Day 26...All "B"s

BOOM...BOOM...BOOM...went on for 20 minutes.  Starting at 9am that's all we could hear from our room. Peggy looked in the kitchen area to see if it was falling pots, pans, or bottles...

Then she checked under the bed to see if perhaps large rodents had arrived ( ala Granite Bay's ferocious, house entering, cat food eating raccoons...):

Side note for those observant enough to see the fan located on the floor to the left of the bed....turns out we are in an unprecedented heat wave for this area.  At 1500 feet, they never need air conditioning, and every night cools down quite quickly.  Not these last few days.  Temps in the mid 90s with humidity in the 80s and everyone couldn't stop talking about CALDO...the heat.  Thankfully there are only 2 guests using the room, because Alessandro had only 2 fans...Back to the BOOMs.

Thought it was exploding tractors...their farm equipment is old, then thought it was thunder, then went into the breakfast room and our host, Alessandro, and my newest Facebook friend, told us the truth.  Barbaresco is SOOO concerned about their vines, that any time there appears to be potential thunderstorms they shoot a particular "silver mixed with mercury solution", fired from boxes on the top of the hills, into the clouds to prevent hail and to hopefully force rain.  They want to avoid heavy downpours and especially ice from ruining the vines. It worked...about 10 minutes later we were treated to a nice, light rain for about 30 minutes...

BARBESCO...a lovely village known in ancient times for its towers:

 The construction on the right of the tower is actually an elevator that allows you to go up and see the view from the top...it wasn't working :(  But there was a nice painting of the tower on one of the old walls in the city:

And its wines...slightly lower priced than Barolo, and a bit higher than Nebbiolo...but the same grapes.  The amazing part of this enoteca...wine tasting room, was that the wine was self serve...

They had 3 wines to taste, lovely glassware, excellent local cheeses and grissini...those local breadsticks..and best of all Jimi Hendrix was looping on the audio system... We must have heard : "And the wind...cries....Mary..." about a dozen times...

BENCHES and BOOKS:  The real objective for the day was to find the perfect bench for reading and relaxing...In Barberesco:

 and the view:

Elva...you know Peggy was loving it...I too was finishing a book that David Dedman turned me on to, called the 11 Days of Christmas...the Last Bombing of the Vietnam War.  Very interesting and informative..

Then we drove to the village of Mango and went to their castle...

to taste the Muscatto and famous Asti Spumante...

but mostly to read...notice Peggy's book "London"...neither of us were reading anything to do with Italy hmmm..Nonetheless, here's the bench, which at times compels one to look around rather than read..ala Peggy:

and here's the view:

I finished my book and Peggy is on page 150 of what seems to be 2500 pages (actually 1145).  She learned that in 1100 A.D.  in London, the traders would take a big branch and cut it to a certain size to represent the value of what was being traded...the owner was given the big piece, or stock, of the branch...and that's the root of the term stock exchange!  So many pages for her to get that one gem...but worth it for me:))

BEER:  For a change of pace we found that a local town had a new brewery, which was a breakthrough for this region, as you might imagine...they also had the large screen TV for the Final World Cup Match...we decided to have the "formal" dinner upstairs rather than have appetizers listening to a DJ blast some local music downstairs.  We were the only ones in the restaurant all night...but the food was still pretty tasty...
Starting with the Blue Cheese and Celery amuse bouche

Peggy ordered the fixed price meal (30 euros) where every dish had something to do with Beer in its preparation...her antipasti had pork marinated in beer

To save money and waistline...I went with 2 antipasti and then split her main course... my first was lightly fried shrimp with zucchini flowers: Christine....they were not quite as good as yours...

Peggy's primi piatti, was risotto with asparagus and grilled chopped meat (not tongue...)

Very tasty, while I enjoyed a terrine of zucchini and fresh tomato coulis covered with brand new mozzarela and ricotta

Peg's main course of pork tenderloin with sea salt and multi colored peppercorns was amazingly delicious: and enough for 2..(I felt like Steve..getting great value for two by paying the price of one): What's pictured below is half of the total serving :)))

BALLGAME:  our last activity was watching the ballgame on the big screen downstairs in their pub area....but eventhough we had the power table..it was stifling hot.  Fitting the words to the song "How're you gunno breathe with no air?"
So we drove back to our B and B and watched the second half , and Spain's victory, on our mini TV...

A very relaxing Sunday..with great times of reading, prayer and peaceful surroundings throughout the day.  Until tomorrow...ciao bella dear friends...