Tuscany with the Whole Family

The Villa at the back

Part of the reason why we needed to ‘sprint’ across Greece is that my Mother rented a villa in Tuscany and my brother Jeff and his wife Kristen, my sister Elizabeth and her daughter Chloe, my mom and us four were going to meet up there for a week and tour Tuscany.

Left to right:  Ross (on a lower step!), Matt's brother Jeff, Matt,
Michaelle (the Villa owner and his dog), Matt's mom Sharon,
Matt's sister Betsy (the one in front), Jeff's wife Kristen,
Jessie, Marina and Matt's niece Chloe. 

The others actually started in Paris while we were working our way up the coast of Italy – spending a couple of days at the Louvre and other museums while we washed the boat, did laundry and generally bummed around Ostia (a suburb of Rome) and tooled around on the trains.

We rented a car for the week. What a difference from Israel – where the car is $20 per day, in Europe – at least Italy, it’s more like 50 Euros a day  -- we had a Peugeot hatchback – we’ve gotten used to the size of cars in Europe – it is about the same size as a Nissan Micra – which is a reasonably sized car here.

So we headed up the A1 toll road towards Tuscany. The directions from the villa owner were probably the only beef we had with the week. We got off the highway and turned left (I would guess they don’t get out much) and that turned out to be the opposite of where we needed to go. Eventually after driving around asking for Cottage Cortona – in a village that’s 15 miles from Cortona when you don’t speak Italian can be challenging. Eventually we called on a house, showed them the place on the Internet (thank goodness for high-speed internet sticks) and their young son hopped on his scooter and led us there. What a nice thing to do. We were impressed and suggested to Ross he would be a good role model.

The view to Cortona from the back of the Villa - sadly,
the pool was not open yet. 

Anyway, we arrived and the place was way nicer than we had expected. Each group had their own cabin – so we had 4 in all, plus a dining room that we could share. Each ‘cabin’ was well equipped with a gas stove (4 burners – wow, we have more than 2) a big fridge, a dishwasher – boy the kids really appreciate a dishwasher now they’ve been washing dishes for most of a year! The first night Michaelle and his wife served us dinner of local meats and vegetables and we sampled their own wine label, olive oil label and tomato sauce label.

Kristen, Jeff and Sharon getting a meal going in the dining room. 

The rest of the week is a blur, we toured Cortona, wine country, Firenze and also had a chance to just hang out. The kids really loved having their cousin Chloe around and it was great to catch up with Betsy about what’s happening back home. We’d Skype every day with Uncle Andrew – Betsy’s husband who gave us the play-by-play on the Canucks – though I was secretly listening on the Teamradio.ca internet feed in the middle of the night. Betsy and my mother were cooking up a storm and we dined very well indeed.

Cousins!

When my brother Jeff and Kristen came the cooking moved into seafood– with many beautiful meals being prepared. Marina and I managed to sneak away for a couple of dates on the tennis court and one nice day alone in wine country. I am sure the kids enjoyed their time without their parents.

Wine country....

Wine tasting!

The small bottle we bought Jeff for his birthday!

One of the events that will live with us for quite a long time is a close encounter Ross had with a clay planter. The kids would play kick-ball for hours and one time Ross was running by the planter, he hit it with his leg and ended up with three rather nasty gashes that needed medical attention. Michello lit off with Ross and Marina to the Hospital and returned about an hour later with Ross hobbling having received 8 stitches. 

Is this going to hurt...?

Clearly he didn’t have a plastic surgeon put these stiches in as I would reckon they could have done 20 or 30 in the cuts if they bothered to put them closer than 5mm apart. Anyway, that kind of stopped the kickball for a while and Ross hobbled around for a couple of days in some pain.

I think he likes the attention.

The last night came and it was time to say our goodbyes. My mom true to form said they should be leaving around 9am and had everyone packed and ready to go by 8 … so they left at 8:15, only to return 5 minutes later because someone thought they forgot something ... typical.

We had a lazy morning, nice to have the quiet and be back to our quartet running on our own schedule. We piled an enormous amount of stuff in the car – did I mention that my mom brought 50 pounds of gear for us all the way from home?? And we piled in the car for the trip to Rome. We had wanted to go to Ikea to see if they had totes that we can store our gear in when we come home. Sure enough we saw Ikea,I missed the turn and blamed it on the others – typical skipper – but we made it and added a bunch more stuff into the car so we were loaded down even more.

We were fully loaded. 

We made it back to Porto Turistico di Roma in the early evening, unpacked the car, took several trips to the boat and filled our fridge from the leftovers from Tuscany. The only real casualty from the trip was my waistline that probably grew an inch or so in the process.