A Fly-Free Meet in Città di Castello

Yesterday, Florence had a meet in Città di Castello, a town about an hour away from us (at the far north of Umbria). Since it was for fly and free (and IM as well, a favorite of Florence's and ours), Michael and I were all gung-ho to watch. So we rented a car and set off for the north.

We were struck again with culture shock that I thought it would be fun to note:

1. On tap, they offered Coke, beer, and wine.

 2. The "athlete's menu" consists of a primo (pasta), secondo (meat), and contorno (veg). So much for a hamburger, fries, and soda! No mention of dessert, either















3. The sweets are colorful, to say the least.

Standard equipment

4. Concession stand pizza is anything but: they get the dough and put it in a press to make a super-thin crust on the spot. Then they smear it with sauce and cheese, and bung it in the oven with their long-handled spatula. It was actually delicious, and only $1.40 for a huge piece.








5. Cookies are served bakery-style, individually. They looked beautiful.

Warmups were a bit tight

Still warming up

It was also really fun to see Florence so much in her element. She swam a beautiful race for her fly; her IM event cracked us up: she hates breast, and excels in underwater pulls, so she ended up taking long, slow strokes and spending most of her time underwater. Meanwhile, the others were pulling three times for every one of her pulls and barely keeping up with her! Because of the way the heats worked out, she won second for both her events, despite winning both of the heats.

Love,

Alexandra

Environmental Change

At least on a local level!

Florence loves her sense of cocooning, so I had long decided to make her a tent...a way to enclose her bed and give her a little nest. I finally finished it!

I made the quilt a while back

Closed! We bought the fabric in India

We also decided it was time for the boys to have a bunk bed, and a fresh coat of paint was definitely in order. Andrea painted one wall green for us, and the rest is newly whitened. Fun, huh? Plus, of course, they had done their "annual" shoveling-out, so it is currently relatively clean.

Love,

Alexandra

Skiing at Canazei

I've just got back from a wonderful week off work in which I participated in the Italian tradition of a settimana bianca, a "white week" being a ski vacation.  This one was organized by buddies from the running club, so I got to experience a ski week done the Italian way.

At 7:00 am last Saturday we all piled into a 9-passenger van and made the long drive from Todi to Canazei, which occupies a narrow valley in the Dolomites.  The drive to get there overrode the normal Italian desires for food, and we made only two brief stops in the 8-hour drive, neither of which were for lunch.  At 3-something we checked into the hotel and then dashed out for a much-needed bite to eat, then ski rentals and lift tickets.

We had rooms in a small hotel a couple of hundred meters from lifts to the slopes.  I think the hotel had about 15 rooms total.  Mine was perhaps the smallest, a single nestled under the eaves on the third floor.  The slope of the roof limited the ceiling height, and over the bed and toilet they had given up and squared it off at chest height.

No standing in front of this toilet.  And in fact watch your head when you get up!

And then the next morning it was off to ski!

And to ski and ski.  Canazei is a town, one of a number in the valleys of the region.  You sleep, eat, and party in those towns, and take the lifts up into the mountains each morning.  My first lift of the morning was a brand new 100-passenger cable car with a 800 meter vertical climb (three times the rise of the one at Stone Mountain).

Once on the mountain you are in a whole network of interconnected resorts and can visit others towns, make all-day circuits, or head off to distant corners.  Our lift passes covered 12 resorts and 1200 km of slopes.  We worked off a map of the four resorts that were within a one-day skiing range.

A popular set of lifts and slopes are those of the "Sellaronda", the ones that let you circle a prominence in the center called the Sella Group (the Sella Group looked large and was even larger, rising a full kilometer above the ski slopes).  The Sellaronda course is about 42 km long and takes 5-6 hours to ski.  And it is just a small part of the interconnected system.

My ski pass log--everything is electronic these days--tells me that I rode 79 different lifts in 6 days, averaged something like 43 km per day, and had a total vertical descent of 47 km.  In real terms it meant I had a blast and skied first lift to last lift six days in a row.  Actually, after last lift on our final day.  We hung around a slopeside bar until half an hour after the lifts stopped running, then made our final dusk descent into the town below as they brought out the snow cats.

Here is the gang minus one non-skiing wife:

Massimo and me in a cable car:

The weather turned out to be uncomfortably warm--mostly above zero--and that meant less-than-ideal snow conditions by midday.  One day we decided the best way to get around that was to go for altitude, so we skied to the highest peak in the Dolomites, Marmolada.

A system of three cable cars lifts you 1834 meters (over a mile!) from the base area and drops you off at 3250 meters.  Several flights of stairs later you are on the viewing platform, and as luck would have it we chose a day with fantastic visibility.  The mountains stretched off to the horizon in every direction.

Of course, then you have to ski down.  This turned out to be one of our most demanding days physically.

The gang before we started down Marmolada

This was a small church on the side of the slopes we skied the last day.  We were in Italy, after all.  Why wouldn't you have a church on the slopes?  We stopped in to pay our respects and look around.  Holy ice.

Speaking of Italy, no ski trip is complete without meals, preferably slopeside.

Dinners were included in our hotel package.  Here we are around the table at the conclusion of one, ready to head into the lounge for continued conversation and some mean rounds of cards.

Michael