Day 9...are you kidding me

It was great spending the last 4 days with Steve and Elva!  Here they are touching the Adriatic for the first time!!!The ultimate purpose of this visit was for Elva to dig up her roots.  She had family that originated from Abruzzo, and had hired some awesome research team to get her in touch with those memories, people and places.  They were blessed beyond belief...but that's their story to tell...Ours is...

In a world of instant communication and world wide access to every piece of info you can imagine, Gary and Peggy Gubitz happened to be in a Villas for 2 location in the beautiful region of Abruzzo, Italy.  Yes, the location had wifi...but NO my netbook could not make the connection.  And yes, before I realized this I had loaded and then deleted all the photos onto said netbook and had erased them on the camera SD card.  That said, since I had to use another laptop to access the internet, I was not able to retrieve, post or otherwise share those photos.  Which simply leads me to being on Day 9 even though the last post was for day 5!

Finding this location, and meeting up with Steve and Elva was providential beyond description.  Suffice it to say we were lost...we had directions from Mapquest and forgot to print the directions from the hotel.  After convincing ourselves that we we were world travelers and obvious winners on the Amazing Race (if we ever really entered), it was clear that winners on Amazing Race don't freak out or scream or get fearful.  So we didn't.  Instead, we stopped at the nearest tractor guy, and asked in our best Italglish if he could help us.  We couldn't understand a word of his, which made us even because he couldn't understand one word of ours (Gary wants to know when Peggy's 6000 years of Italian lessons would pay off in a conversation???).  Nonetheless, the only word he understood was "English" and he said "I know English person".  He got off his tractor, literally, asked us to wait while he washed his hands, jumped into his fiat and drove ahead of us to an out of the way, down the wrong road, never to have found this place in a million years...and said "English here...".  We looked at each other and thought we were so lost and so not communicating until we looked at the house and who would be walking around the corner at that exact moment?   Steve and Elva.  What ???!!! What are you guys doing here?  We had been driven right to our hotel in the middle of SN (Stinkin Nowhere), and had perfectly timed our arrival to the Burlingham's arrival, otherwise we would have NEVER found this place.  That said, we proceeded to spend 4 lovely days enjoying Abruzzo and the mountainous scenery.  The weather was raining at first and the temp was cold...this did not dissuade us having a wonderful time with Steve and Elva.  here are a few photos of these last few days...

Steve standing in the rain to leave room in the villa so ladies can "read"

Ladies enjoying some down time watching the mountains and the rain....while reading...

Peggy enjoying the mountains and the sun while reading...

Gary and Steve buying Gelato for ladies while they were "reading"...

While ladies were reading, Steve and I traveled the hilly countryside, and we also had some excellent food.  

Here's me at a monument in Gassopolena?declaring that the Italian resistance will fight the Nazis and get their revenge on the Nazis for what they did to these Italian towns and people at the end of WW2..

Without spending too much time on our last few days, we catch you up to today when we arrived at Lake Como in a little town called Cannedabia.  We are 2 miles from Mennagio, looking across the lake at Bellagio.  Staying in the identical room Peggy and I enjoyed exactly 5 years ago, and having the same hosts and the same chef.  It's amazing how fast time flies...

This is Ty...our gourmet chef...and owner of the Albergetto Marianna.  He is actually STILL wearing the apron from Silver Oak Winery (Life is a Cabernet).  He would have loved a new one :)))

This is our dinner table view...looking at Bellagio from the outdoor patio table that will be ours for the next 7 nights.  Below are the themed menus for each night.  The price per person is normally 48 euros, but as we sat down, he mentioned that since we were repeat and favored guests..the price would be 30.  

The "Mint sauce with Eggplant Flan"... from Thursday's menu.

That will wrap up through Thursday the 24th.  We watched Italy lose while here at Lake Como...and we enjoyed fireworks over Bellagio to end our dinner viewing.  Not the same as fountains timed to music (ala Las Vegas)....but beautiful nonetheless.  Ciao bella!!!