A few side lined stories…..

Mike and I wanted to share a few stories that have not made the blog yet. The first one is about how creative one can be in a dire situation involving food. We booked a 5 day, 4 nights stay at this quaint bed and breakfast outside of Sienna. We knew we had a problem with transportation with getting around, however, the owners told us they would pick us up from the train station and take us around as needed. The B&B was about 15-20 minutes from Sienna, the next city that had anything ( food, stores, etc. ) so we were pretty much on our own for food. Luckily, the owners knew this and provided us with lunch and dinner a few nights. Our B&B was turning out to be a B&BLD ( breakfast, lunch, and dinner ). Even though we paid for the food we still felt bad for asking. So this brings us to our last full day at the B&B. We had breakfast, relaxed by the pool, and around 2pm started to get hungry for lunch. We did not want to ask them, yet again to make us something so we decided to fast until dinner. The fasting lasted about one hour before we were REALLY hungry. We started to get creative. We had a left over “Corny” bar that was squashed in the bottom of my book bag so we took that out and ate that. A “Corny” bar is like a cross between a rice crispy treat and a granola bar. Then we remembered that we had a small bag of cheesy sticks that they gave to us on one of the train rides from a few weeks ago. The bag was the size of the small bags of peanuts you get on an airplane. We quickly rummaged around to find the cheesy sticks and had that as well. Still hungry, we found a few mints in the lobby-mmmm. Dessert! We were about to go back out into the fields and grab a few grapes off the grape vine, snag some unripe olives off their trees, and pick a lime off the lime tree when we had a great idea of going down stairs and asking to buy a bottle of wine from their cellar, and while down there, asking them for some bread to go with it. Our plan worked and we somehow survived until dinner!

Mosquitoes.

While staying in a hotel in Milan, we were attacked at night by mosquitoes. When we walked into our room the door to the balcony had been left wide open. We closed and locked the door and headed out for dinner. We came back and got ready for bed when the faint buzzing sound began. We tried to hide under the covers but it was too hot-the air conditioning didn’t work. Anything that was exposed was bitten by a mosquito-toes, hands, faces, etc. At about 4am Mike had had enough and shot straight up in bed and turned on all of the lights. He was determined to kill each and every damn mosquito that had been biting us throughout the night. You would think that the greedy blood suckers would have had their fill and stop after a while, but not these mosquitoes. Mike successfully killed 3-4 of them the first hour. With each kill he got more and more pumped, the testosterone was going, and he was determined to stay up until they were all dead. By sunrise he had killed all of them and we got up and out of that hotel so fast and on to the next train to Switzerland in search of some Calamine lotion.