Friday we got up early and packed smaller bags to drive to Italy for four nights where there would be sun.
“How warm is warm enough to make it worth it to go to the beach?” Mark had asked me.
I knew the kids could stand it much cooler than me, so I answered: “Sixty-five degrees.”
And that is how we wound up heading for the Riviera Ponente, the Riviera Levante’s less-prestigious—and this week less-cloudy—western sister.
We drove past Aosta, past all the castles in its little valley. Here is the very impressive Fort Bard, which commands the top of a hill-within-a-valley. We might take a tour of it on the way back, if we don’t decide to go to Turin instead.
Our 17yo had some impressive views of Fort Bard when he went climbing a few days ago with the guide. He pointed out where he was climbing; you could see the face from the highway.
We stopped in Nebbiolo country for lunch and found a little cantina being operated by a winery. Nobody switched into English there. I managed.
Mark and our 13yo reverse-engineered the breadsticks. Do they extrude them in a long string and chop them apart, or do they finish the ends somehow?
Reporting on lunch. The place had a menu that changed daily. There were only two choices of pasta (primi piatti) and two choices of main entree (secundi piatti).
An aside: I know that Americans are supposed to be terrible with our supersized platters and all, but really, you basically eat dinner twice in every Italian restaurant I have seen. First the salad, then the pasta plate (surely enough for an adult), then the plate with the meat or fish, the potato, and the vegetable.
Anyway, besides a simple rotini with tomato sauce for the two littlest boys, the pasta choices were puttanesca (heavy on the olives, light on hot pepper) and the same tortellini with ham and nutmeg-scented cream sauce that we have seen all over Aosta. We got pasta for everyone, and then we only ordered one each of the two secunda. These were roast beef or fish steak (I don’t know what sort of fish it was; it was mild and white and tasted good), served with herbed well-cooked peas, really delicious diced browned potatoes, and a weird little omelette rolled up with a soft cheese inside.
I ordered 50 cL of the house red wine, forgetting that Mark had to drive, and was forced to drink a lot of it myself.
I am blanking on what the kids had for dessert. I can tell you that Mark and I got espresso afterward and they offered the kids more gelato to have while we drank our coffee.
No, wait, I remember: panna cotta with caramel drizzled over it, and an amaretto-chocolate-peach thing. And something else. I am sorry, I can’t remember.
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Back on the road. But first the children have to play for five minutes on the slide out back of the winery.
And contemplate the grapevines.
Mark decided that everything would be more fun if it took longer, frightened me, and made our daughter throw up into her brother’s Klean Kanteen, so he took this road.
Why go through the tunnels on the highway when you can drive directly over two mountain ranges?
When we finally found a place to stop and dump out the soiled Klean Kanteen, we discovered that we were at a trailhead for a long hiking trail that winds along the top of the mountain range that separates Liguria from Piedmont. I had looked into hiking one of the sections as a cold-weather activity.
Onward.
Actually, the drive was really quite beautiful, and the road was at least well maintained and signed, with lots of room at the hairpin turns—I have definitely been on scarier mountain roads in the States. We are at the change of seasons here, so the mountains are green in some places and beginning to show autumn colors in others. There are a lot of ferns in the underbrush; the vegetation does not look like what I am used to.
It is really striking that you can drive from the snowy mountains to a warm Mediterranean climate in just a few hours. I guess it is like parts of California, or maybe Oregon in the summer.
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We stopped at a service station/truck stop place, used the bathroom, and went in to buy snacks. The gas stations in Italy have a cornucopia of food and packaged goodies that is similar in scope to what is sold at a better American gas station, but of much higher quality. There is a counter piled high with freshly made sandwiches of all types, and hot pizza, and espresso. There were bags of locally made meringue cookies and hard-pretzel-like snacks. There were plenty of different kinds of candy, and a small fridge of cold tea, energy drinks, soda, and beer. There were jars of olives, jams, pestos, and pickles.
I picked out gummy bears, Haribo berries, and gum drops for the children, some coconut amaretti cookies, and a Red Bull for Mark’s afternoon caffeine fix.
“What? Full priced American energy drink? Wasn’t there a cheap weird Italian one?”
“Yes,” I said, “but it was called ‘Bee Bad’ and contained royal jelly. Isn’t that a little froufrou for you?”
“If it’s cheaper than taurine, I don’t see how it’s any weirder,” he replied.
“My favorite energy drink is the giant Starbucks Mexican Mocha,” piped up our 17yo from the back seat. “They didn’t have those.”
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Finally we came into Andora, tantalizingly dotted with fat palm trees, and navigated to the coordinates of our apartment. The caretaker, a young woman with two young children at her heels, showed us around. She spoke a little English, but also French and German, and among all those languages we were able to work out where almost everything was.
The place is really lovely, nice and new inside. Well stocked with toys for the children. Loud and echoey, though, with lots of marble and high ceilings.
Gas range. Oven. Espresso machine.
Dining balcony. Gnome.
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We got a recommendation for a pizza place and went out, well after seven-thirty, to dine on a covered patio. It was cool out, cool and humid, but not cold. Still, it was nice to be under cover.
The 3yo methodically destroyed the breadsticks and did not even stop to decide whether they had been die-extruded onto a belt or not. Then, when those were gone, he started in on the basket of baked bread rolls.
We ordered:
- smoked swordfish with arugula, which came thinly sliced with a half lemon to squeeze over it, and which I adored. We debated whether the greens were actually arugula though; the leaves seemed wrong, more like watercress, and our teenager and 7yo liked them. Unlike all previously encountered arugula.
- linguine al pesto, which was luxurious and, this being Liguria, local.
- pizza marinara, which had a lot of parsley on it.
- pizza cepolle, which despite not looking like more than a cheese pizza with a few strands of red onion, had a deep onion flavor that seemed to be infused into the sauce and the crust.
- pizza prosciutto, tasty as advertised.
- pizza diavola, with spicy pepperoni and spicy oil drizzled on top.
- 50 cL of red frizzante wine, which was not quite enough for Mark this time. I cannot seem to calibrate.
- 2 L of acqua naturale.
- Several tiramisu.
- Mousse frutti di bosco, which our daughter traded for my tiramisu after she discovered she didn’t like it. I liked it just fine. She thought it was like a cheesecake but I thought it was more like an ice cream cake, coated with berry glaze.
- Chocolate gelato and lemon gelato. Both very good.
The town was so very quiet, even on a Friday night. The streets were nearly deserted. It is definitely the off season: all the prices go down between August and September. We read later that Andora has a population of about 7,600 which increases to 10 times that in the summer. Many restaurants appeared to be not open at all. But there were bars and pizzerias and shops. “I wonder if it will come to life tomorrow,” said Mark.
It would.
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