And you thought Plazes was fun before. Now it comes with the possibility of valuable prizes! Speaking of Plazes: I didn’t notice until just now that the “blog badge” map has a “show recent” link that cycles back through recently visited Plazes and swooshes the map around to match:

Oh, and there’s a neat Google Earth + Plazes mashup, that let’s you see Plazes users on the globe:

I’m obviously holding up the fort here on the Riviera (that’s me with a red circle pasted around my head). Indeed for most of Italy and France too. Time to start selling Plazes door to door.

I decided to take a little drive this morning, and at the bottom of the driveway from Colletta, I turned right — away from Albegna and the ocean from whence I’d originally come — and drove further up the Pennavaire Valley. As I drove on the road went higher and higher, got twistier and twistier and thus generally more thrilling to drive. About 5km in I realized that I’d just driven off the end of the map I had with me, and so from then on there was an ever-present feeling that I may be accidentally driving to Switzerland.

Several times during the higher twistierness I stopped with thoughts of turning back, but I felt oddly compelled to journey on, curious as to what exactly could be up so high.

A lot, it turns out. People in this valley have built villages in the least likely places, hugging to the side of mountains in very heavenly ways. And just when you think you’re in as high a place as could reasonably house a village you look up the mountain and there’s another one further on up the road.

I finally stopped driving in Caprauna, a small village at elevation 1,000m with less than 200 inhabitants located just up the road from an intriguing tunnel that looks like it was poked through the mountain with a giant fork:

Caprauna, despite being a kilometre in the sky, looks just like a normal little village, albeit a very old one made of stone and wood:

I would have kept going up and up and up but for the fact that I encountered a “you must have chains on your tires” sign, with no “in December and January only” proviso like other’s I’d encountered. So I headed back the way I came, stopping near the village of Alto — about halfway down — to take a picture down into the valley:

Realizing I needed more groceries, I decided to keep going all the way down to sea-level in Albegna (the notion of driving 1km downhill also appealed to me). After filling up at the COOP, I took a detour into downtown Albegna and down to the waterfront:

Despite the 19 degree temperature and balmy ocean breezes the beach was locked up tight — it is very obviously the “off season” here. On the way back to Colletta I managed to get trapped down a one-way street and had to drive into Ceriale, east along the water, before I could turn back. By 3:00 p.m. I was back here eating cheese and zucchini sandwiches and getting ready to start the workday.

Today’s Big Plan was to get out of the apartment before nightfall and take a hike around Colletta. There are walking trails all through the hills, with helpful maps and directional signs, so it seemed like a doable activity for a hikeophobe like me.

Man, is it ever beautiful around here! I headed down the hill from the village proper and crossed over the river on a stone bridge:

The trail looped around and back up the other side of the valley, across the river from the village. Once I got to the highest point of the trail, the views got really amazing:

From there I continued up the valley, gradually heading back down towards the road, where I encountered another stone bridge:

…and some views of Colletta from the bottom up:

The trail varied from well-groomed and almost flat to grass-covered and steep, and the degree of hill-climbing involved saw me just grazing up against my “fitness level” (such as it is). But it was good to get out and see some of the countryside and get a sense of the “neighbourhood.” If I can keep this up every day I will return home with much stronger knees if nothing else.

I forgot to mention that the Ethiopian Library Night was amazing: the food was absolutely fantastic, there was lots of it to go around, and some of it was hot enough to peel paint. The music was great, and the items in the silent auction were worth bidding on (Catherine snagged a coveted Don Moses kinetic sculpture and I a CD of Ethiopian music).

There was a healthy crowd out — perhaps a couple of hundred? Don has photos. Like Dave said: “If they had one of those every month I’d be all over it.” Kudos to Don and Brenda and their library brethren for a job well done.

Dan was honest to FedEx, so they sent him chocolates. This is the kind of story that makes me want to sent FedEx chocolates back.

The first international edition of The Amazing Race started airing this month: The Amazing Race Asia.

I’m slowly regaining my footing. Realizing that I would need groceries or I would slowly starve, despite the copious broadband, I headed down into Albenga to find the COOP Supermercato.

The drive down in the daylight was somewhat more harrowing than the drive up last night in total darkness. Indeed if I’d known the nature of the terrain last night, I may very well have frozen up and parked the car by the side of the road: it’s mountainous here. I had no idea. I suppose I might have read this page, wherein it is revealed that I am living “about three hundred metres above sea level, in the middle of the Pennavaire valley.” But I don’t think that would have helped. Suffice to say that driving the road down to Albenga is better than any virtual car racing game you’ve ever played: all sorts of twists and turns and one-lane parts, accompanied by the occasional BMW on your tail in a big hurry.

But the harrow is worth it for the stunning beauty of it all. Here’s the view out my front door:

And here’s a view of Colletta from the visitor parking lot, which is just up the hill from the village:

In any case, I found the COOP, figured out how the “put your vegetables on the scale and push the button with the appropriate picture to generate a price sticker” system works, picked my way through 50 different varieties of pasta, figured out how to pay (fortunately this turned out not to be one of the “you must be a member to shop here” coops that we’ve encountered elsewhere) and emerged 30 minutes later with 28 EUR work of food, enough to tide me over for a few days.

The Ethernet jack in my tiny loft is located beside the bed upstairs, about as far away from a useful location as possible. So I stopped at the UniEuro (think “Italian Future Shop, but with more doilies”) and bought a 5m cable, which turned out to be just long enough to stretch downstairs and plug into my laptop. My work setup isn’t optimized yet — the MacBook is balanced on an upturned salad bowl on top of a garden table that I’ve rigged lower using bungee cords, but that’s the next project.

As I write I’ve just polished off a Swiss cheese and zucchini sandwich on crusty bread and a tangy glass of blood orange juice. Eating = good.

It’s 10:34 a.m. Central European Time. Which makes it 5:35 a.m. in Charlottetown. And somewhere in between in my head.

If you ever want to give yourself a challenge, fly across the Atlantic ocean and limit yourself to a few hours sleep. Then, for good measure, take another two hour flight down to Nice, and then get in a tiny tiny car and drive at 130 km/h (the speed limit) through a seemingly endless series of tunnels, in the dark, into Italy. Turn off the main road and drive up into the hills (still dark) on a tiny tiny road. Up up up.

Miracle of miracles, I did it. And I arrived here in Colletta around 8:00 p.m. last night. Found the bar, got paid up, found my apartment, and was asleep by 10:00 p.m.

Given the aforementioned darkness, I’ve no idea what Colletta actually looks like — that’s today’s mission. And I’ve got to find someone to sell me a 20 foot Ethernet cable so I can move the laptop downstairs and get some work done.

I am, my former travel companions will tell you, somewhat obsessive about the small details of travel. As such, here’s what’s gone wrong (and right) so far:

• After taking the trouble to clean and straighten the cord on my Shure e2c earphones, which I use with my iPod, I left them on the dining room table at home.
• The zipper on my inside pocket on my 3-day old Marks Work Wearhouse fleece jacket broke. Perhaps I should have gone to MEC like Dan and Isaac suggested.
• The nameplate was ripped from the front of my rolling suitcase. As this was some sort of made up Zellers-related nameplate, this isn’t such a bad thing.
• There is now free wifi (Datavalet) in the Air Canada Arrivals Lounge at Heathrow Terminal 3. And a PC with broadband. Last time I was here, in February, it was dial-up only.
• There is, for some reason, free wifi here in the Terminal 1 departure lounge at Heathrow - SSID is “Wifi Zone - The Cloud”.
• Plazes has the wrong country code for Lichtenstein in the Plazes SMS registration page — I’m sure they’ll correct it soon — so no Plazes SMS updates for now.
• Jaiku doesn’t seem to be accepting web-based presence updates right now. In other words, as soon as I need them, both of my “location based” tools are in the shop.
• If you ever print your British Airways boarding pass at home (you can do this up to 24 hours before flying), make sure you bring all of the pages — I was rejected at security because I left the second page, which contained only a duplicate bar code and the page footer at home and I needed to get a new boarding card printed. Thankfully I was taken pity on by a kindly agent, and didn’t have to line up for this.

I’ll relax soon, I promise…

Arrived Heathrow in fine form — even got a little sleep on the plane, and the Air Canada vegetarian option was mildly delightful. Off to see if I can find British Airways. My flight on BA to Nice will be my first since I flew BOAC from Toronto over the Atlantic with my parents and Mike in the early 1970s (wherein I became a member of the Junior Jet Club — perhaps I should inquire as to my current status).