Welcome to Chez Cliff!

Italy shuts down between 1 and 3 p.m. every day.  Even the restaurants and bars.  If you find yourself hungry at 1:30, forget about it.  You’d have better luck capturing a pigeon for lunch than finding an open restaurant.

Thus was our predicament during one day of our vacation.

Maybe it was poor planning on our part or the fact that the previous nights dinner still sat in our stomachs.  Whatever the excuse, hunger did not visit us until we were into the lunch-time blackout.

So we did what anyone would do in our situation: we drove around.

Aimless wanderings, missed turns, and pure chance brought us to this small, mountain-top village called Montagna which is Italian for ‘mountain’.  Our first impressions of this town was that it was deserted.  No traffic, either by car or by foot.  Most of the buildings: boarded up.  I’m not sure what made us poke around this completely empty town but we did.  One of us noticed a sign which read “Ristorante”.  It was almost deserted . . . two men having lunch at a back table told us that maybe this place was the oasis in the lunch-time desert.

The owner came out to greet us.  A young owner.  His English: impeccable.  With open arms, our host bade us to sit and enjoy the best they had to offer.  No, no menus.  Just whatever the kitchen happened to fix.

Thus became the parade of dishes.  Pasta dish after pasta dish.  Sauces and fragrances which danced on the tongue, leaving warm fuzzy feelings in their wake.  Each course was accompanied with a wine, something specific to each region of Tuscany.

Right about at the third course, we watched our host as he served a basil-based pasta dish.  The pan on which he served the pasta - he cradled the dish as if it were a newborn baby.  The proud look, beaming from his eyes; his slightly cocky smile; the handling of the food with extreme care . . . this was more than some college-kid hired to slop out food at the local TGI-McFunsters.  No, this guy was different.  So we asked.

Not only was this kid the owner, he was the chef.  It was just him.  At nights, his father and sister would help out.  But this was his place.  This was his food.  This was his labour of love.  And what we had stumbled onto was not some feed-bag, chow down restaurant but rather a magical place where passion and love combine to create something truly special.  And it showed.

We invited him to have a drink with us.  Which he willingly obliged.

Underneath that rain-soaked tent, he told us his story about living in Ireland for a few years before returning to Montagna.  The restaurant, which had been in his family for generations, was now his mantra.  The town, once numbering 500 had now dwindled down to twelve.  Most of the people have left, looking to find jobs in the city.  Only a few, brave hold-outs remained with him being one of them.  The monks in the adjacent seminary were doing their part for the community: producing wine.

We spotted him as we were leaving, transfering his passion into the polishing of the silver platters he had in his kitchen.  Mirror-shine.  As is my tradition when visiting great, but out- of-the-way places I said a silent prayer for him.  My hope was that his resturant would still be there, upon our return at some future date.  Whether he may remember us or not is irrelevant.  The love he openly displayed for all to see made a lasting impression on us all.  Something none of us will forget for some time to come.

The appeal to medieval cities stems from the idea that at one time, advances were made and then suddenly time stood still.  Very rarely do you find a small town where buildings are five or six hundred years old and then suddenly buildings from the 70’s or 80’s appear.

Thus is the story of Monterchi, Italy.  This completely medieval town probably sprang up because it was the half-way point between two major cities.  What remains of the cobble stone streets shows hundreds of years worth of foot, horse, donkey and cart traffic.  It is an odd sensation, touching stones that have been worn smooth with the passage of time.

Much as it probably was in the 1500’s, the town has one restaurant and one bar.  To my recollection, the bar was never closed.  Always open to serve either beer or wine along with an assortment of meats for a continual afternoon of grazing.  The fact that the meat was free with the beer was an added bonus.

Once a day, my friends and I would find ourselves at this bar drinking Peroni’s and munching away on the free salami.  And since Italians seem oblivious to drinking water, beer and wine was the main thirst quencher.  Every now and then, a car would zoom by on the small streets.  But other than that, nothing was around to disturb us or our views of the city nor of the country-side.

It was here that I was exposed to the concept of “vino de casa” or house wine.  Before, it was always choosing a bottle of a long extensive menu.  But in Italy, the “vino de casa” often times tasted better than what you could get out of the bottle.  And that is not an insult but rather spoke to the quality of the house wine.  Add to that the house wine only cost 5 euros for a jug made this an easy decision.

While I was traveling abroad, it was the first time where I didn’t have clear internet access.  The tiny town in Tuscany had a “hot spot” which means we would park the car on the street and steal internet.  In Croatia, forget about it.

I kept a travel journal, just as usual.  I’ll probably cherry pick the best stories and share here along with some photos.

And just for the record: jet-lag is horrible when you’re coming home.

It was the 2nd to the last day of the trip.  Our Croatian friend Matko had just shared one of his favorite swimming spots on one of the many islands that make up Croatia.  This swimming spot was actually an underwater cave: under-water in the sense that the entrance is underwater.  You dive down, swim through the opening, and emerge in an cave.  Getting into the cave was easy: the Adriatic practically pushed you into it.  Getting out was another story.

At first, I made good progress escaping the cave.  The tides and currents seemed to pause long enough for me to get away from the cave entrance.  But they came back, pushed me right back towards the mouth.  A few minutes of swimming had just been nullified by 5 seconds of under-current.

My upper-shoulders were completely exhausted from all the swimming we had done.  Fortunately the salt content of the Adriatic Sea is so high that it is nearly impossible to sink.  So I flipped over onto my back and started to use my legs.  I had a swim mask on thus I suddenly found myself completely shut off from everyone else who was swimming towards out boat.  In that isolation, my mind started wandering.

Never has an experience like this enraptured me so.  This entire vacation . . . no, expedition had exceeded all of my expectations.  I had seen beautiful country-sides, met fantastic and wonderful people; ate some of the best food.  To top it all off, I was with my best friends in the world who saw and experienced everything I had.

Then my mind went deeper.  I thought about all the things in life I had done, all the things I had accomplished.  Many times did I hear phrases such as “You’ll never amount to anything” or “You can’t do that.  That’s impossible.” only to have proven them all wrong time and time again.  It had also come full circle.  Those people don’t even register: if I want something, I get it.  If I want to do something, I do it.

And so what if I didn’t have millions of dollars sitting in my bank account.  So what if I’m not on the cover of Fortune magazine.  I’ve accomplished a lot, doing even more, and have bigger plans for the future.  But everything to date that I’ve done, I’m happy.  I’m content.

It was at that moment that I realized if something had happened and I were to suddenly drop from exhaustion or have a heart-attack and drown at least I would die knowing that I was truly happy and proud of my life and what I have done.

Sometimes you have to be impulsive.

My vacation is being extended by another week.  The country-side is beyond words.  Everything that everyone has said about Tuscany is true.  Believe it all.

For those of you in love with the movie “Under the Tuscan Sun” we visited Cortona.  Our timing couldn’t have been better for it rained and hailed, thus pinning us under the awnings outside the shops littering the medieval town.  The only thing we could do was sit on the curbs and drink red wine.

As I type this, we’re sitting in Bari which is along the west coast of Italy.  Somehow we’re going to get on a boat to take us to Dubrovnik.  Half of our crew insist Croatia is beautiful and we must go.  Ok!

I do have to say that while we were in Tuscany, the villa we were staying at didn’t have the advertised internet.  So we drove around, with my iPhone scanning away, until we found a free hotspot.  What a site we were: having four people parked in their car alongside the road of this old town of Monterchi and using our Macs.