I was born with itchy feet and have spent just about every cent I've ever earned on travelling. So I thought I'd celebrate the approaching release of TRUSTING A STRANGER with an excerpt from the journal I kept while researching one of its locations -- on a trip to Tuscany, with children in tow.
As it turned out, the most difficult part of this trip was actually getting there....
Diary entry from Villa Costalpino, near Siena, Italy...
This place is so overwhelming, both its beauty and
how difficult it was to get here.
Yesterday started badly when our plane from Paris to Milan was over
three hours late. The professional
opinion amongst the staff at Orly airport was that we got what we deserved for
choosing to fly Easyjet. With
accommodation already booked some hours away, we raced to pick up our hire car.
And that was where real problems began.
To start with, we couldn't find the entrance
to the autostrada from Milan to Bologna.
Literally couldn't find it. We drove around all these little side streets
that seemed to be going in the right direction (passing a little town called
Lodi about four times). At one stage, we
followed a couple of other cars who seemed to know where they were going, but
they knew well enough to go really quickly (my partner, *Patrick, was still
getting used to driving on the wrong side of the road) and we ended up on this
tiny road that wound through the countryside, parallel to the autostrada, barely wide enough for one car, where we were
nearly run into a wide, deep ditch by a car going the other direction.
After
about two wasted hours, eventually we found our way onto the autostrada headed
towards Bologna. At a restaurant to the
side of the road, we grabbed some pasta for dinner, and Patrick phoned the
housekeeper of the place where we planned to stay. She was waiting for us to arrive by 6pm,
which was no longer possible, so let her know we’d try to get there by 11pm
when she (the keeper of the keys) was due to leave. To make even our new
deadline, we knew we had to rush.
Eventually,
after much travail, many miles travelling far faster than we usually do over
autostradas which are fantastic as far as Bologna, and a little less fantastic
after that, and on the ordinary highway between Florence and Siena (which
doesn't have much in the way of lighting, also--it was raining) we arrived in
Siena just after 11.
Yay. Nearly on time and it seemed like we
were so close.
But from there, we could not get anywhere. I read my instructions over
and over. They said, approach Siena, then
take a turn off towards Grossetto. We tried this a few times--early in the
piece, we almost ended up in Grossetto, until it obviously became time to go
back. The second time we tried to get
there, we went too far the other way and ended up nearly in Sinalunga. In a town just before there, we found a
hotel, and decided that the only thing to do was to stay somewhere else and
come back to Costalpino in the morning.
But the hotel was full. Patrick had gone in to check, leaving me in
the car with the two boys who were both sleeping by then (after our turns and
twists, it was about 1am), and returned with instructions to another hotel that
was just a few hundred metres up the
road.
We started the car again and continued
driving, jet-lagged and sleep-deprived on the wrong side of a dark road,
towards a place that turned out to be a couple of kilometres further than
that. And closed.
We turned and headed back for Siena, with the
idea of finding a hotel there. But as far as we could work out, even the
hotels inside the city walls, where we weren’t allowed to drive and did anyway,
were all already closed. All of them.
Over the next few hours, we drove around looking for other things. This quest centered around a place to do a
wee. If there were public toilets, there were no signs. We saw signs pointing
towards the Ospidale (yes! there were signs--plenty of them!--that
should have made our search easier) and thought we might be able to use toilets
there, but none of the signs seemed to bear any relation to a place where a
building, either the ordinary Ospidale or the nuovo ospidale was.
When we finally found the nuovo ospidale,
there was a gate to pass and a gatekeeper sitting there, looking suspicious at
us for just being there interrupting whatever it is that gatekeepers do at 2:30
am. I didn't feel like taking him on
just for the sake of using the toilet.
Nothing as civilised as a public toilet or even a bar open that time of
the night. Eventually, we found an industrial
estate and had to... do our business...
In the bushes behind.
Some time around 5am we pulled into a car
park and tried to catch some sleep in the car until the warm aroma of fresh
urine wafted towards us from the back seat and we knew we had to get the boys
somewhere to bathe. And buy some upholstery shampoo
Who would have guessed how wonderful the rest
of our stay was going to be or how many story ideas I’d get while there? More
details in following posts...
*all names
have been changed
