Escape From Sestriere!!!

June 14, 2005, 7:37 AM, Grangesises, Italy

We’re about ready to make our escape! Thank God! At 8:30, Paolo is going to take us to Sestriere to catch the bus to Oulx, and then on to Torino. My biggest worry now is the weather. It’s rainy and foggy on top of this mountain. I’m wondering if that’s going to affect the bus schedule. Why, oh, why couldn’t it have been nice and sunny like it was on Sunday?

You know, I don’t think I’d like to ski here in the winter, even. Especially if it looked like today. I can imagine the rain being snow, and the mountain all socked in with fog. Who’d want to ski in that pea soup? I don’t like that even on a relatively small mountain in West Virginia; I certainly wouldn’t want to ski in the Italian Alps in fog. That reminds me of Dennis Belluomini’s story about how he and his family skied the Swiss Alps in fog, and how terrifying it was. No, thank you. I’ll take Snowshoe or Stowe any time.

Well, we managed to get through the long, boring day yesterday, passing the time by chatting with Paolo awhile, then walking the different levels of this place (there are a lot of them, and the views are magnificent.) Once we heard cow bells from the gorgeous valley below, and it made me feel like I was in "Heidi." :)

We went back to the room and lunched on our usual staples—bread, cheese and wine. And then we made a few phone calls. To Barb, Frank and Vince. Last night, we walked down to the one little café open and spent 7 Euros on coffee and a cheese & tomato sandwich for Kathy, and tea and ice cream for me. The tea was the expensive item at 2 Euros, 1 Euro more than the coffee!!! We came back to “the cave” and watched a Julia Roberts movie in Italian, following it pretty well, I might add. (Of course, I’d seen it before.) Before the movie came on, we were so bored that we muted the sound and watched an old movie we've never seen, dubbing in our own dialogue. Now, that's bored!!! Went to bed and slept through the night with the sound of rain pelting down on the shutters.

So, here we are, ready to get the hell out of this place!