A weirdly contagious bout of jetlag insomia meant that we were both awake till nearly dawn last night and slept past 10 this morning (is it gluttonous to set an alarm only to get up in time for breakfast?).

So, up at 10 for breakfast, which is actually two hours of nibbling on bread, local cheeses and espresso on the patio while talking European politics with our host. Then a run – more on that later. Then a light lunch of pasta, red sauce in our apartment around 3pm, followed by some napping and reading on the porch. Then we drove in to the nearest village, ostensibly in search of postcards for our grandmothers, but found that we are most definitely outside of postcard country. So we settled for a 5pm gelato break. (My travel Italian is terrible but I have managed to get all necessary words for ordering gelato and espesso down.) There was a small stray dog who visited the gelateria and the girl working there fed it scraps of proccuito. Even stray animals eat well here.

Then on to a 9pm dinner reservation at a neighboring agroturismo. It appears that most small wineries (and that’s all there is here, small family-run wineries) suplement their income by hosting a few tourists, but the tourists are mainly Italian or European and few places are set up to accommodate the english-speaking hoards. Luckily everyone charmed, or at least patient with our sorry attempts to speak Italian rather than switching over to perfect English as soon as one of us flounders and declares a dish to be “purple!” instead of “delicious!” or something. Ordering dinner is an adventure because there is no written menu — the server simply reads a couple of options for each course to aloud – no time to compare the written menu to a list of food vocabulary (eg, I heard zucchini, so ordered that, what arrived was two deep-fried fish, garnished with a bit of zucchini. Luckily I managed to dodge the veal course.)

The hyper-local wine, bottled in a cellar not 200m from where we sat drinking it.

Anyway, running:

I try to run in every new place (city/state/country) I visit. It’s a way of staying vaguely in shape while on vacation but making exercise an adventure rather than a chore. Treadmill in the hotel? a chore. Running a historic route in downtown Topeka/Toronto/Tokyo? adventure.

This is the only way we work off all this food, because, much like the US, walking is a city activity; out here people drive to get to places. However walking, in the British sense, ie, hiking, is popular and while our host looked doubtful when we proposed going for a midday run (its VERY hilly country, and hot), she did direct us to an excellent 10k route that ran out a ridge with beautiful views of the Lange Valley. Public walking paths traipse across private land in a manner that is both refreshing and alien to Americans with our barbed wired fences and shotguns and private property signs; our running route took us down country roads and driveways, through orchards and vineyards, past wheat fields and tangled bits of forest. While we’ve only seen one other runner here in the past 3 days, we weren’t enough of an oddity to cause a spectacle*, which is the best I can usually hope for.

*Unlike the time Chris and Teresa and I decided to swim out to Shell Island in the middle of Payette Lake in McCall, a lake where the recreation is almost exclusively of the motorized kind. People kept pulling over to ask if our boat had sank.