Our room in Il Pozzo di Radi

It never gets easier to pack for these trips.  I was up late and early every night and day to finish things and get ready to go.  You’d think I could sleep on the plane but there’s hardly room to exhale.  The seat in front of me tilted back past the plumb of my seat.  How can the greedy airlines, squeezing ever more bodies into their flying machines, pretend they are at your service?  I just read in The Week that the 23 largest American airlines made $15.5 billion profit last year, about half from baggage and change fees.  I bet their CEOs don’t sit in economy.

We landed late in Copenhagen and dashed through the airport and a miraculously practically empty customs line (quite unlike the immobile horde in Rome).  I didn’t know Maurice could walk so fast, zigging and zagging around all the slowpokes; I’m the fast walker and I could hardly keep up.  A smiling gate agent seemed to be expecting us and we slipped into seats 4D and F right behind the SAS Plus people.  We were the last ones aboard—zipping from touchdown eight tenths of a mile through passport control and a crowded airport to our next flight in just over twenty minutes—but not special enough to get the free brekky.

We got to the Bologna airport but our suitcases didn’t.  They might have held the plane for us but they obviously were not concerned about our luggage.  The lady at the luggage office explained why we wouldn’t get our suitcases until Thursday—a later plane doesn’t get here until the evening, our baggage would have to go through customs (though I notice we could have walked out immediately with hardly a glance at it from anyone), then someone has to drive it to—where will you be then?  ah, Montalcino.  “This is all we can give you,” she said, passing two plastic-wrapped “overnight kits” under the glass.  They didn’t feel like they had flip-flops in them, which is all I really wanted at the moment.  Well, I said to Maurice, we can strip down to our Smartwool T-shirts and unzip our pantlegs.  I had an emergency pair of undies in my backpack, which I have carried around for years for such a time as this.  It looked like our travel insurance would somehow reimburse us a small amount for delayed luggage, and the Italian lady gave us a paper telling us what SAS would do.  “You have to contact them,” she kept telling us.  The paper says to save receipts and they would reimburse us expenses “proportionate to the time” on our way out of the country, but there was no phone number.

We moved on to the line of ten or twelve car rental agencies; the one we needed was the only one crowded with weary travelers.  We got a Fiat Panda, bottom of the line, but Maurice says it is fine.  Scarlet poppies and fragrant yellow ginestra abounded along our way.  Bad signage on the autostrada, wrong turns, an accidental 1 1/2 hours of the grindingly slow scenic route, unpaved roads and at last we came to our rustic hotel Il Pozzo di Radi.  The lady who answered our knock was not happy to see us and didn’t even ask our name, just took us upstairs to our pleasant and spacious but hot room, with a sliding bathroom door that doesn’t quite cover the opening.  So Italian.

 After a nap I really wanted not to wear my hiking shoes, so we were off to the Co-op (grocery and miscellaneous store) in Monteroni d’Arbia to find flip-flops.  I didn’t like their poor selection—women’s sizes weren’t big enough and men’s sizes were fat and ugly.  We tried Buenconvento eight miles away.  Their Co-op was even smaller but I found a rack of sandals that looked acceptable.  “Quanto costa?” I asked a passing clerk.  Oh, they’re not on sale until Tuesday, she answered me in English.  “Today’s Tuesday,” I said.  Oh, she gets her English days mixed up, but she meant Giovedi.  She could not sell them to me.  It was getting late.  We dashed back to the first Co-op, grabbed two pairs of ugly blue flip-flops and picked out two shirts from a selection of about twelve shirts each for men and women (not twelve of each kind, or twelve of each size—twelve shirts total).  My shirt is surprisingly OK, a sleeveless aqua top with sparkles on the front; Maurice’s is a chartreuse T-shirt with a van, a surfboard and a misspelled logo (Vintage Surf California Vawefest), but you hardly notice the misspelling because it’s printed upside down.

We put on our flips and new shirts for dinner on the patio until it started to rain.  Then we unpacked our goodie bag-overnight kits from the airline, washed our clothes in the sink with the packet of laundry detergent thoughtfully included, put on our airline-gifted XL and XXL white T-shirts as night clothing and slept soundly.