Hi again. Wow, it’s been since July! Thinking back, I wish I had the discipline in the past seven months to have written regularly, but life is much different when you’re not out exploring European wonders. Regular day-to-day life is not nearly as memorable (usually). I had a fleeting thought at the end of 2024 that perhaps my idea of writing and sharing photography on this blog wasn’t meant to be considering how I’d let it go, collecting cobwebs, for so long. Fast forward to a dreary day in January and a cheery red, but official-looking envelope peeks out of the junk mail gathered in our mailbox. Upon closer inspection, it appears it’s from Italy. It was. A speeding ticket. From the Citta’ di Spoleto Polizia. From the 20th of May. 2024.

Thanks to Google Photos we were able to pinpoint where we were that day and it was either on our way to Assisi to see the Basilica and then out to dinner or on our way back to our lodging. Anyway, “Leadfoot Ismert” was “exceeding the permissible limit by no more than 10 km/h.” The amount of times a local zoomed passed us, not being able to tolerate our crawl on the roads is too many to count. We wondered if they collect tickets as well. We paid the ticket but have held onto this paperwork putting it in our souvenir stash, a delayed reminder of time spent there.

Earlier, when I said that regular day-to-day life isn’t nearly as memorable, I mostly meant that we often have to seek out meaningful moments in our typical days, making our way through work or school, cleaning up, cooking, appointments and a general feeling of hurrying to the next thing. But when we are someplace new, our brain is making all sorts of new connections, filing away the different light, sounds, smells, tastes. It’s easy to recall these things. They stand out to us like when we were younger and all was novel and monumental.

My next post will take us to a quiet area of Tuscany, where we settled in for about four days. A lovely place called Podere Piandarca in Terranuova Bracciolini. They fed us amazingly well – we had never known breakfasts could be so grand. We marveled in the beauty of their inn and made pleasant conversation there with our hosts and also made friends with their chickens and cats and one mischievous puppy dog (more on that later). For now, I’m happy to be tapping letters on the keyboard and recording a time past that feels still very fresh.