postcard 32: the tortured travelers department
We get another house guest and another bout of food poisoning 🤷♀️
In retrospect was going on a big road trip two days before our house guest arrived the best idea? Maybe not, but I like to operate on the belief that I’ll sleep when I’m dead. That, or when I come down with food poisoning, but more on that later.
There was just enough time (read: two days) to fight a week’s worth of fires at work, run all of the laundry to the laundromat, scrub the bathtub and make a to-do for Topher before my alarm goes off at 5am on Wednesday. I manage to dump coffee all over my white shirt before even making it to the car, but a few minutes later I’m behind the steering wheel (wearing the same shirt, in green, it pays to have your wardrobe resemble a cartoon character), psyching myself up to drive to Italy. In a manual. By myself.
Despite having never gone farther than the grocery store on my own in the last few months, I am reasonably confident I can do it. As long as I don’t accidentally run over the Slovenian border patrol trying to shift gears, I’ll be golden.
The sun rises to little fanfare as Taylor Swift keeps me company through the pouring rain. The wipers are doing double time and I remind myself to breathe. Honestly, it’s not too bad. The highways are empty this early, the border guards wave me through (in 2nd, hallelujah!) and the toll booths don’t mess with me. Before I know it I’m pulling into Marco Polo airport in Venice, on the phone with my friend Natalie, unhelpfully narrating everything I see in hopes she’ll find me. Finally, I spot her purple hair.
We have seven months worth of life to catch up on and I quickly realize driving a stick and talking isn’t quite as easy as an automatic. The highways have turned into narrow, hilly roads and I am valiantly trying to keep up my side of the conversation, pay attention to the GPS and shift smoothly. Despite having taken ginger, she starts to look a little green. Our lunch reservations aren’t for an hour so we find a cute town to stop in. The man in front of me whips it into a parallel parking spot on the opposite side of the street and makes it look so easy. I take a deep breath and follow suit, but my angle is all wrong and my butt is sticking out. I stall it trying to reverse.
“Let me know if there’s traffic coming the other direction,” I instruct as I look over my shoulder and ease the car backwards. Natalie is deathly silent. I straighten out just in time to see a bus coming careering down the road towards us and quickly pull back into the space, at the same exact angle. The bus swerves around us, laying on the horn. At this point, the woman parked in front of us has run out from the bar across the street and is gesturing that she’ll move her car so we don’t die but I’m definitely not attempting to straighten it out again. We get out and clear town, shouting “It’s fine, everything is FINE.” to each other through hysterical laughter. There is a lovely parking lot behind the church and we manage to park there without incident.
Despite being now infamous in this postage stamp town, we find the only bakery and wait in line to order foccacia. Classic rock is blaring from the back, despite nobody inside speaking any English, and the woman behind the counter adds weights to her old fashioned scale to balance our bread. We walk down the street, tearing off chunks and trying to let our heart rates settle. I’m very ready for a glass of Prosecco when we sit down for lunch.
After all, that’s where we are, the hills of Prosecco. We eat a charcuterie plate filled with cheese and prosciutto and olives before driving the winding roads snaking through verdant vines perched under snowdusted mountains. The rain has tapered off by the time we crawl up the steep gravel drive to Adami’s tasting room. They are the oldest single location vineyard in the region, we learn as one of the founders’ great granddaughters walks us through the rows of grapevines.
Since we started drinking, Natalie and I have gravitated towards Prosecco. It was probably our Parisian daydreams’ more realistic version of champagne, but it’s always been our jam. In two hours we learn more than we ever could have hoped to about our favorite bubbly, and probably ruin the stuff back home to us forever. All Prosecco is made from the same grape variety, by the same methods. The differences come from the terrain the grapes are grown on. Each little Prosecco hill, and the surrounding flatlands, have their own terroir. We taste wines from across the 30km stretch of foothills and pick out bottles of our favorites to take home.
The next morning, immediately after our coffee and croissants, we walk into town for gelato. The sun is shining and we want to take full advantage of it. A little shop in town sells Prosecco gelato and it’s shocking amazing. We eat it as we stroll the cobblestones and I’m sure it’s a little bit the jetlag, but I can tell Natalie is falling in love with Italy. We pop into the grocery store and it’s only a few minutes before we’ve loaded up a cart with cheese and olives for the week, and limoncello for her suitcase home. A Tupperware and a bag of ice become a makeshift cooler as we continue winding through the hills. The roads get narrower and narrower and the other drivers somehow more Italian. They fly past us at breakneck speeds and I try to shift and breathe and not hit anyone. I’m suddenly very glad we didn't opt for the Vespa rental we’d floated.
It’s an Italian holiday and every town is bedecked in red, white and green flags, streets closed for parades and Google can’t figure out where we need to go. By the time we hit the highway I’ve had to put a moratorium on Taylor Swift gossip so I can focus.
When I grabbed the ticket from the tollbooth the window was still open and in my focus to get back up to speed, buckle up and roll up the window all at once, it’s floated somewhere into the car on a breeze. Luckily, there’s a line when we hit the exit booth so we can unbuckle and search for it. We turn every inch of the front of the car upside down. I find Hazelnut’s missing tennis ball, but no ticket. We’re inching closer and closer and I’m starting to panic, just a bit. Finally, I reach behind the infotainment system and there it is, hiding on the dash. Victory!
My seatbelt sticks as I try to reach the toll booth and the machine won’t read the ticket. The lady behind me gets so fed up she starts yelling instructions in English (is it that obvious?) and I’m fully panicking. I hit the help button five times and the machine keeps offering unhelpful instructions in Italian before finally it takes my money. Of course I stall the car as we attempt to leave. It’s a bit of a nightmare.
The rain starts again and we try to stop for gas but the rest stops are overflowing with Italians on holiday. At one cafe, we finally muscle our way to the counter for cappuccinos, picking around a Frenchie trying to eat floor ham and 2 million other drivers. By the time we make it to Croatia we’re both trying really hard to rally. When she says she’d really just love to read her book I agree fast enough that the GPS can’t keep track and we end up four-wheeling the little rental car through muddy olive groves, foresaking our next stop to get home. We pour ourselves all glasses of wine and curl up on the couch with Topher and our respective books and I remember that it’s nice to have introverts as friends.
It’s threatening rain but we head inland the next day to explore Motovun, a town known for it’s truffles, this time with Topher and Hazelnut along for the ride. We pop in and out of shops and stop at the top of the hill overlooking a sweeping valley filled with olive groves and vineyards. They order spritzes at the restaurant patio, but I stick with a cappuccino. I’m forseeing the magnum Natalie bought in Prosecco that we’re planning to drink tonight with our cheeseboard fixings. We order a plate of pasta with shaved truffles on top as the rain finally comes down, drumming on the awning. I let Hazelnut have a bite and it must’ve been a hit because when we duck into our favorite local distillery’s shop, she immediately starts tracking down the truffle section. Waiting the downpour out is no use and by the time we get back to the car it smells very strongly like wet dog.
Google says that Tony’s oyster shack closes at 3pm and we park at ten ‘till. I wouldn’t have tried it, but a group of men is walking in ahead of us so we slip onto the deck behind them and order a few oysters and two glasses of wine on a dock overlooking Istria’s very own fjord. One of the two employees talks us into some clams as well and we watch him expertly shuck the bivalves. We throw back their briny goodness and convince him to shuck us a few more before they close for the afternoon. He pours the rest of the bottle of wine into a coffee mug, throws the basket of unsold oysters back into the water and finishes his cigarette. It’s the perfect experience and we’re still bubbling by the time we get to the next town on our list, Rovinj.
Natalie, a self-declared cat person, is bound and determined to pet the street cats we spot, but Hazelnut is hindering her efforts. Finally, we settle onto a patio with a huge black and white tom that she manages to lure over with a bite of her fish. He and Hazelnut have a staring contest for an hour until she can’t contain herself any longer and barks. The cat swats Natalie and the waiter gives us a wide berth.
I’ve told Natalie the artichokes she picked out looked super meaty at least three times before I bite into a piece of chicken. We’ve built a charcuterie plate to end all charcuterie plates (it’s double decker) and are halfway through the magnum, but I know what I just put into my mouth is not a vegetable. We Google translate the package and, sure enough, it’s some sort of microwave meal chicken.
Maybe it was that, maybe it was the super salty cappuccinos that were probably raw milk at a beachside farm bar on our hike the next day. Maybe it was the pizza at dinner.
The only thing I know for certain is approximately 24 hours later we’re both hit violently by food poisoning, in our apartment with a single bathroom. Topher is a saint and nurses us back to a shaky semblance of health through a very awful 24 hours. Natalie misses her flight, but she’s flying standby so Topher drives her to Venice after a day of resting to catch the next outbound plane. It’s a sour end on a whirlwind trip, but I’m glad at least it was the very end.
She left us with cans of green chilies, pumpkin spice coffee syrup and a (real! not ebook!) hardback book by our favorite author. Bliss.
-Mikaela