Back to . . . Italy!

O! O! The adventures I'm having! I've been seeking out the stranger quarters, as usual, by my extraordinary but still incomprehensible "gift". I'm not sure about the roots of my gift, but I've identified several possible sources of my unusual ability to find, in any collection of people, the crazies: subconcious intention, an internal wierdo magnet, or - aha! - magic. Regardless, I am, much like the sister in the awesome photo I copied today at the National Museum of the Mountain in Torino, having one heck of a time. Getting to know the Crazies is an involved undertaking, and my internet access, following suit with the rest of my life, is often more than a bit unpredictable. Hence: You'll have to grab me with a crampon - or, now that I think more about it, a glass of wine and a piece of dark chocolate would be much more effective tools - and I'll gladly story you up. I'll have more time to color in the shadows, that way, too. For now, a children's picture book about my last few weeks:

After the chateau in theLes Audes, France, I went to work on a git (a type of rural B&B) in the Alps, still in France, still part of WWOOF. They advertised for help in their organic garden, preparing organic meals for guests, and setting up a system of solar panel. After using my fantasy-to-reality translator, which only works on location, I discovered that a better translation of this would be: washing dishes. Essentially, I just washed dishes. Hours and hours and hours of dishes. Nothing against dishes, really: in fact, it's a chore I could even say I kind of like. But I already know how to wash dishes . . . it's the organic farming and the solar panels I was hoping to learn about. Here's my valley, near Briancon, France:

Anyway, I took advantage of the situation and hiked all around the area. It was beautiful!

I also did a lot of hiking because the family had three demon-children, and I did everything I could to avoid being in the crazy house. I think flowers and mountains and walking are much nicer than demon-children. And, adding to my obsession, I discovered that a branch of the Camino de Santiago passes right by the gite doorstep! So I had to follow it . . .

Also, I'd become obsessed with doing a Via Ferrata. They're kind of like JV rock climbs: they can be really challenging, but they don't have to be. There are iron spikes and handgrips already in the rocks, and the site rents you equipment, so you can basically just show-up-and-go . . . from there, you can make it as hard or easy as you like. (You know which way I chose.) This also turned into a crazy adventure: I was exactly halfway up a 500-foot sheer rock wall when the weather suddenly changed. A storm came, a storm with hurricane-force winds and pelting sideways monsoon-like rain. I had no choice but to go down . . . or up . . . so I went up . . . ! It felt like a real adventure, anyway. Also, I dig the helmet, and am thinking about replacing my bike helmet with a Via Ferrata model:

The Crazies started to make me a little too crazy, so I bailed out of France and into Italy. I made it to Turin, where I'm staying with Silvana, an amazing woman I linked up with through Hospitality Club. She's an incredible host and even took me to Eataly (also an extraordinary place, worth checking out the website) for a Welcome-Back-to-Italy pizza:

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure

So: I’m WWOOFing in France. (It’s a long story, but the short of it is: I got fired from my sweet bike job. So I decided to turn it into a positive and learn French!) I’ve spent the last few weeks on a chateau / wine estate / garden / B&B / restaurant in Le Aude, a beautiful but atrociously hot, fly-ridden part of Southern France. It’s kind of near Barcelona, Spain – that’s probably the easiest way to describe it. My “estate”, La Sabine, makes reds, whites, and roses – I like the whites the best – and they host dinner-concerts on their patio every Thursday night. I’ve been disappointed in the experience in that I haven’t really learned what I hoped to learn – about wine, about organic agricultural production, about restaurants – but I have a learned a lot of other things - about business and entrepreneurship and toilets and psychiatriac problems -, progressed with French to the point where I think it’s now fair to say that I “speak some French”, and seen an area of France that seems a little off the foreigner-beaten track.

My favorite experience so far was my hitchhiking-trekking-and-camping adventure last weekend. This was an adventure of the choose-your-own variety with a turn-to-page-X option every five minutes. It took me 14 different pick-ups to get to the Peyrepetuse Castle and back, and along the way I met, amongst others, a dealer of “strange African paintings”, a Belgian cyclist, a Brasilian musician, a stoner-cum-boat-builder, a stoner-cum-raver, and a couple of stoner-cum-Rastafarians. My most interesting ride, however, came from an 82- (“and-a-half”) year old man from the area. I could understand this guy easier than lots of other people, believe it or not, because he spoke a local dialect that seemed closer to Spanish than to French. He went on and on and on about the oak trees. There are white oaks and green oaks. Green oaks and white oaks. Look! There are some there! And there! And there! (We were driving through a forest.) The man was obsessed with oak trees.

It turns out that the man was obsessed with oak trees because oak trees have acorns, and acorns are what the wild boars eat, and this man, at the age of 82 (and-a-half) continues to hunt wild boars. In fact, last year he caught a wild boar that was 130 kg – about 280 pounds, or three mes!

This is important because it helped me to “identify” some of the “night sounds” that graced my camping-in-the-wild experience that night. I have, admittedly, no training in identifying wild boars. But I am absolutely convinced that the snorting not at all so far from my tent was – yes – a wild boar (and probably one that weighed 130 kg, too). Though I’m not usually one given over to fear, I will admit that I was terrified for most of the night, motivated to pursue an early-morning 6 AM departure, and even more motivated, at 5:55, to forget the rest of my PowerBar and skedaddle, right through the blackberry briars and garrigue scrubland, to someplace far, far away from where I had camped.

On the plus side, I saw a beautiful sunrise over Peyrepetuse Castle, hiked a good bit of the long-distance Cathard Way, soaked my feet at the gorges of Galamus, met some interesting people along the way, and at least temporarily sated my taste for adventure.

Here are a few photos.