Searching for the future – Page 2

SFTF – Closer to home – Canadian memories and discovering North Carolina, Pt.2

Discovering North Carolina

A week in Ontario reliving some of my past and also doing the tourist thing in Toronto proved to be enough to convince me that great as it is see old friends and revisit old stomping grounds, such journeys back into one’s previous life serve only to accentuate what has been lost and do nothing to satisfy the inner need to make the best of one’s future. So having satisfied that nagging curiosity that comes from always looking back over my shoulder, flying away with Celine to once again discover new lands was an exciting prospect.

Our destination from Toronto Pearson International Airport was Asheville, North Carolina via RDU, the airport shared by the Research Triangle cities of Raleigh and Durham in the Piedmont Region. Bad weather along the east of the country having delayed our flight for thirty-six hours and thick clouds still hiding much of the country beneath us, only clearing as we crossed over to the sunny side of the Allegheny Mountains, then getting our first glimpse of the wonderful green countryside of the Eastern States that is such a welcome contrast to the vast stretches of arid yellow and brown scenery to be seen when approaching the Southern Californian megalopolis we call home, combined to breath new life into both of us and somehow we knew this was going to be a destination with a difference.

The idea of a 240 mile drive after getting up at five in the morning wasn’t a great prospect, my mind still thinking in terms of overcrowded multi-lane freeways, both California and Ontario style, so finding us cruising smoothly along the enjoyably ‘not-too-busy’, two-lane highway that was Interstate 40 proved to be just the relaxing panacea I hadn’t dared to hope for. The temperature was agreeably up in the low eighties, Toronto having been a little on the cool side for us both, and we soon left the busyness of North Carolina’s technical hub to find ourselves out on the open road, driving westwards through a seemingly endless corridor of healthy green trees in their early blush of spring freshness. After an hour or so we turned off the highway to take a look at Winston-Salem, a city that CBS MoneyWatch had listed among the ten best places to retire in the United States[1]. It wasn’t a bad looking place, but being the first town we had visited in that part of the country we had nothing to compare it with. We were getting hungry and eventually finding a large shade-tree to park beneath next to a small park in a fairly gracious part of town, we satisfied the inner man with the sandwiches we had bought in the airport, while we contemplated our first morning in the not-quite-deep south.

From thereon the scenery got better and better as the highway climbed steadily, slowly worming its way into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains until we passed a sign announcing we had reached the Eastern Continental Divide at something over 2,600 feet above sea level. It was all downhill as we coasted the last few miles past the small towns of Ridgeville and Swannanoa into Asheville where we had to climb once more to our accommodation, a cute little old chalet snuggled away among the treetops near the crest of “Town Mountain”. It was an auspicious start to our introduction to the Carolinas.

We spent the next three days exploring with our eyes open for a possible nest relocation. Our immediate neighborhood comprised a variety of homes perched on both sides of the steep hill, as well as along the ridge where the locals had great views of the town to the west and the rolling tree-clad hills in every other direction. Our chalet was one of those that were clinging to the hillside which rose up directly behind us and dropped precipitously into the woods below us, such that the front half of the building was supported by steel pillars which disappeared into the undergrowth several feet below our little balcony. We quickly came to the conclusion that if we were going to find a property to purchase, the building would need to have all four corners planted firmly on terra firma – and the ‘garden’ would need to be level enough to comfortably push a wheelbarrow up and down. However, one positive benefit of such a location soon became self-evident as we got our day’s exercise carrying a small load of basic groceries back up from the local store only half a mile away but also a long, long way below us. After spending half a day sitting in the car on our drive from Raleigh-Durham, we had an urgent need to stretch our legs and headed downhill soon after our arrival, luckily meeting some friendly locals who pointed us in the right direction for the shops – our inclination would have been to turn left at the next junction which would have doubled the length of our trek, let alone the degree of hill climbing!

An amusing little incident occurred as we were nearing the bottom of the hill. A rather flashy looking gentleman of colour with a full set of bright gold teeth in his mouth, pulled up next to us in his large BMW, rolled down his window and promptly proceeded to chastise me for not walking on the outside of my wife when there was no sidewalk.

“My mother always said that the lady walked on the side of the bush? Weren’t you brought up properly?”

he blustered. Well he was maybe only about forty years younger than me, and I had of course been brought up to do exactly as he was instructing, so naturally I felt somewhat ashamed to have had my temporary aberration so vociferously pointed out to me. But we had to laugh as he drove off and wondered whether all the locals were so obsessed with correct etiquette!

Downtown Asheville was on the other side of the “mountain”. So next morning, after revelling in our surroundings as we ate breakfast serenaded by a chorus of wild birds and bathed in the leaf-filtered sunlight, we abandoned shanks’ pony for the less healthy motorised option. As is our wont, our first visit to any new town is to cruise the streets, getting our bearings and a feel for what the place has to offer. Asheville’s historic centre initially presents itself as being unpretentious, compact, very green, and well endowed with older buildings, many from the Art Deco period. Our car-borne meanderings initially failed to reveal an obvious town centre, or even a main street when, feeling somewhat disappointed after having heard so many good things about the town, we lucked upon the local Whole Foods store where we consoled ourselves European style with coffees and patisseries. Trader Joe’s was also just around the corner which really made it feel familiar territory. It may sound silly to born and bred Americans, but for us relatively new immigrants, after so much recent travel to distant lands where nothing was the same as over’ome, it seemed strange to realise that even though we were once again a couple of thousand miles away from home, this time we wouldn’t have to change our shopping habits.

What we really wanted to see was where freewheeling retirees such as ourselves might live in this interesting town, so armed with some local knowledge of the neighbourhoods from the pastry lady in Whole Foods we decided to explore the up-market Montford area, another historic district. Only five minutes drive from the city centre with a handsome small park (Montford Park) at its heart, this lush green paradise built on gently rolling hills was replete with many beautiful, and rather expensive-looking homes, each one set in an ample garden. We didn’t see any For Sale signs which in itself is a good indication that the residents aren’t looking to decamp, but not very promising to potential house-hunters; still if we ever decide to move to Asheville this would be one of the first areas we would start looking however financially optimistic we might appear. We did our usual thing of driving along every little street and were somewhat surprised to find a contrasting small estate of far less prosperous homes, identical wooden prefabs all standing on steel piles, backing onto the northern end of the area, somewhat resembling the small villages one would find outside the grounds of stately homes in times gone by, built for the staff, gardeners and chauffeurs. And this was also very positive in a way as even if we could just about afford to purchase one of those other fine houses, we have no wish to end up in an elitist, snobbish community with no sense of social equality. Indeed we believe one of the more attractive aspects of Asheville life to be its broad appeal to a wide spectrum of society. In the afternoon we decided to explore downtown Asheville on foot and to discover for ourselves the eclectic mix of artsy stores and boutiques, cafes and restaurants for all tastes, with hardly a single nation-wide store to be seen, that gave the town its reputation for being such a pleasant place to live. As the sun went down we drove down the valley, through the more commercial end of town and past an impressive looking medical complex which could bode well for our approaching old age, to Biltmore Village, originally constructed to accommodate the workers building Mr Vanderbilt’s “Biltmore Estate” in the 1890s. We thought it rather “twee” and bore a strong resemblance to a retirement community, something we aren’t quite ready for just yet!

We had to return along the same route the next day as we wanted to sample another of the sumptuous residences of the fabulously rich American business barons of late Victorian times – Casa Loma in Toronto having merely whetted our appetite for such architecture. The Vanderbilt who owned Biltmore Estate had done his research well and the end product of his dreams was a fine mish-mash of French Chateaux and English stately homes[2]. The building’s exterior is certainly handsome and it has lots of fine interior woodwork, the octagonal sunken Winter Garden being especially splendid, but some of the rather heavy Portuguese and American furniture detracts from the delicacy of the architecture and gives the house a less refined appearance compared with the European homes that inspired the design. Nevertheless it was a well spent three hours that we took to walk through, and that was without exploring the extensive grounds, omitted on account of heat and general old age fatigue! The icing on the cake however was the five mile drive through the estate to reach the exit, a melange of mixed woodlands, a stream and a river, a couple of small boating lakes, various farm buildings and finally, a field full of Canadian geese.

Still trying to see as much of Asheville and its environs as we could in our lamentably short stay, on our way back from Bilton we took a “short” detour to the little village of Black Mountain, recommended to us by a charming lady in the bookstore where we had stopped to pick up a few cards and gifts, as being a much nicer place to live than Asheville itself. About fifteen miles north east of Asheville, it turned out to be a bit further than we expected and when we got there we were disappointed to find that it wasn’t as attractive as we had been led to believe and, indeed, appeared to be rather high on the “Hicksville” scale. Perhaps it was just the lower cost of housing there that generated the suggestion which was obviously given with good intent. Anyway the next morning being our last, after enjoying another breakfast with the North Carolina sunshine seeping through the curtain of green leaves surrounding us, and being serenaded by the songs of the throng of small birds easily defeating the distant hum of traffic on the freeway in the valley below, we explored a couple more of the local neighbourhoods before heading off towards Charlotte. Lakeview Park and North Asheville in the general area of Beaver Lake are about a ten minute drive from downtown. The houses in the immediate vicinity of the Asheville Country Club were every bit as posh as their address implied but for those of us for whom the close proximity of a golf course is not a pre-requisite for residential desirability, there seemed to be a good choice of potentially liveable properties and in a very pleasant environment. Grace, where we stopped on the road back into town is another quite acceptable small neighborhood that seemed to have a sense of community, and is where we discovered “The Fresh Market”, a store that seemed to live up to its name and where we met with Linda and Josh, two of the staff who couldn’t have been more friendly. If there was only one very positive feeling we took away with us about Asheville, it would have to be the helpful, friendly vibes we sensed from everybody we met during our stay, something that is lacking in so many larger towns and cities.

One last drive through downtown, passing a protest by teachers, parents and pupils against education cuts, a perennial problem in our capitalistic society, and we were on the road again. Having left ourselves just six days to get a feel for North Carolina, we had decided that twenty four hours in Charlotte, the most populous city in the state, should be included in our itinerary. We opted for a more southerly route on highways 26 and 85, taking a slow detour through Hendersonville – nice main street but otherwise uninspiring – and eventually arrived at our luxury boutique hotel, “The Ivey’s Hotel”, on North Tryon Street in the heart of Uptown Charlotte, our little birthday splurge. The city is certainly quite impressive with plenty of very smart new high-rise architecture, clean streets with avenues of mature trees and a nice little park. The city has witnessed a lot of America’s coming-of-age history, and it is now the home to several large multi-national businesses and banks reflecting its status as one of the country’s major financial centres, the logos of Wells Fargo and Bank of America in particular to be seen everywhere. We only had time for a short walkabout in the evening, but the next day we toured around a couple of the city’s more liveable neighbourhoods, starting with up-market Plaza Midwood in the vicinity of the Charlotte Country Club and ending with more economical looking North Davidson (better known locally as “NoDa”). Our conclusion was that if one had to live and work in a large city, you could certainly do a whole lot worse than Charlotte, where it was possible to find very nice properties within a short drive of downtown – or Uptown as it is called in Charlotte. However, all said and done it is still a very large conurbation and certainly not the type of place your scribe would want to live out his retirement.

Thus, with our short vacation nearly coming to an end, we spent our last afternoon driving the more southerly route back to Raleigh-Durham airport avoiding the major freeways and taking NC24 and NC27 through towns with interesting names like Locust and Carthage and cutting across the edge of Uwharrie National Forest. The scenery was a patchwork of rolling hills, small farmsteads among the fields between the many townships, and at the roadside hundreds of churches of all denominations. Everywhere was very green and healthy-looking, the weather was sunny and hot, up to 90degF in some places, and our freeway-free meander gave us a brief but interesting insight into life in the rural Carolinas. We arrived in Raleigh in time to grab a coffee and take a brief walk in what appears to be a fairly modest city compared to Charlotte, before we had to return our rental car and check-in at our overnight airport hotel, in readiness for a crack-of-dawn flight the next day. As we waited for our shuttle bus driver to wake up, our final early morning chat with yet another friendly local, the overnight hotel concierge, provided us with a slightly less rose-tinted view of life in the Carolinas.

“Yeah, I have a gun at home, all my neighbours have guns and some of them even wear them openly when they go shopping for groceries. I hope I never have to use mine.”

and when Celina asked him why he had a gun himself, he simply answered,

“It’s our right!”.

He was in his sixties, an Afro-American who had started out life the hard way on the streets of Brooklyn and seemed completely oblivious to all the bigotry that we hear about in the media. I like to think his optimistic outlook on life was justified but there is always that undercurrent that seems to permeate through society in this country that makes one cautious about making a move such as we would be making if we ever decide that Asheville is the ideal nesting place for us. Not perhaps the best thought to go away with after having found such a delightful corner of the world.

[1]Nancy F Smith (2012-03-08). “The Ten Best Places to retire”. Finance.yahoo.com

[2]George Washington Vanderbilt ll was the youngest son of William Henry Vanderbilt who amassed a huge fortune from steamboats, railroads and other such lucrative enterprises. He commissioned a prominent New York architect, Richard Morris Hunt, who visited, amongst others, the French chateaux Chenonceau and Chambord, and Waddesdon Manor in England. Celine and I visited all three in the last few years which added an extra dimension to our impression of Biltmore. Of particular interest to me was the use of a load bearing steel framework beneath the stone exterior, a design feature which was a very new innovation when Waddesdon Manor was constructed some ten years earlier.

SFTF – Closer to home – Canadian memories and discovering North Carolina. . . (Pt.1)

Reliving Canada

After all those journeys to Europe and a couple of forays into Central and South America, Celine and I thought we should give this great continent of North America at least a chance to show its mettle. Son Number One recently took the bold step of moving his family from south California to South Carolina and my brother-in-law, always on the lookout for value-for-money housing, kept saying how wonderful the Carolinas appeared to be. Then someone else mentioned how popular the little city of Asheville NC was becoming, what a wonderful climate it had and the natural beauty of the surrounding countryside. Thus with the seed of an idea to travel east well and truly sown, an invitation to an 80^thbirthday party in my old hometown of Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario gave us just the catalyst we needed to start planning another little jaunt, one week reliving my old memories, and a second week exploring places completely new to both of us.

April beside Lake Ontario was never a guarantee of warm weather and North Carolina was a complete unknown so we packed assuming we might see some snow initially and would perhaps need a little sunblock later on. Climate Change was on our side this time and we were spared that final wintry blast that I remembered of old. Indeed there was sunshine enough to produce a small rainbow in the mist of the Niagara Falls, though small icebergs, remnants of the heavy freeze-up of recent months, were still making the death-defying leap over the edge and a lace of ice and snow decorated the fallen rocks along the gorge below the falls. The city of Niagara Falls continues to grow, with new hotels lining the edge of the escarpment above the never-ending crowds of tourists jostling for position along the railing, each one hoping to catch the perfect selfie to join the millions of other nearly identical pictures on Facebook.

Visiting the past can be painful and I was unsure what emotions I would feel being so close to the house where I had watched my sons grow into manhood, and which still contained so many memories of our past family life together. But when we pulled up outside what had once been my driveway and found no-one at home, we happily wandered around the old estate and admired the changes made since my departure, as I realised that the past is simply a part of what makes me the person I am today and is something I should enjoy without fear. We even had afternoon tea with my old neighbours as if nothing had really changed!

A few days staying in Burlington with old friends also helped to soften the experience and readied us for what was a novelty for me, three days of sightseeing in Toronto. It’s funny how one can live close to a large city for so long only to realise some years later how little one actually knows about the place. My excuse as far as Toronto is concerned is that I was always far too busy trying to make a business work whilst raising a family, looking after a very old house and tending the couple of acres it sat on. But the real truth is I don’t have a great love of cities, full-stop. What I do have however, and share with Celine, is an enjoyment of museums, art galleries and general wandering around new surroundings, and so it was with some surprise that I realised what a nice place Toronto is to do those things. When I lived in Canada people often told me that the city was really a conglomeration of small villages and didn’t seem like a big city at all. Well, times have changed and downtown Toronto most definitely has a big city feel about it, what with the enormous amount of new and very high high-rise building that has taken place in the last few decades. Wanting to be ‘nice and central’ we had found ourselves an AirBnB apartment on the 35^thfloor of one of the many ‘little’ skyscrapers that have sprung up, this one being at the junction of Front and John Streets. Living at such a great height was an unusual experience for both of us. The promised wonderful views were fine if you like looking at other tall buildings, though they were indeed rather beautiful when lit up at night; the ‘beautiful lake vista’ however was only visible if you knew exactly where to look and between which buildings it could be sighted; but it was well placed, ten minutes walk from Union Station, five from the Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays were just starting the new baseball season, and even less to the CN Tower from which one does indeed get a superb 360degree vista of the lakeside city. Sadly the Leafs had just got knocked out of the end-of-season playoffs so I didn’t get a chance to stomp and holler my encouragement to that ‘great’ ice-hockey team that we followed with such enthusiasm when the boys were growing up as young Canadians.

Still museums are our thing. To start off our three days as tourists in the city we spent an afternoon enjoying the fine art collection in the Art Gallery of Ontario. I particularly appreciated the works of the Group of Seven, artists who decided that Canada needed its own art to dignify its place in the world; and we both liked the renovated Dundas Street façade designed by Frank Gehry – who went on to design the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao amongst other great buildings. Our walk back from there took us through Toronto’s China Town, an area still dominated by two storey homes with small front and back gardens, where trees flourished and greenery prevailed, enabling us to understand those past comments about the neighbourliness of Toronto life. We stopped in the “Lucky Moose Food Mart” for one or two basics, enjoyed an extremely delicious vegetarian burger at “Fresh”, and then found “Fresh and Wild”, a well-stocked organic grocery which answered all of Celine’s wildest foodie dreams. And thus suitably fortified and our larder replete, we took a ride up to the top of the CN Tower to enjoy the sunset and the lights of the city coming on as darkness fell.

For whatever reason, the next day we decided to forego another museum visit and take ourselves to Toronto’s largest tourist attraction by visitor numbers, namely the Eaton Centre, now no longer owned and operated by the eponymous department store chain started by Timothy Eaton in the 19^thcentury, but by the faceless multi-billion dollar commercial real estate operation Cadillac Fairview Corporation. Well I guess everyone has to go shopping sometime and to do so in a building partly inspired by a galleria in Milan, Italy, is a better way to do it than most. And luckily for us, Lucky Brand had a sale on, and they had some different lines from our local store in Long Beach CA, so our shopping expedition was not wasted.

Our third day in Toronto was meant to be our last and we opted to visit Casa Loma, a Gothic Revival style mansion, or faux castle, constructed for financier Sir Henry Pellatt at the start of the 20^thcentury, and which eventually helped in that gentleman’s financial downfall when he found how much tax he owed to the city fathers. Totally pretentious, it is nonetheless a fascinating example of one man showing his feathers off to his fellow citizens and then falling out of the tree, and occupied us gainfully for another few hours on what had turned out to be a rather drizzly cold wet day. Thank goodness for Uber when the weather proves uncooperative; in spite of the heavy traffic we were back downtown in plenty of time to collect our bags from the safe hands of the concierge in the International Hotel and to take the UP train to Lester Pearson Airport for our evening flight to Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina.

But it was not to be . . . Bad weather had totally disrupted flights up and down the east coast, including ours, and we found ourselves spending the night in the fairly decent Hampton Inn and Suites Hotel adjacent to the runway we should have been taking off from, and rebooked on a flight for not the following morning but the day after. So Saturday saw us not making our way to our mountain top retreat in Asheville, but with time on our hands to do one more tourist thing in somewhat cooler and much less greener Toronto. We took the UP train back into town and walked the mile or so up to the Royal Ontario Museum where we spent most of our stay fascinated by The “Royal Arts of Jodhpur”. Mainly a history of the Rathore Dynasty, with lots of Indian art through the centuries, this temporary exhibit gave us a marvellous insight into the privileged life of India’s very rich and powerful, aided and abetted by British colonialism of course. Otherwise the Museum was only so-so, not very well organised and nothing of very much interest to a pair of well-travelled Europeans who have already seen, if not all of it, a lot of it. The ride back to the UP station at the end of the afternoon was a less than wonderful experience as the Uber driver seemed to have more interest in his passengers than in watching the road. Still at least we had the cab to ourselves, instead of sharing it, as we did a couple of days previously, with the rather frightening ‘gentleman’ who smelled of goodness knows what, and caused our very dapper driver to apologise profusely for his presence once he had left; a good reason for us to avoid shared rides in the future.

A final journey with UP to the airport and one more night in the Hampton Hotel and the next morning we were safely on our way, flying above the rather cloudy skies of north-eastern USA to explore another state, of which I will tell more in my next post.

SFTF 2018 – Let’s have just as much fun in 2019, but without the stress!

At every year’s end we are all encouraged to analyse the year gone by and then make resolutions to do things even better in the coming year. Well I think Celine and I would be hard pressed to have a better year in 2019, but I am quite sure we can have just as much fun!!

2018 was decidedly busy for us with a couple of long trips, one ‘down under’ and the other back ‘across the pond’. There’s no yellow brick road guiding travellers to the Oz we visited, but it is a country with a lot of magic, and being predominantly populated by migrants from the ‘old country’, it is an easy place for Anglo-Saxons – and their English-speaking wives – to find their way and feel at home. Crossing the Atlantic however, is a very different kind of journey and however many times we have both done it, we never cease to be surprised by what we find in dear old continental Europe.

We both enjoy travelling, as much for the adventure of discovering new places as for the enjoyment of returning to old pastures. Or so we thought when we planned our trip to Italy this autumn. “Let’s have a look at those regions of the country we haven’t seen before, for surely they will be every bit as good as the Italy we already know!” Lesson number one: Do not assume, and don’t take the recommendations of others at face value. Lesson number two: There may well be good reasons why one part of a country is so much more popular than another.

Lesson number three is a harder one to swallow. Just because you have enjoyed a country several times before as a tourist, does not automatically justify the corollary “hence it must be a really great place to live”. [If you haven’t already read my previous post “SFTF Italia o Portogallo Pt.5 Decisions, decisions . . .or rather a lack of same!” you may be wondering what leads me to this conclusion.] My migration to Long Beach CA to start a new life with Celine has some relevance to this lesson. My few short visits for various family gatherings prior to taking that step totally failed to educate me about the Californian lifestyle. I followed my heart in making the decision, and have absolutely no regrets in that regard. However, my previous habitats of semi-rural England, lakeside dwelling in Canada, plus a couple of short sojourns in hot dusty Kuwait and tropical Nigeria, in no way prepared me for a life in the seemingly endless megalopolis that surrounds Los Angeles. So I have to admit our recent peregrinations have been prompted by my wish to return to a lifestyle more suited to my ‘needs’ and, happily, Celine has been a more than willing fellow traveller but with slightly different expectations.

Perhaps with the exception of our trip to Australia, which was very much an adventure for its own sake, the journeys we have taken in recent years have all had the underlying goal of finding that perfect place to build our new nest. Unfortunately we have not been as successful as we might have hoped, for a lot of reasons which I do not intend to reiterate here. The result is that we are now having second thoughts about the whole idea of re-establishing ourselves in Europe. Indeed we have resolved to go forego foreign travel for at least the next twelve months and give more consideration to staying in the USA. After all we have family here on both sides of the continent, including especially four delightful grandchildren whose growing pains we enjoy being part of; and its going to be several more years before they will be joining the ranks of young globe-trotters able to visit us in far off places.

So what are we looking for???

Our combined needs and wishes for the perfect nesting site make for a complicated conundrum; collectively they fall into two main categories, location and site features. Location involves geography, climate, the natural environment, access to local shops, markets, cultural pursuits, fitness classes, health facilities, and these days more than ever, local political and social agendas. The features of a site that are relevant to our search are all the usual things, condition, age, size, garden, garage, basement, neighbourhood, and so forth.

As to the specifics of our particular ideal nest specification, we would love to find a well maintained two/three bedroom home with enough space for a “granny annex” and with a view of nature at its most glorious. This should be within a small garden to keep flowers on the table, fresh veggies in the diet and green fingers out of mischief. And to nurture our creative selves we would need space for a studio for my artistic wife, a garage or workshop for yours truly and of course . . . a study . We want to be close by a fair-sized town and yet not surrounded by dreary suburbanisation. Weatherwise we are conscious that advancing years and several decades of living in sunny south California have, between them, made the prospect of us accepting a life with temperatures regularly hovering around freezing point insupportable. At the same time we would like to enjoy once more the beauty of changing seasons, but without the need to shovel snow on anything more than a very occasional and rare basis. Geographically we remain undecided whether mountains or the sea are the more desirable background to a contented life; both have their virtues but an unspoiled view of the ocean nearly always incurs an undesirable financial penalty. The potential for hurricanes, severe flooding and uncomfortably high humidity for prolonged periods in the summer are also things we can do without.

The next question is where on earth, or, now we have for the moment taken Europe out of the bucket, at least where on this vast North American continent, can we find such an ideal place? California is fine in many ways but by virtue of its, in my opinion, highly over-rated climate is on the whole over-priced. Moving further north to Oregon or Washington appeals to the nature-lover in me but the prospect of numerous days of wet rainy and/or misty weather holds no charm for Celine. Continuing up the map and returning to my second homeland of Canada, in particular the coastal areas of British Columbia, ‘God’s Country’ to its devotees, is probably a non-starter for much the same reasons, although the prospect of a better national health service, and an increased pension for me, are quite appealing. Large mountain ranges and barren deserts harbour the extremes of weather that both of us wish to avoid so that would seem to eliminate a few more of the Western states; however, Colorado and perhaps some parts of Arizona stay on our must-visit list. The vast section commonly called ‘middle-America’ is a region about which I know almost nothing, apart from the weather that people experience there, and we don’t see many billboards, or read many articles, suggesting that the place we are looking for might be found there.

So we are left with the Eastern seaboard of which I have some brief experience, having lived on that side of the continent for many years and taken vacations with my family to New England and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I also recently read Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in The Woods” which makes a good case for the Appalachian Mountains, and as I write, my son Tom and his family are considering a move to South Carolina. Keeping well away from Washington DC and New York and all that those two great cities imply in their own fashion, we are left with the pretty countryside of New England – too cold in the winter, Florida, Georgia and perhaps South Carolina – hurricane territory and far too humid in the summer, plus North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and the Virginias, all of which have some beautiful countryside.

I have no idea what all this is leading to, and even less idea about when and where we will find that idyllic nesting ground. So for the next few months we will plan nothing, keep a careful eye on TrustedHousesitters.com and HomeExchange.com and see what, if anything, turns up trumps. It would also be a good time for me to get back to writing my ‘memoirs’, which was, after all, the original reason I set up this blog site. And then at the back of my mind I still have the feeling that we should go and explore a bit deeper into Portugal, though not the Algarve, and have we really rejected Central America in its entirety!!

Any and all suggestions will be gratefully received and carefully considered. Thanks for reading and I will keep writing. See you again soon!

SFTF Italia o Portogallo Pt.5 Decisions, decisions . . .or rather a lack of same!

Taranstales

December 2, 2018

Sitting in a sun-filled room and looking out over green fields rolling away towards small craggy mountains nearly hidden in the distant mist, and in the shadow of war-torn Monte Cassino with its rebuilt abbey, it would be lovely to be able to say “Yep, we know where we are going to spend the rest of our lives”. Alas, the only thing I can say quite categorically is that we have found plenty of places where we most definitely will not be replanting our roots!

The marvellously rebuilt Abbazia di Monte Cassino.

Italy has proven to be a fascinating melange of conflicting qualities. We found there beauty both natural and classical contrasting with a lot of manmade ugliness, mainly the result of some terrible post-war concrete architecture; we breathed sweet fresh air in every corner that had not been scarred by the works of modern man and then were apalled by streets strewn with detritus from a society unable to care for itself; and to make matters worse, everywhere there seemed to be a blatant disregard for rules and regulations put in place to make sense of the chaos that prevails. What Italy is not is a never-ending realm filled only with romantic relics from its glorious past, a haven of peace and beauty unscarred by the carelessness of modern man. And then there is the small matter of the weather. I’m sorry to say but those who have become acclimatised to Southern California’s never-ending sunshine over many years don’t take kindly to the idea of facing what Northern Italy is capable of dishing out three or four months of the year. Personally I am still sitting on the fence over that one, believing I am still a tough Canadian but occasionally starting to have doubts!

During the course of the past eleven weeks Celine and I have been on a quest. We arrived in Italy each with our own idealised memories of past visits, expecting we would easily fall in love with some part of the country that we had both previously held in such high esteem. It might have been simpler if we both had exactly the same idea of the perfect place and the need for compromise had never entered the equation. But we are your normal married couple with the inevitable differences of opinion, who don’t always share the same likes and dislikes, and have a few different priorities in life.

The Trevi Fountain, one of Rome’s must-see places – if you can get through the crowds!

Our saga started with three days in Rome, where our transcontinental flight from Los Angeles disgorged us back in September; we needed some easy time to get over the usual jet-lag and acclimatise ourselves back to the Italian lifestyle we both remembered. We stayed in Trastevere within walking distance of most of the main tourist sites, bought slices of very delicious pizza at a ‘hole-in-the-wall’ pizzeria, ate some very good rabbit stew at a trattoria around the corner from our digs and tested out the local transport system to seek out the second largest Basilica in town. Suitably into the travelling mode again, we took a couple of weeks on a side trip to Portugal and Spain (see “SFTF Pt3 – Ten days with International Living”) before getting on with the main project, searching for our future, which we believed might well involve la bella italia.

Doing the tourist thing wasn’t really the intention of our trip but there were a few places we both wanted to revisit to remind ourselves what we had seen and liked so much in the past. So we gave ourselves three days each in Venice, Bologna and Florence. Venice and Florence were much more crowded than I remembered and had ever so slightly lost their charm as a result. In Venice our gondola trip was, at times, almost like being in a waterborne traffic jam; and we only just caught our vaporetto back to the carpark before a record high tide brought the city to a standstill. Bologna was new to me and I was suitably impressed by the renaissance architecture and its arcades that enabled us to walk nearly everywhere without an umbrella – it was a bit damp during our visit. And Florence disappointed us in one important regard as we had to miss out on the wonderful Uffizi Museum after we discovered too late that it is sometimes now necessary to make reservations for tickets 48 hours in advance.

One of the many lovely arcades in Bologna

The tourist theme continued albeit unintentionally. We were travelling long distances and needed to break the journeys into easy stages, stopping sometimes for just one or two nights. The simplest plan was to look for towns that had something of interest, a focal point for the time we would be there, and often it was somewhere we had read about or that had been recommended by someone or other. In Italy this was almost inevitably a town or city of historical significance, rarely a town that was simply a very pleasant place to live. Thus we visited the red brick town of Urbino with its unusually large student population, the ancient troglodyte city of Metara which is said to be the third oldest continuously occupied city in the western world, Campobasso high in the hills of Campania with a marvellous museum about the Sammites, the wonderful baroque city of Lecce, the capital of Puglia and the Firenze of the south, Cassino where we visited the site of one of the bloodiest battles of WWll, and finally San Stefano di Sessanio, a tiny earthquake shattered village high in the foothills of the mountains that are the heart of Parco Nazionale del Gran Sasso.

Some of the beautiful scenery to be found in Gran Sasso NP

The very ancient town of Matera, the home of several thousand cave dwellers until as recently as 1952 when Italy’s “shame” was brought to light.

In this way Italy, or at least the Italy we have seen on this trip and in the past, is its own worst enemy, for there is history of some sort everywhere, whether it be ancient Greek or Roman, medieval, baroque or renaissance, and where there isn’t history as we know it there is some of the most beautiful natural history to be found in all of Europe. Thus we seemed to spend days and days, tramping the streets of cities and towns, and even small villages, looking at archaeological sites, churches, museums, and castles, but rarely gaining true insights about the quality of life these places could offer us as potential new residents. We stayed in some beautiful homes, most notably an antique penthouse with marvellous views over the valley in the Umbrian town of Todi, and a wonderfully renovated farm house at the top of a hill in the little village of Moricone. I believe that our only mistake on this trip was to never stay anywhere really long enough to become even peripherally involved in the local community or get a real feel for the neighborhood.

The appearance is of a country that has a good handle on dealing with its rubbish . . .

When we did get a view of Italian life in the raw, such as our 48 hour sojourn in Naples, the drive through the modern city of Pompeii on our way to the Amalfi coast, the visit to the coastal town of San Cataldo some twenty miles east of Lecce or simply driving between our various destinations, the experience was not always entirely gratifying. For starters parts of southern Italy seem to have a serious problem with refuse. You see it everywhere, either dumped in black bags in laybys, thrown into the bushes alongside an otherwise attractive country road, or casually thrown out of car windows. Which all seems to be totally at odds with an apparently serious attempt by the authorities to have a well organised system of recycling. We found three or more different coloured containers, each destined to collect clearly defined streams of recyclables, in practically every place we stayed. Recycling bins were visible in every town and village, and collection schedules were posted for all to see. Yet every time we questioned locals about this rather anomalous situation, we received roughly the same message, namely that the local population really can’t be bothered and doesn’t have the will to clean up it’s own backyard.

Sadly the reality turns out to be . . .
rather different!!

And then of course there is the ‘excitement’ generated by meeting other road users. Much has already been said about the exuberance of Italian drivers, in blogs and travel guides of all ilks. I have driven in many parts of the world and have rarely been fazed by what has come my way. In my several jaunts into Italy it has usually been my passengers who have raised the “Oh my God” alarm bells as I have deftly avoided another heart-stopping situation. But once away from the wheel, I do have to admit to have now become quite neurotic about the sound of a scooter vaguely approaching in my direction at full throttle even when I am in a supposedly pedestrianised area, to totally distrust the actions of all motor vehicles anywhere near pedestrian crossings, and to being unnecessarily nervous when it comes to crossing a road without the sanctity provided by well signed semafori. Well okay, this sickness did reach the acute stage after 48 hours in Naples which has to have the worst case of scooter-mania we have seen in all of Italy, but it is something that has been a grumbling pain every time I have hit the shore of this bel paese. And, sadly, the ‘mad’ driving has a serious effect on Celine for whom, like so many US citizens, driving anywhere in Europe creates unwarranted fears of not being able to cope, even though she is a perfectly competent driver on her home turf.

Scooters and pedestrians constantly playing chicken on the streets of Napoli!

Last but not least in this litany of complaints about what is still in my opinion an otherwise very desirable place to live . . .what on earth has happened to the Italian flair for architectural style and a desire for beauty as well as function that started in Roman times if not before, and continued for many hundreds of years possibly into the later years of the industrial revolution, or even the 1950’s? Practically without exception, every city and village that we visited and of which we enjoyed the centro storico within, had its outskirts filled with ugly concrete buildings, both residential and industrial, designed and built without the slightest pretence of artistic merit or architectural innovation. And to make matters worse, particularly in southern Italy, it seemed that the majority of these structures were in a sad state of disrepair with rusted crumbling balconies, weather stained walls in dire need of plenty of TLC and unkempt yards and gardens. [To be fair the post-war period of ugly architecture is not a phenomenom unique to Italy, just such a surprise in this country!]

There are almost certainly many reasons, some may say excuses, for these ‘unfortunate’ aspects of Italy, but it is with regret that I have to admit they do little to entice Celine, and myself, to make the move that we had been hoping might be the result of this year’s Italian saga. Countering these blights, there is of course the prospect of living in a country with hundreds of square kilometres of very beautiful countryside, a country whose people have proven to be nothing if not friendly and who have made us feel welcome everywhere we have gone, even including the most touristy areas. As is so often the case in a foreign country, a little of the local lingo has gone a long way in making us welcome and particularly Celine’s command of Italian has opened up many a fascinating conversation for us. We have spent time with ex-patriots who have had nothing but good things to say about their lives there, that is apart from the perennial complaints about Italian bureaucracy which most seem to have been able to endure, even if not enjoy! And yet we have also talked with several Italians, and ex-pats married to Italians, who can’t wait to get away from that self-same bureaucracy and from a country that they find to be increasingly unliveable; not exactly sure whether or not this is a case of rose-tinted spectacles versus the grass being greener on the other side of the fence.

The most important lesson that I believe to have come out of this really quite wonderful trip, in spite of its unhappy conclusion, is the need for us to decide exactly what makes the ideal place for us to live. So many times Celine and I would find ourselves waxing lyrical about a hilltop village, or a view of the countryside, or sometimes even the old centre of a historic town or city, until one or other or both of us would ruefully admit that the place we are admiring would never make us both as happy as we hope to be in a new home. We both know the wishes of the other but neither of us is very good at accepting the need for compromise, if indeed compromise is the answer.

Something for me to go away and think about and, hopefully, write about sometime.

SFTF Italia Pt4 – Addendum – A lesson learned!

Since writing this post I have received some interesting feedback from Monia di Giulmi, one of the better presenters at the conference, which I feel adds an important dimension to what I said. With her permission I am reproducing her comments below . . .

“I agree about almost everything you have written…but there is one point you have completely misunderstood:

…”but we had also come to understand why housing there can be cheap, and why the locals were so eager to bring in foreign investment.”…

“Are you sure that local people are kind to “foreigners” because they have some economic interest?

“You really have misunderstood this point!

“When you bought the vegetable at the local outdoor market in Torino di Sangro, you have spent 1,00 euro of cherry tomatoe and the vendor has given you more than 1.00 euro extra gift of other products to try. Celine, was impressed, she said that this in California would never occur.

“You should investigate this point a little more…

“The nature of the locals…

“The welcome party in Colledimezzo was spontaneous and not planned.

“There are more than 15 families of foreigners from all over the world that have bought in Colledimezzo.

“This makes the locals very pride of their little town in the middle of nowhere.

“The mayor has not any interest in selling houses or bring in foreign investments, on the contrary, sometime foreigners give him more trouble than anything else.

“In addition, I can say to you that Abruzzo might seem poor, but it is not really that poor, almost every family owns two or three houses…sometime four.

“In my opinion you hadn’t enough time to relax, stop for a while your journey across the world and start to enjoy what Abruzzo has to offer.

“Abruzzo can’t offer lot of culture and art like Umbria and Tuscany.

“Abruzzo can’t offer glamour and VIP events like Sardinia or the Lake region in the North.

“Abruzzo is a region where you have to stop and where you have to open your heart.

“If you have time you can read the blogs below:

“The first one is a client of mine, she writes her blog because she loves writing…(no other hidden interests):

https://navigatinglifeinabruzzo.com/2018/11/22/walk-to-the-village/?fbclid=IwAR2V–COKmiBQ-NYfqFtpmT-I8USc3ZnsEBUKOkoBafnhzlVMXnlhul0TL0

“The second one is related to a family I never met, but I met many other families like them:

http://www.italymagazine.com/featured-story/share-your-italian-story-one-familys-new-life-rural-abruzzo?fbclid=IwAR39lN9SW9IxEbep4tfg3wutMiovy5g4Q59CCmQhFyUi8dK3ILovlB4soro

“Reynolds the man who was talking at the conference has a blog too:

http://theslowtourist.com

“I think it’s not easy to understand a region in just one week…especially one week spent at a conference and attending a guided property tour.

“I hope you will have time to comeback on your own, to enjoy the beautiful places the region has to offer (for sure not Pescara) and the very welcoming people that are just so happy to meet foreigners!

“My best regards from Abruzzo!!”

These are very valid comments and I am grateful to Monia for making them. We were indeed in Abruzzo for only a very short time and it was unfair of me to make any sort of realistic judgement. However, I can say for certain that the region has some very beautiful countryside which deserves a second, more lingering look.

Celine and I have been trying to see a lot of Italy in our ten weeks here trying to find that perfect place. In many ways we have probably tried to see too much and have been nothing more than whistle-stop tourists. Only now as we come to the end of this tour are we beginning to come to any firm conclusions, some of which may come as no surprise to my readers who are going through the same process. In my next post I will try and synthesise our experiences and draw my own conclusions . . . Will we decide to come back to Italy? And if so when, to where and with what objective? I wish the answers to those questions were already jumping out at me!!