want to avoid the evil fairies in the woods.
I email our dog sitter about the treacherous drive up and tell her that if she’s not up to it that’s OK with us. (I’m hoping she backs out so that we can ensconce ourselves here for the duration). No such luck; she is pro at mountain driving, she says.