Pastries and Passagiata

Three weeks from today we will be stepping on the airplane in Paris to come home. It’s hard to imagine that this adventure will be finished in 21 days. We planned this trip for so many years, and it has been everything I pictured. Having said that, I will be happy to see my family and friends and get back to my regular day-to-day life, in which my granddaughter has learned to ride her bike without training wheels!

Bec and TR were on the road to the Cinque Terre by 9 o’clock yesterday morning. Bill and I left the Priest’s House shortly after to have our morning coffee and pastry. We have become regulars at the pastry shop now. We are greeted warmly and the barrista no longer asks us what kind of coffee we want. They know that Bill has a cappuccino and I have a machiato, and we each have a pastry. Every morning it comes to 3,80, no matter what kind of pastry we get. The pastries we get at this pastacceria in Certaldo are the best we’ve had during this entire trip. I will miss them, though my waistline definitely won’t.

Once we get our coffee and pastry, we take them out to a table on the patio. While we eat, we watch the men who gather there every morning argue and laugh with each other. We observe all of the regulars, including a mother with her little six-year-old boy and her three-month old baby girl in the stroller. One day Mother left Big Brother to watch Baby Sister while she went inside to get her coffee. Big Brother was waving his arms around Baby Sister, teasing her the way brothers of any nationality tease their sisters, and suddenly the baby projectile vomited right at her brother. Big Brother stood motionless in shock and horror for an instant, and then ran into the café, babbling rapidly in Italian. I laughed out loud.

Yesterday, since we had nothing special to do, we walked around the town a bit after we finished our pastries and coffee. We found a store that sells English-language books, and we browsed in there a bit. We window-shopped and tried to stay out of the way of the women walking purposefully towards the next stop on their list of errands. Bill treated himself to an International Herald Tribune, which is a global edition of the New York Times that you can get throughout Europe. It galls him to spend 2,50 on a newspaper, so he doesn’t buy it often. Still, if you asked him about things he’s missed, he would say reading the newspaper in the morning while he drinks his coffee.

The day consisted entirely of taking care of some business we needed to get done, and since the house was very quiet without our visitors, we had no excuse not to do so. Bill made our hotel reservations for the week after we leave Certaldo. We will spend it working our way towards Paris, with stops on the French Riviera, the Bordeaux wine region of France, and the area around Normandy. We will spend our final few days in Paris.

We drove into town in the evening around 7 o’clock, just in time to participate in the passagiata, which is the evening stroll down the main pedestrian street. The town was filled with Certaldoans walking with their families and greeting their friends who they hadn’t seen since last night’s passagiata. We saw a little girl on her bicycle with training wheels and thought of our granddaughter who has reached that next step towards independence.

We had pizza and gelato, and then headed back home just as the sun was going down. Bill took some wonderful photos of what was a very pretty sunset. The sky was a beautiful color of orange, and it turned the whole vista a lovely shade of pink.