Happy New Year

Happy 2018! The new year came in with a bang, literally: the fireworks in the piazza outside our apartment building at midnight were incredibly loud. I went to sleep with earplugs, but they were not any help with all the explosions. My wife somehow stayed in bed through it all, but I got up to watch a bit from our living room window. There were a handful of balconies where they were shooting off large quantities of fireworks, and lots of others looking on from their window or balcony. It took me awhile to get back to sleep after all the excitement.

It was good to have a morning at home, including exercise for the first time in almost a week. Every so often the mission has a "deep cleaning" P-day, and this was a particularly good time for it. My wife did the floors in our bathrooms and the kitchen, as well as running loads of laundry nonstop to catch up from our trip. Because it takes days to dry things, catching up on laundry is much harder than at home! 

Meanwhile, I tried to figure out why our back fridge wasn't working. I took out all the different pieces inside. There is apparently a very small conduit from the freezer below (which works great) to the fridge above (which doesn't). My assumption is that cold air is supposed to be sucked up by the little fan; if not, I have no idea how or where the cold is supposed to arrive in the fridge. A bit of crud had accumulated in the hole, so I cleared that out with a toothpick  and a screw, as much as I could. My wife cleaned all the inside surfaces as well as the floor beneath, and we then reassembled everything, hoping that it would work. By evening it was clear that it wasn't going to make any difference. Bummer. We'll be shopping for a new fridge sometime soon.

In the afternoon, we left for a big outing with five other senior missionary couples, organized by the Herways. There were 12 of us, so we drove in three cars. We had the Balzottis in our car, so hilarity ensued. The trip was to Bagnoregio, about 80 miles outside of Rome, where they have a live nativity scene that covers the entire town. It was chilly but not too cold when we left, and it rained pretty hard during the drive up on the freeway. There was also an accident which stopped traffic dead for about ten minutes. By that point I was thinking this wasn't going to work out -- no way they would do the nativity scene in that much rain. But then the traffic cleared, and a while later we drove out of the rain into blue skies as we approached Bagnoregio!

The town is amazing: it's built on a mesa, with vertical sides. Apparently it was never able to be conquered in ancient days because of its natural fortifications. Here are some views, from the adjoining town and on the walk up:

It was quite a hike to get there, over 20 minutes just to get from our parking spot to the base of the bridge, and then another 20 or so minutes up the very steep hill. We were all very winded by the time we got there, but it was good to stop occasionally and enjoy the breathtaking scenery all around.

With my fear of heights, I was a bit uncomfortable on the walk up over the rather narrow bridge. My wife did pretty well -- she always complains (justifiably) that, with her comparatively short legs and stride, it's hard for her to keep up with American-sized people, but we all arrived in good shape. It was a good thing that we bundled up a bit, since it was getting colder as it got dark, and being up high like that meant that there were some strong wind gusts.

The tickets to get in were only 5 euro each. The town has only seven full-time residents, but it has become a tourist attraction, with several B&Bs, and a place for second homes for some Romans. The live nativity scene is put on as a fundraiser by the Red Cross. It was rather magical. There were scenes all over town, not just the manger scene, with people dressed in ancient costumes plying their trades. I'll give a few photos below just to give you an idea, and you can click here to see the entire unedited set of photos I took.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The entire thing was rather magical. I felt sorry for the re-enactors, who had to be freezing. We spent about an hour and a half walking through the town, enjoying all the different ancient scenes. 

Then we all went for a brief dinner at a little place that was carved into a cave.

 

The staff were very nice, but they only had three menus to give us for the dozen of us, and a couple of them were handwritten and hard to  decipher. The waiter couldn't seem to understand that most of us actually spoke Italian, so he kept trying to speak to us in English that didn't quite make sense. Finally we just decided to order one of every kind of bruschetta they had (their specialty), cut them up, and share them. The alternative of ordering individually and waiting for it all to be cooked and delivered to our tables would have taken hours. So we had a nice selection of all different kinds of tastes to share and enjoy, and it was only about 8 euros apiece. The staff thought we were weird: bruschetta is NOT a dinner here, but it worked well for us.

We then did the reverse walk, almost an hour, with the wind blowing pretty hard on the exposed bridge down. There was a large amount of climbing in both directions, so it was a great workout! Here is a view of the streets in the adjoining town that we walked through, very festively lit and decorated for the holidays.

By the time we got back to our car (no parking ticket, thankfully, even though our parking pass had expired about half an hour earlier), we were cold and exhausted. The drive back was harder in the dark, with windy country roads for quite a while before getting back to the freeways. 

When we got to the main freeway tollroad south to Rome, I inadvertently pulled into the Telepass lane -- those Balzottis are just too fun to visit with, so I blame it all on them! I tried to back up and change lanes, but the cars behind us were having none of it, honking furiously for us to get out of the way. So we pushed the emergency help button and it let us on, without an entry ticket. We figured we'd explain when we got off the freeway and paid the toll. Well, not much luck there. The deal is that, if you don't have a ticket, you pay the maximum toll, 78.50 euro in this case instead of 4.50 euro. Yikes!! The toll booth guy let us pay the 4.50 amount but ticketed us and gave us a paper to go pay the rest online. There is apparently a way to appeal and try to prove that we actually only drove a little ways on the freeway. We'll see how that goes! Anyway, we were laughing and talking with the Balzottis, so worst case it was worth the cost for a great evening out.

We got home about 9pm, tired and cold, but having had a wonderful day. Not long thereafter we hit the sack. It is incredible to live and serve in such a beautiful and historical place.