I got here, didn't get a good safety feeling from central city, could not get anyone to sell me a local bus ticket. It felt very much like "tourist go home". So another hour schlep to the apartment on the edge of town on aching legs, in the pounding sun. Nice hosts greeted me.
A cold shower later (despairing of ever fixing the shin splints with all the weighted walking) I dug unto the app for bus tickets here. Wow, a 1.5 rating? You gotta work at incompetence to earn that! The horror stories (50 euro fine for not having ticket when it was right there on the phone) made me think... No. Not going to happen.
Okay, it's an hour walk to the historical, tourist places. Not going to do it daily but could do it every few days. Not happy. But no despair. It is what it is.
Then i got up, looked at the huge flat I'm in, the greenway around it, listening to birds singing and a canal running merrily 2 blocks away, and I said you know what you have here, kid?
You have a $5000 Italian countryside writing retreat for a week!
And i only paid 500 for the place.
So, walked to grocery store, $30 for a full week of clean, healthy at-home dining. The cheeses alone would make you weep. So many kinds! Then backto the flat, and right at end of my edge-of-suburb street, a farmer is setting up a stand!
Put groceries away. Went over there and bought a pound of fresh-picked Emilia Romagna cherries, and writer or not, I do not have words to describe. Five levels above best cherries i ever ate, including fresh Rainier cherries in Oregon. Cherries that make you weep in gratitude for being alive.
Dining area and kitchen at dawn, from living room.
The green space across the way. Time for bird watching.
I took for Charlotte this pic in grocery store of eggplants, which, btw, taste entirely different here. Has to be the volcanic soil or something. That's not wax on them. They simply glow. Because someone picked them fresh not 50 miles away yesterday.
So I'm set for a writer's retreat. Turned frustration to joy.
And will get a novel by the time I'm in AZ that will make most of the trip deductible. Not a bad lemonade to make from this lemon. 🙃
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