Final summer days

It's Tuesday. We've been back three days but it already seems like a lifetime ago that we were on Italian soil.
The final days of our holiday were spent in some great places, I can't remember where I left you, but we saw Volterra again (but screwed up the medieval festival by getting our Italian 'and' and 'until' muddled, but enough about that!). Still, being able to feast on hot chocolate that was so thick you needed a spoon almost compensated.













 We drove to an amazing hill town in Southern Tuscany that had underground caves as well as buildings on top of the hill. Pitaglia is now a bit of a haven for the creative and artistic community. As a hill town it is beautiful to walk around. More care seemed to have been taken here with presentation outside apartments etc. We would go back here and recommend the trek it takes to get there.












Our final day we visited Lucca. Again, a little more off the beaten track so less touristy, but fantastic none the less. It is Puccini's birthplace. It was close to Pisa, so the idea was to spend the morning there and then trug over to the airport in the late afternoon for our evening flight.




















Now we're back and our home has been beautifully cared for by friends and family and we are so grateful for this. School is looming on the horizon rather quickly, so today we've been for haircuts.

Master Beehive the younger has a Scout camp for the rest of this week, which, in hindsight was a rather silly idea as he gets back on Sunday and starts secondary school for the first time on Monday morning!

In the garden, I am slowly preparing for final harvest and removing dead flowers and vegetable plants. The broccoli has been decimated by some kind of fly and also by caterpillars so the chickens are enjoying some greens (and the odd bit of fleshy caterpillar). I'm thinking already about rotation and next year's crops. I
know for a fact there will be less courgette next year as, despite the 'humongourgette' that we picked before we went away, there were two further ones that were there to greet us on our return. I've made courgette marmalade now and tomorrow will be making a beetroot, chocolate and chilli cake (or two) and lots more ratatouille!

I've had my name down on our local list at the allotments and am hoping that I might be in with a chance to own one before Christmas so I can dig over and get it prepared for Spring. I intend to move most of our vegetable growing over there as the allotments get more sunshine and perhaps turn more of our own land over to longer term crops such as fruit and even things like lavender or sunflowers (yes, I know what you're thinking, neither a long term crop nor a crop that copes with shade but we do get 'some' sunshine).

I'd love to own a couple of goats, but in all seriousness, there isn't really the space to extend the livestock even if I moved everything over to an allotment. I think, if we 'did' have the space, goats or sheep would be our animals of choice due to the fact we could get quite a lot of produce from either; wool, milk, cheese and potentially meat if we felt we could. In another life perhaps?

What are your plans for your homestead next year?

All laud to the tower that leans

Fourteen years ago, Mr Beehive and I came to Italy. We were younger (fourteen years to be precise!), less grey, thinner (by three children for me!), more naïve and less sceptical (isn’t it a shame what life does to you?). We were newly weds on our honeymoon (I’d like to say we were alone, but that’d be a lie, the only thing I can say in our defence was that we didn’t know we had a hitchhiker on board!). We began our two week vacation in Venice, and what a splendid introduction to Italy that was. We’d splurged on two nights in the Doge’s palace. What with that, the water taxi arrival, the masks, the gondolas, the bridges, the coffee…it was superb. Two days later we took the high speed train down to Rome. Bearing in mind this was pre-year 2000 celebrations, but all the city was under tarpaulin! We were staying at a hotel that ‘gave a lovely view of the city’, but sadly at this time of restoration and repair, gave us a view of a swathe of grey/blue tarp with some of the world’s most famous monuments buried underneath. Not impressed. However, we saw the coliseum, which was amazing, went to Vatican City and saw ‘the ceiling’ – equally amazing, went down the Spanish steps and learned that swear words graphitised in Italian are the same as English but you stick an ‘o’ on the end, however, one of the things I’d really got hung up about was seeing the Trevi fountain.

When I’m hung up on something, I have to follow it through, even if the consequences are not quite what I have expected. The other thing I’m pretty good at is having pre-conditioned ideas. In my head I’d pimped the Trevi to be in a beautiful square surrounded by lots of cafes. The books had given me the impression this was the case. To say I was a little underwhelmed when I got there would be an understatement. One of my final gifts is the inability to just.let.things.go when they disturb my perfect world. Fourteen years later, I STILL talk about the Trevi and its disappointing ‘wow’ factor. Don’t get me wrong, the fountain itself is wow, but the setting was more ‘ow’ than ‘wow’.

For this very reason, and the fact I’d done my estate agent read through the bullshit in the guide book, I was all ready for Pisa and the leaning tower to be in a back street next to a load of lock up garages and wasteland.

We decided to take the train, partly because Mr Beehive had had enough of driving for a few days, partly because the bus eats petrol like a mosquito in a blood bank, partly because the cost of parking we felt would probably be the final straw in our one family attempt to solve Italy’s financial conundrum and partly because we wanted to just be free of the car for a day.

If you’ve never done rail travel in Italy, do! That is all. It is ridiculously cheap in relation to everything else in the country, in fact, in relation to rail travel in the UK. Most stations have everything in English as well as Italian, trains are fast (well, if you go on the high speed ones for which there is naturally a premium to pay), regular and clean (ish – if you ignore the rather classy graffiti on the outsides). Returns for the five of us (children under 12 are half price) was 60 Euros. Pisa, from where we are staying is around 1.5 – 2 hours’ drive. Now calculate that on British Rail…Not bad eh? No restrictions on times that we travel, the station was in Campiglia, so easy to get to, parking at the station was free and we got a seat no problem.  Of course, if you’re married to Mr Beehive, getting on a train in a European country always pushes the button that recalls his tales of Inter-railing as a student, which, naturally is interesting, but you recall earlier….fourteen years people, four-teen-years!!!

The map at Pisa station detailed a short walk to the Leaning tower. Pisa station itself is clean enough as stations go. It’s in a relatively open part of Pisa, not creepy or particularly grubby as many London stations can be, or somewhere that has you clutching your purse for fear of pick pockets. We walked the shortish ten minutes to the tower complex past shops that were…closed for August *sigh*.

If you have not been to the Leaning Tower – do! Also, if you have not been, you will know when you are getting close because you will suddenly start to meet all the hawkers. The leaning tower is not one that you can see well from the flat of other parts of the city, so there is no prior warning other than men trying to fit neon sunglasses on top of your sunglasses or an extra watch or two on your already watch-adorned arm!

However, when you do catch that first glimpse, you may well be blown away. Trevi it is NOT!

I didn’t realise that the Tower and the Baptistery and the Duomo were all so close together. They are also still so WHITE! The Scott memorial in Edinburgh is the closest similarity I can use: The city (Edinburgh) spent hundreds of thousands sandblasting the memorial to try to restore its original colour. Other beautiful landmarks in Edinburgh and around the UK are less fortunate as. Of course, sandstone erodes dreadfully on  blasting, which is one reason, but also hundreds of years of burning coal in the UK has created a distinct dirty sheen to many British monuments that no amount of money or time will completely remove. Here in the Mediterranean, however, white gleaming towers, cathedrals and baptisteries all in their leaning glory against a backdrop of vivid blue makes you realise why the sunglasses sellers are so desperate to sell you an extra pair or two. Your pupils not only dilate they seriously shrink into your head. It is AMAZING!

This is something the Italians have got SO right. Surrounding each monument is an area of grass that is chained off, so no one can go on the grass. This means that each monument has open space around it. Naturally, there are snakes and snakes of tourists (so many Japanese that it resembles Bicester village at times!) but they are all restricted to the paths around the periphery and to the entrances of the attractions.

Of course, trying to take photos around the people taking photos of their loved ones holding up the tower, pushing the tower over or catching the tower ( – so lame ;-)) is a nightmare.

The photos below are NOT mine I hasten to add as I got stroppy that I couldn’t seem to get them angled right yet Master Beehive the elder captured some great ones of his siblings that I have now pilfered.

We had tickets to go up the tower and for the cathedral, so after selling our souls to buy a couple of coffees and three two-sip hot chocolates, we went into the cathedral. The inside is as beautiful as the outside.  The mosaics and the ceilings were simply stunning. I’m not one for being able to describe things in words, so the pictures will have to do to try to explain the magnitude of their beauty.

On leaving the tower, we paid to have a wee (well, what did you expect?) and had a half hour wait for our slot up the tower.

The bell tower is now (allegedly – not that I’m remotely sceptical) totally secure in its tilt. Having been shut for many years in the late 1990’s they have now managed to stop it leaning further. Therefore, it is safe to climb again. It’s an incredible structure, surreal in fact. To think it was built only five years before it started to lean, yet there it has stood for a further 800 years. The reason it leans is that the foolish man built his house upon the sand (and didn’t put in strong enough foundations to support it). Initially it was only three stories high before it began to tilt, but engineering obviously wasn’t hung up about it, and the next three stories were then built on top, but each with a small angle to the contrary of the one below to try to ‘rectify’ the lean. Rather than this solving the issue, it left the tower with a banana shaped lean. I’d heard many people say that it gives a very weird feeling when you’re inside. I have to say I didn’t feel this so much, despite a plumb line insisting I was on a slant, perhaps this says something about my own stance? However, you certainly feel it on the top, particularly if you walk around the bell tower level from one side to the other and suddenly you seem to be lower.

It’s a good trog up and down, not for the faint-hearted, but definitely worth it, particularly if, like much Italian architecture, it’s one day going to end up under sand or water!

Today we were due back at the Thermal baths, however, the night last night was hot, hot, hot, and no one slept particularly well, the haze over the sea gives a distinct impression of a later storm, we’re going to stay close to home, read some typical holiday trash, go to Conad’s for lunch supplies and use the local café to hook up to the net later. Tomorrow, we’ll try the baths if the weather looks less unsavoury, then we’re off to Siena on the train on Wednesday, Volterra again on Thursday, and the baths on Friday if we don’t find anyone to take us out on a boat around the coast and home on Saturday. Hopefully we’ll catch up after Siena.

Ciao!

In pursuit of vineyards

That’s better!

A small hillside village that is NOT a vampire attraction or beckoning people in with lures of the world’s best ice cream, instead one that has a great fort, clean streets, some tourists but not so many that you feel you are in France or Germany, a helpful tourist office and PARKING!

Having lived abroad, I always look at places we go to as potential homes. Ridiculous I know, but it’s obviously part of my survival instinct: “Could I live here?” is always my first thought on a town. I have odd pockets of places all over where I have imaginary flats or homes – various parts of France, Lama Island in Hong Kong, San Francisco etc. Montalcino is the first place since arriving here where I thought ‘maybe’, however, with much of the Italian rural areas rather like ghost towns apart from the towns invaded by the grockles during August, I’m not sure I could rock with this way of life so much, there is laid back and there is bloody horizontal ten feet under!

We really enjoyed Montalcino despite it sounding like something you might order in a coffee house. The sat nav took us through the Brunello wine region which is lovely and sprawling, past many hill towns and up to the parking for Montalcino. Our draw to this place, apart from the fort was the fact that Friday was market day. When we lived in Brussels we always took visitors to the market on a Sunday if they were with us. It was a HUGE expanse of market selling everything from the ordinary socks and fuses to the bizarre and amazing; palm trees and colourful Moroccan tagines. Montalcino had some lovely fruit and veg stalls, lorries full of loose tomatoes delivered the goods up to the village (we know as we were stuck behind one and, if you’re stuck behind a loose tomato lorry on a vertical serpentine climb, you’re pretty glad it’s carrying tomatoes and not rubble or garbage!).

We spent a good three hours exploring, buying a picnic lunch at the Coop and dining in one of the parks, supping coffees and limonsoda in a street café and buying some goodies to take home. Master Beehive has departed childhood altogether it seems, as I promised each small a souvenir to take home, along the lines of a t-shirt or something and he chose a small Italian leather wallet. Now this may say something about his love of good quality, his ability to know how to barter the best out of a deal, his love of cash, or just that he felt he’d outgrown funny t-shirts that mentioned Tuscan Wild Boars or Pinnochio?

One thing that Montalcino does that our village does not, is visitor tours. ‘Ah…here come the tourists…’ (sorry, that was actually another reference to Twilight!) There is a daily ‘wine bus’ that takes car-less or not tourists out to the various winerys with which they have struck a deal (the bus company that is, not the tourists, just in case you had a vision of a £1 fish man but with wine!) This tour is likely to set you back around 28 euros per person. Given we had a car and three non drinking children and one non drinking driver (oh ho ho, how I love these hairpin bends -  I couldn’t ‘possibly drive’ the tank around them!!!) 140 euros for a maximum of 2 bottles bought (weight restriction issues) did seem a little excessive – rather like car insurance methinks. So, being those stoic Brits (I think you know where this is going!) we decided to do it ourselves.

Okay, so remember we are in Italy and bear with me: Italians have siestas, you remember that bit right? They also shut during parts of August – did you know that bit? I know, peak season, how bloody stupid, no wonder the country is running out of dough! They also don’t like to signpost anything clearly and don’t seem to be able to afford signs that tell you any opening hours – or maybe they don’t keep opening hours.

So armed with a map of the wine bus route, we decided to try two of the vineyards that were on our route back home. The first was a ‘family run’ farm that looked appealing. We saw a sign that took us along a rubbly track and pulled onto it. My first fears with these ‘tracks’ is that we won’t get the bus out again, but as Mr Beehive pointed out, if they’re taking tour buses here, there’s got to be a turning point somewhere. We drove along and came to the first house – a small place with a sign for olive oil sales, this wasn’t it. We drove further, the second, enormous house, had its gates firmly shut and locked, that can’t have been it. We drove on, and on and eventually, finding nothing else, decided that perhaps house number two was it and they were now shut as the tour bus had run today. Skillfully manoevering a 47 point turn, we headed back to the main road. About a kilometre further down there was another vineyard, well signed, sales direct to the public and tasting. The gates were open, we were in luck. We drove down their driveway to the house to be met by closed doors, closed shutters, no signs, no bells, nothing. All five of us walked across their lawn to see if it was open anywhere, nada. So we all piled back in the mystery tour bus and Scooby doo-ed it back out of there. As we were pulling back down their drive a woman twitched her curtains back. So maybe it was open, maybe it wasn’t but they obviously weren’t too keen to cater for l’Ingelese, particularly if their arrival was between the hours of 12.30 and 4.30. Off we went again. Our last choice was a huge manor house estate, we decided this was the last stop saloon and if this was closed we’d give it up as a bad job and convert to Californian wines in protest!

Driving up their kilometre drive we met a small car with two women where, Master Beehive the elder assured us, the passenger was holding wine. I, on the otherhand felt sure she gesticulated something a little rude to us either because we were a large car on a small drive or maybe she was telling us to turn around you stupid Brits because it’s siesta time in August! Either way, we carried on.

At the top of the hill we nervously looked at the Enoteca from the car. It says Aperto I mumbled. We decided to risk it. Piling out again, we set foot on the soil and as we did we were greeted by a smiley face from the Enoteca door. “Welcome, Buen giorno” (notice dear reader, how she immediately assumed dumb foreigners before her own kin!).

We were treated to three fantastic wines, two Brunellos and a French mix grape, this resulted in a purchase of two rather more extravagant than we would normally pay, wine. But we’re planning on a Christmas at our house this year where we DON’T flood so are putting them aside. A sniff of the grappa (not a taste – jeez, fire water is exactly what it is!) and we were back on the road with much of the cursing of the Italians missing a trick yadda yadda, put behind us.

Today is Saturday again, one week since our arrival. We’re having a day close to the village today. We intend to visit the mining museum this morning, San Silvestro, and then a trip to Gonads for a food top up (it’s not really called Gonads, it’s true name is Conads, but seriously, when there’s humour in a name like that, you think we should miss out?).

Tomorrow we will be starting early. We’ve decided both from a financial perspective, a driving perspective and a parking perspective that we will take the train to both Pisa and Siena (not in the same day, obviously!). It’s always hard when you’re on holiday to know where to go to make the most of your limited time in an area. I really, really wanted to go to Florence, it was part of the reason for going to Tuscany in the first place, however, on arriving here and discovering how much further away we really were than we first assumed (and discovering how long it takes to go anywhere due to having to spiral round mountain after mountain. Seriously, you can be driving for over an hour and still see your apartment!), we chose to do Pisa and Siena as they were more manageable in a day and far closer on the train. We have tickets to climb the tower tomorrow afternoon, so hopefully this will compensate for not seeing David or the Uffici this time. 

In the words of a child:- "Epic Fail!"

Day five has been a bit of a fail on our part. Not being true Italianos we do not nap during siesta time, we tend to do the British thing of leaving the house around 9.30 and spending the day out, returning home at around 5.30 or 6. This, be warned dear reader, is NOT the way to do things in Italia! Here you wake at the craic, you do your chores close to home.  You return to bed around 1.30 when everyone siestas. Life does then not resume again until around 4.30pm and parties on until around 10pm, unless of course it is carnival time and then you boogie until dawn and the cycle begins again.

This, you would think, is not an issue, but, with small British kids in tow, a siesta is out of the question due to small people’s needs to ask continual impossible questions and poke you in the eyeballs as you pretend to be asleep;  as are ‘really early starts’ (this is primarily due to teens needing to sleep and small girls taking forever to get out of the house, then needing to return back to go for a wee as they forgot!). Today we decided to visit San Gimignano or as we’d renamed it, Chimichangas! Given quite a lot of space in the guidebook and described as a medieval city of skyscrapers with the best ice creamery in the world, we thought that we’d pay it a call. Unbeknownst to us, our guidebook has obviously been translated into at least 4 million languages and that small 2 inches of write up in Italy with Kids is like the touch paper to a fire. Leaving here around 9.30am we meandered round the hairpin bends at a leisurely pace (frankly, if we’d not gone at a leisurely pace, we’d have ended up rolling back down the mountain sides). On our arrival in San Gimignano we discovered that every car park was full in the whole town bar ‘3’ spaces in one of the car parks! Yet again we were learning why the majority of cars in this part of Italy are no bigger than a Fiat Panda and have as many dents as a colander has holes. We knew that to fight against the rest of the planet to visit this town in a car the size of a minibus was not going to happen. We drove to a small village 1.5 miles out of San Gimignano to the advertised ‘Park and Ride’, only to sit and wait in the deserted car park, too scared to put our money into the automated ticket machine to buy our bus tickets as we’d not seen a single person this far out, let alone a bloody bus, Peartree Park and Ride this ain’t! We drove back up to the town and circled a couple of times just in case Lady Luck decided to smile on us, however, today she decided to fart.

 Lesson learned: to ensure that we get up at the craic if we want half a chance of parking anywhere and to take the scenic route HOME from places and the fast route TO places.

Instead we took a similar leisurely meander back down the same mountains, stopped for lunch at an Agricturismi with an amazing view of the town we so nearly visited, stopped at an organic wine and oil tasting farm to sample lovely Chianti and peppery olive oil with a farmer’s wife with bright red hair (not that her hair was remotely relevant, except it looked awesome!), tried to take some relatively convincingly alive photos of end of season sunflowers, got stung by a wasp (not me, Mr Beehive!), tried to get diesel for the car from antiquated self-service machines that didn’t take any of our cards, so we could only fill up 30 Euros worth of fuel  as that was all we had on us in cash, and ended up back where we started some 8 hours earlier.

Tomorrow we intend an early start to visit Montalcino’s Friday market. I think, learning from experience, we will leave before the cockerel crows as whatever parking spaces there may be, are likely to be taken up by market vendors! We are also praying that the fact that this town is NOT in bold in our guidebook may be an indicator that it is less touristic, however, the alarm clock is set as we’re not taking any chances…in fact we may even drive over tonight and sleep out in our sleeping bags just to make sure ;-)

The Volturi land in Volterra and the hail descends

Wednesday saw us taking the car out further for the first time. Normally we go with the flow on holiday and have lots of down time, but, given our wait in the car rental, the sleepiness of the town during siesta and therefore the time for lots of reading, most of our literature had been devoured before the end of week one. We needed to get out and about more, sit and relax less.

On a serious note, many guide books do not truly cover this part of Tuscany. Florence is covered of course, as is Pisa and their surrounding vicinities, but if you really want to get an idea of where to eat in this part, you just have to get out there and discover it yourself. Mr Beehive had recently stumbled across an article in the Guardian about Volterra. He’d had the forethought to cut it out and hang onto it, so we decided to give it a go. I am SO glad we did.

Volterra is another hill top town, this time it dates back to 1398. The main square (as an aside of course!) is the setting used for Edward and Bella’s mad dash to save him from showing himself to the humans in New Moon – but that was (honestly readers) just an added bonus for me to roll on the floor where Edward Cullen put his brown clad shoes before that two timing love rat excuse for a girlfriend leapt onto him…ahem…moving on…

One of the most interesting parts of Volterra – aside from its abundance of artisan gelaterias, tourist snares selling medieval torture implements and weapons to highly enthusiastic tween boys, and open door policy on the alabaster workshops where the sculptors are able to create anything from coffee machines to knitted pullovers and suitcases out of the stone!!! -  is the fact that until 1950 the most highly prized attraction in Volterra, it’s amphitheatre complete with columns and pillars etc, was under around 200ft of rubbish as it was the community rubbish dump! 

Luckily it has since seen daylight and restoration and you can now admire the beauty of it from one of the roads above. Of course, if you want to wander around at the same level, it’ll cost you! However, for freeeeee, there is the road leading back up into the walled town from which there is the best view of all the angles.

The third best part of Volterra (I say third because obviously the fact that it was used to film a scene in Twilight is quite good, no?) is it’s zebra striped Byzantine cathedral! Yes folks, it’s a cathedral that is the same colouring as a zebra crossing! It is also pushed back off the square. I suppose, were it not disguised as African equidae, then it would pass unnoticed as a building behind the town hall. However, for the fact that it is so elaborately dressed, it really cannot be missed. Fantastic!

I’m sure the children would like to say that The Torture Museum in Volterra is one of its best features, however, as we have experienced Madame Tussauds in Blackpool before it was updated (even now it’s pretty bad) and various ‘Dungeons’ in various parts of the UK and abroad, we felt that perhaps this could be presumed to be one to put on the overated-tourist-trap- give-it-a-miss, lists. They are still reeling that we denied them the opportunity to gauge this for themselves!

However, we did count no less than FOUR artisan gelaterias and all of them the most elaborately decorated ice creams. So Volterra gelato scores high on the glamour front, equally high on choice, price and taste. We’re awarding Volterra gelato an overall 8/10.

Later next week we hope to return to Volterra as they have a medieval festival on and whilst we were there, they were setting up. It does look to be a lot of fun, so we may face the crowds once again to re-visit this lovely, underated in the guide books, town. It may on the otherhand, take LMB a bit of convincing as we experienced a rather vicious storm on departure. One minute we were eating gelato in the sunshine (Frutti di Bosca and Mango!), the next we were standing with others under the gateway to the town to avoid the deluge. After ten minutes we decided to be stoically British – this wasn’t rain for goodness sake…it was WARM!!...and make a run for it. Be warned, all rain begins as hail…you knew that right…normally it warms on the way down to become rain. On a hilltop high, high, high above sea level, it doesn’t! Golfball sized hailstones proceeded to hit the car (oh so glad for that blasted £600 paid out!). Fortunately we all made it back to the car before we were hit by them. Within 20 minutes of the storm starting, the vertical hairpin roads up to the village had become waterfalls, muddy water cascading down the hillside. As we slowly trundled out avoiding the worst of it and trying to calm down LMB who would scream everytime we were met by another sudden burst of water coming out of the side of the verge, we did begin to wonder if sitting it out may have been a better idea and whether Chryslers come with water skis and that may have been what we really paid £600 for!

As we steam dried on the journey home, we decided to top up at the supermarket. Back in Venturina, the sky was blue and the temperature was 31degrees. We opened up the doors and amidst a ball of stinking steam, five drowned rats fell out.  The land was flat, the sky was blue, there wasn’t a vampire in sight…all was right with the world again!

Bikinis, mankinis, tankinis and stuff

Generally when we go on holiday we rent an apartment or villa. This tends to be the cheaper and simpler option for five of us. Hotels frequently mean we need to book two rooms and you are then often restricted to their meal times and menus. For the majority of the world that is a good fact: there is no washing up, there is no shopping, there is no meal planning or preparation, in fact, there is no groundhog day but in a hot country! For our family that consists of a vegephobe and small people, that can sometime mean two weeks of eating French fries and something that resembles a sausage but surely can’t be due to the colour, texture and taste! It also means that we get to experience supermarkets. There is nothing, in my opinion, that aids feeling a true part of a country, than getting into their supermarkets or street markets. Language barrier/smanguage barrier! I even managed to explain that I needed antihistamine tablets to a pharmacist yesterday through sign language and crazed imitation scratching of my body (Oh, for the record, if you ask for ‘Zirtac’ – it’s a common pharmaceutical name…why doesn’t the guide book tell you that rather than you risk being thrown out of the shop for imitating a monkey?).

Our home for the next two weeks was a lovely top floor apartment within the walled city of Campiglia. We had views of the sea from the window, a beautiful tower, boats, Tuscan villas and farmland for as far as the eye could see and…other people’s bedrooms! This was a way to get close to the locals, hanging out our smalls on the washing line 20ft above the unsuspecting tourists below whilst nodding and muttering ‘Buonjourno” to our opposite neighbour, noting her partner still asleep in bed, the name of the paper they read lying on the pillow (yes, THAT close), and the fact that my British undies appeared to be four times the size of her Italiano ones – or maybe they weren’t even knickers – but I digress! I think our only mess up was the fact that we didn’t have a pool or access to one, but, when we booked, we were told we were only 5 miles from stretches of beautiful beaches, so we didn’t feel the need to worry.

Ah ha! In my next life I will come back as an estate agent and I will tell people the TRUTH. I will not elaborate or decorate what is basically the phrase “the apartment is only 5 miles from beautiful stretches of beach that are made hideous by the fact that you can’t SEE the beach for Italians.”

Day two was a bit of a shock. Luckily we had fore-warned the children that we may not be able to get onto the beach ‘today’ and hadn’t loaded the car up with the typical Brit’s beach attire of buckets and spades, windbreaks, umbrellas, picnic food ready for a coating of sand and lots of white skin ready for burning. What we hadn’t envisaged was that the Italians beat the Germans at getting up early to get the best spots on the beach. We also hadn’t factored in that the beach was better than a Brazillian waxing and was quite literally a small landing strip that stretched for miles. Miles and miles and miles of young and beautiful Italian women and men stretching out their (no, here I’m using poetic license) contorting their lean and slim bodies to fit into a space no bigger than a dog’s basket, to sit for the next 10 hours topping up their already barbecued body. There was bikini after bikini after mankini after bikini. Interestingly there is no age restriction on bikini wearing in Italy (long live the bikini!!) even if you are 102! That was also somewhat of an eye opener. Much as my feminist side said “you go woman! No one cares about your shape or age – if you want to wear a bikini, you wear it!” there was a bit of overkill when, on our sixth kilometre of passing parked cars parked for their day at the beach and another wrinkly bikini wearer getting out arse first, zimmer frame second and Mr Beehive having to slam on the brakes for fear of literally ‘rear ending’, we decided that perhaps the Italian beach was a step above these Brits. So we decided to seek out further water play elsewhere!

And boy, did we find it! Calidario thermal springs are natural Etruscan baths in the next village over to ours. Naturally, like everything in Italy, if it moves, breathes, gives any form of view or spectacle, a huge price tag is wacked on it, but in temps of 34degrees and a son whose eczema was needing some kind of miracle to get better, we decided to budget in a couple of days spent here. Interestingly this place was almost empty and there were sunbeds galore! And there speaks the difference – we will pay through the nose to get away from other people whereas the Italians are happy to sit for hours on their neighbours’ laps and it’s free! For us though, it was worth it. We spent the whole day there enjoying the baths and sitting out reading our books. Master Beehive the elder was able to swim without pain and the baths came highly recommended as a good place for people with all kinds of conditions, so he didn’t feel freakish about taking off his t-shirt either. It has actually done his skin a lot of good, so this place gets the thumbs up (and free access to our credit card naturally *sigh*).

Back in our village, we arrived at the beginning of Apritiborgo. This is a week long festival in which there is entertainment every night from 8 until midnight, street food vendors and a great atmosphere. Once we discovered what we needed to do after misunderstanding the estate agent’s Italian to think we had to get our ticket for our car otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get into the village all week – yes, there was disaster in the air about being trapped on a hill town in Tuscany for the first week of our holiday – not too dissimilar to finding ourselves in a walled town in Morocco in the middle of Ramadan last year – it’s been known to happen…don’t laugh! We got the first gift of the holiday by finding an English speaking Italian who told us it was free for resident (we were classed as residents) there’s that ‘freeeeeeeee’ again! It also referred to us as people rather than the car, so we were able to come and go into the village, although, as we discovered yesterday on arriving back a little later than anticipated, late parking ie: after 6pm, is more of a bun fight.

We have since been to the festival almost each evening, sampling the different street entertainment and food. Wild boar Panini at dusk, overlooking vinyards, sat at the foot of a ruined castle seems somewhat light years away from the fact that it’s a really just an overblown hot dog in the park. The mood and atmosphere was lovely. Of course, no evening would be complete without sampling yet another couple of flavours from the local gelateria in the main square. Our rating for our local gelateria is 7/10. It loses marks on the presentation and the fact that they ran out of two flavours on day two of our stay and we’ve yet to see them return, instead they have been replaced with ‘milk’ flavour and ‘cream’ flavour, which in my book is a bit of a cop out considering that cream/milk is the number one ingredient anyway! So far we have a list of flavours that do NOT go together and a list of flavours that really, really do. My favourite is mela verde and mango…I’ll leave you to your Italian dictionaries to figure it out.

Toscana bound

It’s that time of year again where we all pack as much as we can into as little as we can to step onto a plane or ferry to whizz us to foreign soil. This year we had chosen Italy as the Beehive summer destination. But of course, not to be boring and ordinary we needed a reason to visit (of course it was the wine really, but bear with me, we have kids in tow) so this year’s theme was to find the best gelato in Tuscany.

The kids were thrilled with the fact that this year we were flying with BA so there were no rugby scrums for seats and we were given a light meal…for freeeeee (you could almost hear their Gollum-esque squeals!). But nothing in life ever goes that smoothly and part of the travel experience is the ups and the downs.

Pisa airport is relatively small, despite being Tuscany’s hub. This therefore means that it’s even smaller car rental hall is a short walk away in a separate building. Pisa also serves Heathrow and Gatwick and both flights appear to come in within around half an hour of each other. Tuscany, given its location, is best served by self-drive over trains and buses, this means, therefore, there was a queue out of the door when we arrived at the car rental. The kids and I found a spare spot on the floor next to another family who had been there for at least half an hour already and settled down to read and watch the crowd.

Crowd spotting in another country is also fun. Over the years I’ve seen several ‘slebs who probably come to a car rental hall in a slightly off the track part of Italy/Kenya/Mexico etc to avoid being spotted and have a ‘normal’ holiday. Luckily for them, being in a hall full of bored queuing Brits means that they (yes, that’ll be you Ken Clark) are the most exciting thing that’s happened in the past 1.5 hours. Luckily that woman from the telly whose name I can’t remember was shielded by my suitcase, so she was able to continue to sit and be bored with her family like the rest of us. For poor old Ken however, he was accosted by some fan who apparently shares his birthday – and one assumes, with at least a huge percentage of the rest of the population! (ha! Bet he wished he’d decided to be a diva or an MP on expenses in this instance and hire a driver rather than just a car!).

Anyway, moving on….Around an hour later and with a fight with the rental lady who tried to fob us off with a car that was too small for the five of us and our luggage, despite having booked a people carrier, we were given the keys, reluctantly, to ‘a van’ – oh huzzah – and a bill for a whopping £600 for the insurance to ensure with didn’t need to pay the £2000 excess if anything happened. For any of you who have driven in Italy before and seen the attempts at using the roads as Grand Prix practice, would appreciate that the £600 was a wise investment, however, this was a huge dent in our holiday budget that we had NOT been informed about and at least three times the price of any other country in which we’ve hired before!

Still fuming, we went to ‘the van’, which actually happened to be a Lancia (Chrysler) people carrier – so probably the car we had actually booked in the first place but were close to being fleeced over! Feeling ‘slightly’ better at having won round one and even better that we actually had this car in the US for a short while, so Mr Beehive wouldn’t feel too disorientated driving it, we all flopped in, wound the windows down and set the sat nav for Campiglia Marittima on the South West coast.It’s that time of year again where we all pack as much as we can into as little as we can to step onto a plane or ferry to whizz us to foreign soil. This year we had chosen Italy as the Beehive summer destination. But of course, not to be boring and ordinary we needed a reason to visit (of course it was the wine really, but bear with me, we have kids in tow) so this year’s theme was to find the best gelato in Tuscany.

The kids were thrilled with the fact that this year we were flying with BA so there were no rugby scrums for seats and we were given a light meal…for freeeeee (you could almost hear their Gollum-esque squeals!). But nothing in life ever goes that smoothly and part of the travel experience is the ups and the downs.

Pisa airport is relatively small, despite being Tuscany’s hub. This therefore means that it’s even smaller car rental hall is a short walk away in a separate building. Pisa also serves Heathrow and Gatwick and both flights appear to come in within around half an hour of each other. Tuscany, given its location, is best served by self-drive over trains and buses, this means, therefore, there was a queue out of the door when we arrived at the car rental. The kids and I found a spare spot on the floor next to another family who had been there for at least half an hour already and settled down to read and watch the crowd.

Crowd spotting in another country is also fun. Over the years I’ve seen several ‘slebs who probably come to a car rental hall in a slightly off the track part of Italy/Kenya/Mexico etc to avoid being spotted and have a ‘normal’ holiday. Luckily for them, being in a hall full of bored queuing Brits means that they (yes, that’ll be you Ken Clark) are the most exciting thing that’s happened in the past 1.5 hours. Luckily that woman from the telly whose name I can’t remember was shielded by my suitcase, so she was able to continue to sit and be bored with her family like the rest of us. For poor old Ken however, he was accosted by some fan who apparently shares his birthday – and one assumes, with at least a huge percentage of the rest of the population! (ha! Bet he wished he’d decided to be a diva or an MP on expenses in this instance and hire a driver rather than just a car!).

Anyway, moving on….Around an hour later and with a fight with the rental lady who tried to fob us off with a car that was too small for the five of us and our luggage, despite having booked a people carrier, we were given the keys, reluctantly, to ‘a van’ – oh huzzah – and a bill for a whopping £600 for the insurance to ensure with didn’t need to pay the £2000 excess if anything happened. For any of you who have driven in Italy before and seen the attempts at using the roads as Grand Prix practice, would appreciate that the £600 was a wise investment, however, this was a huge dent in our holiday budget that we had NOT been informed about and at least three times the price of any other country in which we’ve hired before!

Still fuming, we went to ‘the van’, which actually happened to be a Lancia (Chrysler) people carrier – so probably the car we had actually booked in the first place but were close to being fleeced over! Feeling ‘slightly’ better at having won round one and even better that we actually had this car in the US for a short while, so Mr Beehive wouldn’t feel too disorientated driving it, we all flopped in, wound the windows down and set the sat nav for Campiglia Marittima on the South West coast.

Tree love

It's been a day of crops and trees.
We drove to St Albans today and ordered a couple of wonderful looking Himalayan Birches for the garden.
Later in the day we also had our cherry in the front pruned quite drastically. It's not been pruned since we bought the house some three years ago, so it looks somewhat dandy after it's haircut and far more in proportion.

Sadly though Mr Beehive and I have become wood sluts over the years. He, because he likes to smoke using different woods. Each wood has it's own delicate flavour on the various meats or foods he smokes. I, because I rather like taking my knife to green wood and having a little whittling session with Master Beehive the younger. So they left a fantastic pile of the off cuts. I then sorted through some of it to find some gems to work with.


Finally I went out to water the tomatoes to find we are now, quite literally, invaded in the greenhouse.

We've had the time of our lives....

and we're back!

What a fun weekend that was!

It was quite an experience for me as I've never done a festival solo with a child in tow, I've always been with Mr Beehive.

Ha! Burnt my face this year (2007)- A rarity on all festivals to follow!

We have nearly always done a festival each summer since the kids were tiny, starting with Gathering of the Vibes in the US for three years. The first year we hadn't quite figured out the volume of the music and lack of soundproofing in the family campsite, hence a serious lack of sleep, followed on by two years of swimming due to excess rain and doing it as a day fest to avoid the small toddlers and lack of sleep.

Girl Rocker even at two!

Solfest

Then there was the year we did Solfest with friends.
It rained!

Again!

And we camped on a slope and the airbed deflated at 2am.

Pyrites 2010 with Jonah and Saskia

Then we did Pyrites one year (oh I did that fairly solo, only I met a friend there with her son) but Master Beehive the elder was sick so Mr Beehive had to drive in the middle of the night to come and get him so I was left with the younger two and lots of vomited on gear, Oh yes, I forgot, that was also the year that I got stuck going down a road that became too narrow and too steep and I had to reverse up it. This caused LOTS of black smoke coming from the car and lots of scared, screamy small people who have never quite forgotten that and now everytime I drive anywhere with them alone always seem to drop into conversation things like 'Are you sure that you know the way?' 'Are you sure the car will get down there?' 'Are you sure that x is meant to do y?' I feel they lack faith!...yeah, these aren't the best memories!


HOWEVER...Bestival really was the best!

LMB with the wonderfully, wickedly, wild and
wacky authoress, Laura Dockrill. She and LMB were
peas in a pod!

We didn't get lost. It didn't rain. I didn't cause any colour of smoke to come out of the car. We found where we were going. We didn't get washed out of the tent. We slept (a little!)

We did cheat a bit. I didn't want to put up our ten man tent by myself again, so we hired a tent that was already erected. We didn't 'glamp' in one of the posh yurts or airstream caravans, this was a basic two man tent, but we did cheat a little further because it came with hot showers and flushing loos on the site. However, it was on a slight slope and we didn't do airbeds because I feared a revival of the flatness experience. I have since learned that I am too old to do Karri-mats and if we hire bigger than two man tent we get a flat pitch. Guess what we'll do next time?

I burnt my face again...you'd think I'd learn, however, apparently not. I think I probably just wanted to prove it was hot. Suffice to say I now don't need to turn the lights on in the house as I am continually emitting a reddish glow.
I spent Friday trying to introduce Billy Bragg, the Proclaimers and Ash to LMB and she spent Saturday with Mr Tumble (that was more by the fact that his music drew us in and we wanted good spots for the following act - Honestly!!!) and Horrible Histories.

Mr Billy Bragg

Camp Bestival is totally set up for children. It's in the grounds of Lulworth castle and spreads for acres! And those would be 'rolling' acres, quite literally. We probably walked the equivalent of 10 miles over the three days we were there, but these were up and down miles too.

Once you've parked your car you need to walk to your tent. And that will be you and your child/ren and your kit (sooooo glad I didn't bring a tent!). I did think to pack our reliant radio flyer truck as LMB has, at previous festivals, used this as a place to sleep and hitch a ride. I don't know how we would have done it without, short of hiring one of the many trolleys that were there for our expensive convenience. That said, not having cars on site meant that it was safe for the kids and clean. In fact, the whole site was kept remarkably clean. My biggest shock was the sheer number of tents and people. It was, in some terribly crude way, much how I would expect a refuge camp to look. A sea of tents stretched as far as the eye could see and, as this was at Lulworth, this was actually 'the sea'! The tents were simple, garish, big, huge, humungous and pop up tiny. People had flags, whizzy things on sticks, banners, bunting, protest banners...you name it. The costumes we saw ranged from the ordinary to yoda and Princess Leia as well as a fully regaled trolley pimped as an aeroplane complete with four year old child-pilot and parental team comprising Airline staff and trolly- dollies (quite literally the whole crew!).

Everything you could possibly want was there: yoga, massages, a sauna...in a yurt...that was added to my 'I want' list!
Obviously the acts on main stage plus fairground rides, dance floors...a knitting tent!!!! farmer's markets, science tents, cooking demos, lots and lots of fairy gear, beer and burgers...amazing.
I think LMB's favourite place (apart from the rather cool 'tea and toast' cart and just about every ice cream cart or food stall) was the Dingley Dell...or maybe the science tent...but then she loved the Storytimes and kids outdoor theatre...

It is a bit of a posh-bird's gig and you are highly likely to hear names such as 'Rupert', 'Tiggy' or 'Tallulah' over 'Tyrone' or 'Chardonnay' being called out, however, there is a huge mix of people from all backgrounds and ages which meant that there is a nice atmosphere of both young and old. I was able to nurture my hidden hippie and LMB was able to run and cartwheel everywhere in a safe and clean (glass bottle free) environment.

We're definitely going next year, this time I hope we can all go together.

Back soon...

Almost as much stuff as if we're ALL going!

I love my radio flyer truck - works everytime!

Men are being left behind.

Education into the music of one Mr Billy Bragg to commence.

Girl's are off to Camp Bestival.

Perfect festival attire: Wellies and shorts. The girl has learned much!

See ya later dudes!