Castles, Laundry, Cheese, Cookies

Little time to write, as my typing hours are taken up with dealing with practical career-related issues back home. To make a long story short, olives got picked and turned into olive oil, tremendous meals were consumed ([[Oliver]] has eaten more species over the past two days than he did in his first 7 years), we’ve done the laundry, and today we drove high up into the hills through the next valley to the east to visit Castelvecchio di Rocca Barbena:

At day’s end we drove into Albenga for some urban action, and happened upon the Christmas market: one long street of all the Italian wine, cheese, meat, bread, preserves, cookies and chocolates you can possibly imagine in one place. With samples. While Oliver chafed at the bit — exotic cheese only holds so much allure for the young set — we did our best to cover it all.

We returned home to Colletta, Catherine made a meal of all the leftover food in the fridge (supplemented by highlights of the Christmas market, including perhaps the best chocolate cookie, ever), and I’m hurrying around trying to squeeze out the last bit of reliable wifi I might see for days.

There’s more photographic evidence in the Flickr. Tomorrow we get in the car and head off into points unknown: we fly from Milan on the 12th of December, until then our road is open.