Vinitaly 2010

Firstly, sorry for the delay in blogging during my trip. It has been exhausting. By the end of every day, all I was interested in doing was video chatting with my wonderful wife Sabrina, have a bite to eat and hit the sack. I'll recount some of my experiences in the posts to follow.

So...I'm in Alba now (Piedmont Wine Info).

I booked a car rental before I left Ottawa and picked it up this morning a short walk from my hotel. I'd downloaded Italian maps for my Garmin (and while I was at it managed to download a fix for the constant difficulties I'd been having with my GPS device) and they proved to be accurate and immensly helpful.

The roads are in excellent condition and Italians seem to have a penchant for driving remarkably FAST. Man, they boogey! My rental is a five-speed diesel itty bitty Fiat:

I spent three hours (and 14 Euros in tolls) at roughly 125km/h (the limit was 130km/h) evading both the slow-moving stream of freight trucks and the light-speed-sound-barrier-popping BMW's, Benzes, and the like. It wasn't a boring trip! U2 is popular on the radio, as I'd come across them during my frequent station scans.

I arrived at Hotel I Castelli and am very pleased with where I'll be staying for the next two nights. Here's the view from my window:

(outstanding!!)

Here are pictures of the room:

(now THAT'S a bathroom!)

There's no construction site immediately next door here. In Verona, the jackhammers would start bright and early as they seemed to be deciding whether or not to take the building down, or simply jackhammer their way to the centre of the earth. It was very disruptive:

(my room was immediately to the right of the balcony)

I'm going to venture out into town for a bite of lunch and will post more about the past week later this afternoon.

Ciao!