Mike finally posted!

Wednesday March 30, 2022

Mike here. My turn to post before time gets too far away from me.

Margaret has covered the trip from Chicago and I cannot add much. A couple of things, though. I had expected that upon making it through Customs that we would be ushered out into an area with shops and kiosks but after walking through hallways we ended up in an open area with exit doors and no amenities. I had planned on hitting an ATM but if there was one, I missed it. (Margaret said she saw one but I walked right past it) I had 80+ Euros leftover from our trip to Scotland and we needed 50 of that to get on the bus to Vasto. Convenient how all of our cards failed to work on the driver’s phone app. We kept our water bottles from the plane and needed them for the bus trip.

Our Wise account & card have worked well here as an ATM card and as a credit card. We load it from our US banks and convert USD into Euros at a whim. I can tell Europe is becoming less stressed as the exchange rate has decreased from a high of .92 USD to Euros to .89 today.

Margaret wrote about our daily garbage pickup. We have a scheduled paper/cardboard pickup on Saturdays but since I use that for my daily fire prep, I don’t expect to put paper out until it warms up. Today started as a cool, damp 50 (10 Celsius) with rain expected throughout the week. I got the fire going in the kitchen fireplace first thing this morning. I am getting better at the fire thing but I still think I am using too much wood. Pam, the owner, left us some firestarter bricks but I have been able to stop using them.

Our rental house is in a cluster of 5 houses and we’ve been made welcome in our enclave. We only have one native Italian family in our group, the rest are international.

A note about driving. Margaret and I have adapted back to a manual transmissions without problems. The roads here are mostly two lane blacktop and their condition varies widely. It’s a hilly area and the roads wind up and down and no trip is complete without a hairpin turn or two or several. We try to keep to the posted speed limit of 50kph (30mph) but the Italian drivers tend to stack up behind us until we wave them past or they pass on their own.