It is Sunday, May 8, and we are back in Vermont.
We left Solferino on Wednesday. It was a beautiful sunny day, warm with clear skies. We drove to Orta San Giulo, which is on Lake Orta just about an hour’s drive north of Milan, and checked into the Villa Crespi. The hotel was built in 1879 by a Sig. Crespi who made his fortune in trading cotton and during his travels to the middle east had fallen in love with the “Persian” style of architecture and the home he built clearly reflects this passion.
We wandered around town for a bit and got caught in a rainstorm but waited it out in a little café overlooking the lake.
On Thursday we drove to Stresa, just about 15 kms over the mountains to the east and on the shore of Lake Maggiore. We took the cable car (“funivia”) up to the top of Mt. Mottarone (we had tried to do that in September of 2001 when we were in Stresa but it wasn’t working then) and then had lunch in Stresa. Afterwards we paid a visit to our friend Rosaria, who runs La Cambusa wine shop, and spent a wonderful afternoon talking about wine, food and sipping a bit of wine and eating cheese and bread in the back of their shop.
The next morning we checked out after having breakfast and drove to Milan’s Malpensa airport. We had called on Monday to arrange our car drop-off and that went very smoothly, taking all of about 5 minutes and we were on our way inside the terminal. We checked in and then had some lunch while we waited to board a 12:20 flight to JFK. Our good fortune continued with us: we were given two exit row seats and could not believe how much room we had – rather like our own tiny compartment. Time went by quickly as they showed 4 movies. We touched down in NYC a couple of minutes late, grabbed a cab and went to Penn Station where we bought a couple of tickets on Amtrak for Providence, RI. When we arrived in Providence it was about 9:30 and Susan’s brother Dick was waiting on the station platform for us – and drove us to their house where we soon crashed to get ready for our last leg of the return home, the drive to Vermont Saturday morning.
We are fortunate indeed to be able to do something like this. Was it a vacation or was it something not quite as easily categorized?
Whatever it was the real challenge now is for us to try and hold on to the opportunities given us by this experience.
1 comment:
Hi Steve
nice to read that you returned home save and enjoyed your time since you left Società Dante Alighieri. Learning about a new culture and a new language, is for me, like finding a hidden treasure and the best is you cant loos it because the memories are always there.
Greetings from Switzerland Reto
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