I just realized today that in two weeks it will be winter for Luci and I. And I don’t mean the pseudo-winter that we had this summer up at Boccalatte (lasciamo perdere, eh) but real true astronomical winter. No, wait that can’t be right. Ah yes, spring starts in New Zealand next weekend. I can’t even keep it straight anymore. I guess we haven’t seen astronomical winter in over three years. But in all the 27 winters I’ve experienced in my life I can’t say that I have ever stood on snow and ice a kilometer thick before like I did last summer. Or can I say that one day we had 8 inches of snowfall and the next day it was sunny and 70F outside like happened to us this summer on the Grandes Jorasses. I guess you can say we are just sailing on a sea of irony.

Tomorrow we leave Italy, and I have to say, I have never been happier to be out of here. Sure, in the past I have always been ready for a change of scenery by this time in the season but this year I am simple ready to be GONE FROM HERE. This season in Italy was going superbly until the 4th of August when in began to snow. I determined that we had about 4 feet of snowfall throughout the month of August. Snowfall means no clientele for us at Rifugio Bocalatte; no clientele means, well, nobody at the hut. Kind of a novelty at first but by the end of the month (some 20 zero-counts later) it was simply madness.

By the time the Alpine club came up to do the work they were scheduled to (see earlier posting) we were ready to make a run for it. We couldn’t get in the helicopter fast enough. What insanity, though. About a week before the date they were supposed to come up to work we got in touch with the contractor to see how many days he was planning for the work so we could plan their meals. That is when he drove the last nail in the coffin of our august. He said that he told all his workers to plan to eat cold food because he thought they would come up after we had closed. We were kind of looking forward to the extra income a couple days of guests would bring us but, in a way, the news was kind of a relief. So we called his bluff and said, “Fine, we are going to fly down on the helicopter you fly up on.” I don’t think he was expecting that. Our theory is that he was going to bring up his own food and then turn around and charge the Alpine Club for full-pension at the hut. So when he tells the Alpine Club that we are not going to be around they are surprised and he tells them, “They said they don’t have enough food to feed me and my crew” to try and cover his ass. The truth, of course, is that we needed to FLY down because we have so much left over food that we can’t possibly pack it down on our backs. Not only is this guy a bad worker, but he is a terrible liar. We keep telling the Alpine Club that this guy is a crook but they won’t listen.

Anyway, the day before they are scheduled to fly up it snowed another 4 inches. So, on the morning of the flight it is kind of hectic getting everyone and everything on and off the roof of the hut and in and out of the helicopter. We almost lost my brother’s sombrero in the process. But, we arrived safely in the valley like rock-stars in our private helicopter and promptly caught a bus (very not-like-rock-stars) into town to our friend Gio’s. He wasn’t around but he let us stay at his place, being the brave soul that he is. We threw massive rock-star like parties and made sure to clean up really well before he arrived at the end of the week (Just kidding, Gio!). Luci’s parents came up for the weekend and we did a little hut to hut hiking to a couple of the huts in the lower valley.

Since we had the motorcycle, we decided to take a detour through Val d’Isere and the Vanoise on our way back to Milan. We also had to stop in Turin at the Alpine Club office to sort out my payment for the painting of the hut and to talk about “things”. We found out that it began to snow again at the hut later the same afternoon that we had flown down and they had beat a hasty retreat without doing any work whatsoever. Sono i cazzi loro.

Back in Milan…Luci and I had been talking about taking a little three or four day motorcycle trip to the Dolomites. But, she and her folks took most of the week to recover from the hike to the huts and then this came up and we needed to finish that and, “oh crap the post office is closed on Fridays”, blah, blah, blah and we never got around to it. So I have spent the last two weeks at my in-laws…fun. My personal in-law law is: two weeks. After two weeks, suicide begins to look like a viable escape. Coincidently, two weeks is the time it takes for my older bother and I to begin seriously considering fratricide.
So my bad mood has been building for days and then it started to rain. It POURED for 24 hours straight without stopping and has since been drizzly punctuated by the occasional drenching. I decided to just go ahead and put the motorcycle away early. Sad day. But it only got sadder.

Yesterday, Saturday, we all went to an antique show. I like antiques; they like antiques; there is no reason this shouldn’t be fun. One of the few things my mother-in-law and I can agree on is that we have completely opposite tastes in almost everything; especially when it comes to clothing and domestic decoration. I am not going to give examples because it is enough to know me or read a couple of pages of this blog and imagine someone completely opposite in everyway and you have my MIL. Alright, alright, an example; she says she could never go to Antarctica because she would get claustrophobia…yea, fear of ENCLOSED spaces.

So knowing that we have opposite tastes it is just easier to split up in the antique fair to look at things we each like; me alone and Luci with her mother and father. It didn’t take long to discover this was not my kind of fair. It was mostly jewelry, furniture, silver, high-end stuff. I did find an old Leica 35mm camera for 500€ which is a good price but I wasn’t carrying that kind of cash around with me. I had seen everything I was interested in seeing and went to find the pod of Pandolfis. I found them in the vintage clothing section.
Now for those of you who know me, you know that I have never been any sort of animal rights fanatic. On the contrary, I once put myself unintentionally and somewhat embarrassingly at odds with friends and colleagues at break time at McMurdo. We were all sitting around reading the photocopied New York Times and there was article about a guy who had been sentenced to jail-time for brutally killing someone’s puppy. I exclaimed something along the lines of, “that is nuts that they would sentence a guy to jail time for killing a stupid dog”. From then on, I was a crazed canine murderer to at least one of the group. But, I digress.

Before going to look for my wife and in-laws, I had been looking at a series of old Chinese sculptures in ivory. Some of these piece were made of very, very large pieces of ivory. They were obviously from very large Tuskers that are simple not found anymore. It made me think of a study I once read about how the genetic traits for large tusks in elephants are being selected out and how large tusks are becoming less and less commonplace almost as a mode of self-preservation from poachers. With poaching on my mind, I went to look for my family. I found my mother-in-law wrapped in a ocelot coat in a vintage furs stall. When they saw me, they collectively jumped. Luci made a futile effort to distract me by showing me something she found in a different stall. Yeah, right. I was upset. I said to Luci, “you are trying to convince her NOT to get that, right?” She said, “I just spent the last fifteen minutes trying to convince her not to get TWO”.

I have always been indifferent to fur. In fact, I think rabbit fur is great. I think using the fur is a great way to put to use something that might otherwise go to waste (I guess since Americans don’t really eat rabbit like Europeans, that sounds like kind of a weak argument). But seeing my mother-in-law buying the fur of an endangered animal that was killed exclusively for the value of its fur on the international market I found upsetting. But what could I do? Try arguing with someone who thinks she would suffer from claustrophobia in the wide open space of Antarctica? I just walked away and waited in the car. I am leaving tomorrow anyway. No more mother-in-law for seven months.

Yes, its true. Tomorrow we leave this wonderful country for cold, white wastes of Antarctica. This year we are going to the USAP’s newest field camp, WAIS Divide. Luci is going to be one of the two cooks and I am going to be the fuels tech and light mechanic. This camp will be much larger than Siple Dome with an average population of about 30 from what we understand. But first we have a couple of weeks back in Maine where hopefully I can bring to a close the long motorcycle licensing saga amongst other things. This year, our employer is doing training in Denver like it used to be done in the past. Why they have changed back I am not sure. Probably because it is cheaper to send new people home from Denver than from Christchurch when they begin to discover that McMurdo is going to more like a gulag than the penguin and pony show they saw on the Discovery Channel. Hopefully my brother Joel isn’t one of them. He has signed up to go to the South Pole for the season.

The weather improved slightly at the beginning of last week. Enough to increase our lunch counts but, since the climbing conditions were still affected by the previous weeks snow, overnight guests were still only a trickle. Because of the good weather, the guys who were planning on coming up to work on the emergency radio came and made their improvements. It seemed a good opportunity to fly down some stuff that doesn’t need to be up here, including myself. I got to fly in a helicopter that I haven’t been in before; an Agusta Koala. Comfy. I took the lead photo on the descent. After my three minute descent, I loaded the van and drove to Milan where I was greeted by one frustration after another.

I haven’t kept the blog updated every Sunday because we have been having internet problems. I have tried everything and, after a call to the ISP, we discovered that it is a problem with the server. We use an old-school dial-up server that we signed up for for free back when the internet was almost unknown in Italy. It was a promotion by the Italian Telecom. Things moved very fast and now, like in the states, most people use a DSL connection. But we held onto the free dial-up service to use with the radio bridge phone at the hut. I also used to from time-to-time when we were having problems with the Iridium satellite phone software at Siple Dome last year. But, after weeks without being able to connect, a few phone calls and a long time on hold, we discovered that they are having “problems” with the free service server. My theory is that because it doesn’t earn them much money, they just stopped maintaining it in hopes that people will sign up for a pay service.

When I got to Milan, I was looking forward to using the Pandolfi’s high-speed wireless to catch up on some stuff but, alas, they were having problems as well. I spent the better part of a day trouble shooting their system with no luck. I determined that it is a problem with the line and finally gave up. I also found out that I had gotten a speeding ticket from back in June that I had to deal with.

Many towns in Italy have started using what they call the AutoVelox. Sounds like some kind of anti-venom doesn’t it? What it is is a guy with a camera and a radar on the side of the road who takes your speed and picture and sends you the bill if you are going over. They have somewhat recently introduced a points system to Italian driver’s licenses. If you lose all 20 points you lose your license. So, along with an envelope containing the $200 speeding ticket, I received a form to fill out with my license details so they could deduct 2 points.
The catch is that I don’t have an Italian driver’s license. For a foreigner to get a driver’s license in Italy you have to go back to driving school. It takes months and cost hundreds of Euro. I have decided to take the easier and legally questionable route. According to the law, if you are in Italy for more than a year you are required to get an Italian driver’s license. But they are not specific about how to count a year. I have decided that since I am never and have never been in Italy for more than a year I should be fine with an international driver’s license that anyone can get at their local AAA in the states. Of course these expire after one year so every time I’m back in the states I have to make a trip to the AAA for a new one. Luci’s father offered to take the hit for me and send in his license but, in a sort of masochistic way, I am interested in testing the system I’ve been using all these years. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

While I was in Milan sorting out all this business and getting the motorcycle ready to take back up to Valle d’Aosta, the weather at the hut had gone bad again. By the time I got back up, there was another six to eight inches of snow on the ground. In the past week we have had one nice day which happened to be the 15th of August or Feragosto; the big summer holiday day. We served a few lunches to people who had struggled up in the snow that still blanketed the trail well below the hut but we had no overnight guests. In fact, today is a week without any over-night guests. We are bored out of our minds.

With no internet either I have been losing my mind. Last night I made a deal with Luci that I would call our Antarctic employer to see if they had received her new dental x-ray if she would call telecom to figure out how to set up our cell phone to connect to the internet. I had spent at least 20 minutes a day over the past three on hold with them waiting to talk to someone to help us configure our new phone. True that we have nothing to do but doing nothing is better than sitting on hold. To make matters worse, there is this horrendous jingle that they use in a new ad campaign on TV and on the radio. At least in commercials you only have to hear it a few seconds every-so-often but when you are on hold with them they play the same ten-second loop over and over again punctuated with a recorded voice saying “all our operators are busy. We invite you to wait until one is available.” Of course, when Luci called she got right through. They made the necessary adjustment to our account and, before I knew it, I was checking my e-mail. Phew. The call to our employer went equally as well. In under two minutes I found out that Luci had been physically qualified for Antarctic deployment. Now we can dedicate our full attention to our boredom.

The past two weeks have been complete contrasts. This time last week we were preparing for the onslaught of climbers that were to make our first full-house of the season. We ultimately had all our beds full and one person (arrival with no reservation) sleeping on the floor. Everyone had half-pension so we were lucky to have the new benches and tables which gave us enough room to serve all twenty-five people in one seating. We had two internationally known guides last Saturday, too, which made the climbing easy for everyone (people just let the guide find the route and follow him). The whole week before was nonstop; which is why I didn’t get a chance to write. We had reservations for fifteen-or-so every night plus the unannounced arrivals from above to keep us up most of the night. Plus, three breakfasts every morning: 1:30am, 4:00am and 8:00am and a slew of day visitors wanting lunch.

But at the beginning of this week the weather forecasts predicted a steady en-worsening of atmospheric conditions. Because, to potential climbers, the forecast is more important than the actual weather, from Monday on our reservation book was blank. Wednesday was forecast bad but turned out to be an incredible day. Some friends came up to talk about filling in for us for a couple of days next year. Luci finally decided to bite the bullet and make a trip down to the valley to get the supplementary x-rays that our Antarctic employer was requesting. A couple of weeks ago, the radio-tech for the alpine rescue was up here and mentioned that they were planning on making an upgrade to our emergency radio. The battery doesn’t hold enough charge for it to be left on at all times so they are planning to retrofit it with a larger panel and battery bank which would require the use of the rescue helicopter to bring up the materials. On the off-chance that they might fly up on Thursday, when she had the dentist appointment in Aosta, Luci decided to give him a call to see if she could hitch a ride down and up again with the helicopter. As it turns out, they were planning on flying up on Thursday and said it would be OK for Luci to hitch a ride.

So after our friends left on Wednesday Luci began preparing for her descent into the valley the next morning. At about 4:30 in the afternoon we got a call from the tech saying there had been a last-minute change of plans. The helicopter was going to be occupied with a hospital transfer the next morning and the works would have to be postponed until the next week. Luci was upset because she doesn’t like to hike down. But, we really had everything going for us; she already had the appointment, the weather was good at the moment and we had no reservations until Saturday. So, we made the split second decision to hike down together to the valley. We locked up the kitchen and the basement and started down at about 5:20. By 7:30 we were dining on filet and poached trout sipping fine wine.

The idea was to hike back up Thursday afternoon after the appointment and the weather looked like it would cooperate. After raining all night, it had cleared up in most of Valle d’Aosta. But, by the time we got back up to the Mt. Blanc area, where Boccalatte is, it was obvious that it had not cleared up there. In fact, we could see during a break in the clouds that the bad weather had laid down a considerable amount of snow around the hut. Because it was likely that there was still no one at the hut, and on account of the continuing bad weather we decided to stay another night in the valley. We got a hotel room and watched the European diving championships.

Despite an improved forecast, the weather was worse on Friday morning and we could see that a lot more snow had fallen up high on the range. By now we had put off our ascent too long so we donned our rain gear and started up. It was drizzly up to about 2000m (c. 6200ft.) when it turned to snow. When we got to about 7500ft, the snow was about three inches deep and the trail was becoming difficult to follow. By the time we climbed up the ropes and got to the hut at just shy of 10,000ft there was between six and eight inches on the porch and the hut was empty as we expected. Even though the hiking conditions were not anywhere near optimal, Luci still managed to shave a good half-hour off her personal ascent record.

It snowed lightly all night and we awoke to another three inches this morning. This Saturday, instead of preparing for the hordes, I had to shovel a foot of snow off the porch and walkways. All but six people have canceled for tonight. We don’t hold out much hope of them arriving, though. If there is a foot of snow here it means there could be at least twice that much on the climb making for bad avalanche conditions and difficult walking. Looks like winter has begun on the Mont Blanc.

Sorry, but I don’t have any good pictures this week. We are coming up on our busiest time of year and between painting the building and taking care of guests I just haven’t been able to get away from work. True, I did go down at the beginning of the week to re-supply but that was pretty much all I did. I did have a few hours away on Tuesday night. I went up to Rifugio Bonatti to meet up with our friend Monika; the one I had mentioned was hiking the Tour de Mont Blanc. She was with a friend and her parents. Her parents are very funny. Her father is from Saxony, the same part of Germany my own ancestors are from. He moved to the US after the war and worked for many years with the Chrysler Co.

Since our airlift is very close to the Bonatti trailhead, they came to watch it. We hope for this to have been our last flight of the season. We had such a big one at opening that this one wasn’t even that big. I was able to transport everything in our van. The logistics were kind of annoying though. Usually we do our flights from a parking lot just below our hut but the guy from the Hutkeepers Association who is organizing the flights said that the new helicopter company didn’t want to land there. This makes our rotation almost twice as long and, at $25 a minute, the cost adds up. The reason, he said, is because they don’t transfer from one hut to the other with the hook and line attached. This would mean they would have to land, take the hook out of the basket and attach it before they could begin our rotation which adds time to the shared transfer costs. He also said that the company told him to tell us not to be late because if we weren’t around the pilot would just leave without doing our flight. The nerve! I have never known ANY helicopter company to be on time and this is our third company in three years. Not only did the helicopter arrive an hour and a half late but it arrived with the hook and line attached and immediately did our rotation after letting out the helo-techs. Ce’ qualcosa che non va, mi sa.

The flight itself went smoothly in the end, even though I had to transport the goods to the helo-pad myself and had to pay twice as much for the flight. Monika’s father got some good pictures, too. I think I found the right caulking for the cracks in the façade but I still haven’t tried it yet. The stuff is called AcrilOne. Acrylic instead of silicone. I also got a palm sander to sand the rusty spots off the roof. The sander is great but the sandpaper I got to go with it is total crap. The moment you put the paper to the metal you could see all the sand come off it. I used the last of my good stuff on the rustiest spots and for the rest I had to improvise. Extension cords cost a fortune so I decided just to buy some heavy duty wire and build my own for a fraction of the cost. No problem. I also bought some wire-brush tips for my cordless drill which ultimately took the place of the crap sandpaper. The problem was that a battery only last so-long. The good thing is I always buy 12v drills for this very purpose. I first took the outlet part of some extension cord tips I had laying around and wired a socket onto my 24V > 12V converter. The hut has a 24v PV system and I convert it to 12v for various appliances that use a cigarette lighter outlet. Then I built wiring harness for the drill with a plug tip. Now I can plug the cordless and extension directly into the 12v power supply to make an improvised angle grinder which I used to finish prepping the roof for painting. To be able to improvise in this way comes in very handy up here.

It can also be handy in Antarctica but, surprisingly, the Company highly discourages it. I looked into getting a job back in maintenance when it looked like our field positions might not materialize. They got back to me saying that this year they are being “sticklers” and to get a promotion I would need five years of experience in the “Utilities Technician” field. Since we only do four month seasons, to get five years of experience at McMurdo it would take 15 years of service to get a promotion. To get the same position I was in two years ago, they told me I would have to reapply using their on-line application. I could have argued about current level of experience but what’s the point? I am beginning to think by “sticklers” they mean they are on a campaign against improvisers. Now we have contracts with a department that works FOR us rather then AGAINST us. My boss actually made an appeal straight to the appropriate government agency proposing a new position for me. And, best of all, they respect the ability to improvise.

It took me 20 hours but now the roof is clean and ready to paint. All I can hope is that the weather cooperates. Today I couldn’t start because it has been pretty much steady with people. Last night there was a constant trickle of people all night which is typical of this time of year. During the day, we had a few teams from various routes on the north face and reservations for 14. In addition to the 14 people we had reserved (all Italians with two Germans), two Spanish arrived right before dinner, and two Germans from the night before arrived down from the climb just after dinner and wanted to eat. Then, about 11:30pm two Americans arrived from the Tronchey Ridge and woke us up for coke and chocolate. At 1:30am we did breakfast for the 14 (actually, Luci does the early breakfast; I’m useless that early in the morning) and, at 2:00am, two English arrived from Walker Spur wanting cake and hot chocolate. At 8 am we cleaned up from the evening breakfast and began the morning one. It stretched on until 11:00am with the English finishing breakfast as the first of a group of about 20 began to order lunches. Not much time for painting. This does typify this time of year and it is when we do most of our business. I am glad I got the façade done when it was still relatively tranquil.

Ideally, something of the sort will keep up for the next couple of weeks before he numbers begin to drop again. We just got news from Vasco and Co. this week that they are not coming up until the end of August or beginning of September because their mountain guide, who is doing their security, is on vacation in the US. This means that they will be cutting into OUR US vacation time at one end while the Company cuts into it at another. We just found out this week that they are doing three days of orientation and training in Denver instead of the normal one day in Christchurch. Che palle.

I want to finish by talking about living in Italy as usual. Looking back over my entries I began to think about the sensitive topics that I have been covering. Luci often gets upset with me but then turns around and makes the same kind of observations. She says she is justified because she IS Italian but I shouldn’t because I am a foreigner. I, by no means, intend to offend Italians. As an Italian friend of mine who spent many years in the States remarked, “[You make] a perfect portrait of Italy that Italians will never admit [to]”. All I want to do is point out these peculiarities that Italians find normal (even though they are often common inconviencies) but Unitedstatesians might find odd. For example…

In the States if you want to deduct a tax-deductible purchase from your taxes you need to keep the receipt. Well, in Italy, they take it a step further. In Italy you need to get a fatura which I think translates as “invoice”. It has to include your own fiscal information including your personal sale tax number (partita IVA) and fiscal residence. Often times you have to pay an extra fee to get one and other time you get a discount on the goods if you get one. I haven’t figured out what the difference is and Luci doesn’t know either. If having to request a special receipt for tax purposes isn’t enough of an inconvenience, if you need to get reimbursed by a different company than your own, than the fatura has to made out in THEIR name. The real clincher is that Italians don’t ever get a tax refund they just get a tax credit in case they ever have a tax liability in the future.

But this is just background to explain what happened to me the other day when I tried to exchange a light bulb. As I mentioned before we have a photovoltaic system for power up here at Boccalatte. Because of our non-standard power supply we have non-standard lighting which requires non-standard light bulbs. When I came up to open the hut this year, I wrote down the model numbers of the bulbs so I could go on a hunt for spares. Before our opening flight I went to an electrical warehouse where they have all kind of different bulbs. They had the two types I was looking for so I bought them and had them make out a fattura to the Italian Alpine Club who was going to reimburse me for their cost (which was a total cost of not more than 5€). When I got them up to the hut I realized that one of the bulbs had a different type attachment than the existing ones. Upon closer inspection I realized that I was lacking one letter in my model number. No problem; I still had the fatura.

When I went down to do the shopping for the airlift this time I went to the warehouse to exchange the bulb. I went to the counter with bulb and fatura in hand and was ignored twice. No problem, this is common; I’m not in a hurry. When I finally present my case the kid at the counter said he would have to talk to his boss. After a brief interlude, where I entertained myself looking at a chart of different intercom configurations on the countertop, the kid returns with the supervisor who was visibly worked up. He commenced, what I have to say, was a very unexpected tirade about how it was impossible to exchange merchandise if I had requested a fatura for it. I could only return it if I had a recivuta fiscale (your run-of-the-mill receipt). He caught me off guard on two fronts: first that he would be so visibly angered over such a simple request and, having just a common receipt was BETTER that having a fatura. So, I told him that I still needed the correct bulb and this one doesn’t do me any good because, very simply, it is the WRONG one. I also explained my predicament (being up at the hut and all) and that I would have brought it back earlier but…for whatever reason this just made him angrier and he walked off grumbling something about bringing an example next time. This is all over a bulb that cost less than three bucks. In the meantime, the kid was looking up the bulb that I need on the computer and says that it would have to be ordered.

At this moment I realized that this whole scene was not worth my time. I told him not to worry about it, I threw the bulb in the trash and left. I still had a half hour before the next store I had to go to opened so I just sat in the car waiting and thinking about what just happened. I just couldn’t get over how farcical the whole thing was. It took such a bizarre incident to make me truly appreciate our system of taxation and the annoying guy in the hardware store that is always asking you “are you finding everything you need?” This is what I love about living abroad.

I don’t have too much to write this week. I have spent the whole week painting the façade and metal storm doors. The façade went pretty quickly but the storm doors dragged out until yesterday. There was a lot of cutting in to do which made it take much more time than I thought it would. But now it is all done. It got kind of tricky at times having wet paint on our tiny porch with guests coming and going all day. I still need to caulk the cracks and paint them. I have asked a couple of people how to say caulking in Italian but I get blank stares. It is not looking good. I won’t be happy if I can only find silicone.

I’ll find out soon enough. Tomorrow I go down to do our second re-supply. We are hoping to only have to do this flight to last us the rest of the season. As soon as I get the rest of the materials (including a sander) I get to move on to the roof. This place is going to look brand new by the end of the season. At some point in the next couple of weeks we an look forward to visit from Vasco and Co who usually leave the place looking worse than before they arrived. I am waiting to paint the area where they will be working in anticipation of destruction.

I may be meeting another friend from Antarctica tomorrow. She is hiking the Tour de Mont Blanc with some friends and is going to be in Val Veny tomorrow. This has been the summer for friendly visitations. We recently discovered that a friend we worked with at the AMC in NH is now living and working very close in Switzerland. She is planning a trip up sometime in August.

Still nothing from our Antarctic employer about our medical clearance. We asked our dentist to FAX a signed statement declaring that the requested work had been done but have heard nothing from either him or the medical department.

In closing, I want to lie to rest my World Cup coverage. Italy won the if you hadn’t figured that out by now. People are still talking about the now-infamous head-butt given Materazzi by Zidane. In Italian you could say he made a brutta figura. This literally means he “made an ugly face” but its meaning goes deeper. Its true meaning is more akin to making a fool out of oneself. The score was tied, France was playing very well, and this was to be Zidane’s last game before retiring from soccer. When, in front of the world, in the finale of one of the most followed sporting events in existence, he decides to make a blatant statement which results in his expulsion from his last game, that is a brutta figura. I believe that Italians’ sense of self-control is rooted in the concept of the brutta figura. I think this is how Italians can get away with not having a drinking age (I think they have one but no one can tell me what it is). Americans love to make brutte figure when they drink. It is pretty much part and parcel of the experience. Image is everything to Italians. It is very important to remain composed in social situations because making a fool out of yourself in public risks irreparably damaging your reputation. When Italians drink they tend not to exaggerate for fear of making a brutta figura. So you can imagine: a blatant brutta figura during the world cup final = media coverage for weeks.

Happy 4th of July.

This week has been considerably slower than last. We had only one zero count night though. Compared to last year when we had 11 zero counts up to this time, we are still doing well. One night this week we weren’t expecting anyone when two drenched French walked in the door from an obscure and difficult route on the Grandes Jorasses. They had been out for a week doing this climb, and they smelt it. Besides them we have had a couple Spanish, Germans, and Belgians this week.

We have had a sharp drop in the numbers of French and Italian guests. Our guess is that it is on account of the fever spreading through the two countries…World Cup fever, of course. I heard on the radio that only 6% of Americans are following the world cup. So for you Americans reading this it will probably be hard to grasp depth of the mania which is going on here. It is even greater this time around because four teams that made it to the semi-finals were all continental European teams. And we happen to live and work on the border between the two countries to make it to the finals.

The semi-final match between Italy and Germany was pretty boring up to the last two minutes of over-time when Italy scored two back-to-back goals to reserve their place in the finals. France beat Portugal with a penalty kick by Zinedine Zidane sealing their spot. So tonight is the big final match between Italy and France. Strangely enough, all we hear on Italian radio is how formidable a foe Zidane is going to be. An unusual shift from the regular strutting, self-important stance usually taken by the Italian press towards their sporting heroes. It is also strange how they have fixated on Zidane when the French team is full of other great players such as Henry, for example. My theory is that they are just gufando. A gufo is a type of owl and, for whatever reason, gufare means, roughly, to jinx someone. But rather than a curse, when some one is gufando it means they are over-confidence to the point that they screw up. So, in other words by saying that Zidane is such a great player they hope to bring him down. I use this tactic in billiards all the time.

Enough about soccer; honestly, I would probably be part of the 94% if it wasn’t for my fanatic wife (she prefers “big fan”). The point is that we have had a pretty relaxing week to ourselves because most people are watching the games. I have had some time to begin work on the building. I started sanding the rust off our tin roof and cleaning up the mess that Vasco & co. left a few years ago. Somehow they came up with the idea that they needed to patch up the roof with tarpaper and silicone to prevent leaks and corrosion. The tar paper came loose immediately and has become a hazard to the helicopters who let people off on the roof. All that was left was some bits of stubborn tar paper and gobs of silicone which I spent a good part of the week peeling, cutting and brushing off. I soon realized that I was going to need a power tool if I wanted to get the whole roof sanded before the end of the summer. So I finished cleaning up the silicone and moved on to the wooden façade. If any of you have ever had to work with silicone you know it can be a mixed blessing and you know to use it sparingly. It works well on certain applications but should never be used in lieu of caulking. In most cases it can’t be painted on and it shrinks in the cracks rendering its usefulness questionable. When it comes time to try to peel it off, it comes off easily in places and sticks horribly in others. It is especially hard to get off wood. Apparently Vasco & co never learned this lesson. They went silicone happy here. There is an ungodly amount of the stuff in all the cracks in the wooden façade and not a trace of caulk. I am beginning to wonder if it even exists here. So I have put off painting the roof until I get a sander and the façade until I can get some caulking. Hopefully the hunt for caulking doesn’t go gummy.

The relatively quiet days freed us up to have a nice 4th to ourselves. Well, there was a Spanish couple here. They didn’t flinch when they woke up late to billowing smoke from our bonfire. In fact, they never even asked what it was all about. Maybe in Spain it is common for the huts to have bonfires. We decided to keep some of the old benches and placed them around the hut for seating space which, in august, becomes a prime commodity. Some of them are pretty precariously placed but considering that most of our clientele face much diceyer situations on the climb we figured they’d be alright where they are. The tables and older benches had to go. They were pretty funky. In the process of burning the tables, a small grass fire ignited. I stepped out of the hut to a huge cloud of smoke and expected the worse. I couldn’t see where it was coming from from the hut because some coals had rolled down the cliff a little and set fire to some tufts of grass farther down. I went up to the roof and hosed the area down with our water supply hose; no biggie. The rib grilling went well, too. We had invited some guide-friends to celebrate but none of them made it. Why would they; obviously, the 4th is not a nationally recognized holiday in Italy. We always try our best to celebrate it anyway. This was my tenth 4th outside of the US. Their absence just meant more ribs for us. We let the ribs marinade for 4 days. They were really good but they still can’t touch a good Corky’s rib. Luci and I took turns wearing Jesse’s Tui sombrero while we grilled. Jesse got it at a Crusader’s rugby match in Christchurch, NZ and gave it to me if I promised to wear it up at the hut. I had been searching for a sombrero to wear out at the grill when it was raining and this one fits the bill perfectly. A bit difficult to travel with, I have to say. It doesn’t pack very well and attracts a lot of attention when you wear it on a plane. It has found it’s home here at Boccalatte. We leave it hanging in the dining room and people always try it on.

There have been some interesting developments with our Antarctica jobs this week. It has been a rough ride this year with our contracts. When we left McMurdo we had alternate contracts which essentially means we were on a list of candidates for field camp staff. This also allowed our company to send us to get our First Responders recertified. In April we were offered supervisory and chef positions at the same camp we were at last year: Siple Dome. The tricky thing is that the field camp staff positions need to be filled BEFORE the NSF approves the annual budget. As it happens the NSF decided to eliminate one of the camps about a week before we came up to the hut. It was a two person camp whose existence was solely as an emergency air strip for the Hercs flying between McMurdo and Christchurch. It had never been used in an emergency and most Herc crews said it never would be either on account of the rough, icy and windy nature of the area. They are more likely to land at Siple.

Since the other camp had already been staffed, someone had to go. Since the staff at the other camp have more years in the program they got moved to Siple and we got thrown into limbo. Our supervisor said she was working on an alternative for us but after three weeks we were getting desperate. We began to think about what we would do if we didn’t get jobs in Antarctica next season. We talked about going to South America or traversing the Sahara to Mali with a friend. Then we got news from our supervisor that she found us positions at the larger camp nearby Siple Dome: WAIS Divide. The NSF had approved me a new position. I’ll be solely responsible for fueling aircraft and machinery and doing preventative maintenance on generators and smaller equipment. Luci was given the sous chef position. Jesse had applied for the same position but he said he didn’t mind so we’re happy.

We’re pretty happy but we don’t want to gufare troppo. There are a whole chain of events that still need to happen before we can be sure that we are going. The first thing is that we need to PQ or, physically qualify, which means we need to pass our medical. Last week we got a call in the middle of the night from medical (people always forget we are 8 hrs ahead of mountain time). The dentist wasn’t happy with the quality of one of Luci’s x-rays and they want me to get a “restoration” on tooth #14OM. This is difficult for us coming up on our busiest time of year. So we have been brainstorming ideas to make it happen. As it turns out, our dentist already “restored” #14 after the x-rays were taken. There was a bit of confusion because European dentists count teeth from left to right (like we write) rather than vice versa as American dentists do. We are still in negotiations about Luci’s bite-wing x-ray. Our argument is that they also have a current panoramic x-ray to refer to.

Before we can be approved for travel to NZ we need to PQ. Last year we were approved for self-ticketing because we deploy from outside the US. If we have to wait until August to get x-rays that cuts it pretty close for an October deployment. We are concerned about availability if we wait so we have begun building our itinerary already. American Airlines lets us go ahead and book a ticket but we don’t have to pay until a month before travel at the latest. So, hopefully, by the end of next week we’ll have a little better idea of where we stand.

Happy birthday Mom!

Despite a string of intense thunderstorms, we have had a steady flow of guests here at Boccalatte. Last night we had our busiest night of the season so far: 16 guests. Two came down unannounced from the ridge, 7 came to climb the standard route up to the summit of the Grandes Jorasses, and the other 7 went to climb a rock route on the Tour des Jorasses. This means that today we had three different breakfasts to serve for the different parties; 2, 5, and 8am.

On Friday, the Courmayeur Guides Course came through on their high mountain segment with 2 instructors and 6 students. As always, they arrived semi-unannounced and from a direction rarely climbed. Luckily, we caught wind of their plan via the Valle d’Aosta rumor mill. About four hours before their arrival our fiend Matteo called from his campground in the valley. He has a good view of the summit and had seen them on descent in his binoculars. About two hours before their arrival, one of the students, who frequents Boccalatte, called us to tell us they would be arriving in a couple of hours. So we threw together a dinner (we had no other guests) and watched the Italy vs. Ukraine world cup soccer game together.

We did, in fact, have a bit more forewarning of their plans than I let on. I was in the valley on Tuesday and stayed at Matteo’s campground. He told me that there was a probability that the Guides Course would be climbing up to Jachia and attempting the Tronchey Ridge. I was in the valley because the Alpine Club was planning on flying up to Boccalatte with an engineer and iron worker to look at our puny wooden walkway and design a replacement. I figured that this would be a good opportunity to buy paint to paint the roof and exterior of the hut. I have been planning to do it for years and the alpine club agreed to pay for materials and my time. Seeing as they were already going to be flying up, might as well fly me up with paints and supplies. It would make reimbursing for flight minutes easier. While shopping for paints, I found some new benches and tables. Our existing ones were very old, broken and nasty. Kind of like the hut sometimes. The Alpine Club had pre-approved the purchase of new benches and tables but had not expected to be flying them up on this flight. It was kind of crazy. I had to fax them an estimate and the president had to arrange payment and I had to fit them in the van.

I was also shopping for other random stuff for around the hut. I just rearranged the bunkroom to give more space when we are full. I mounted the ladder to the loft onto the wall and resized and shuffled around the coat pegs. Now there is a coat peg for every bunk. The idea was to co-associate a coat hook with a bunk using little numbers; so bunk #7 would have hook #7. Easy. Every hardware store has little adhesive numbers, right? I also needed a rubber sleeve to slide over a broken section of our effluence pipe. A very common item in American plumbing but almost non-existent in Italy. I have looked for this piece in the past with no results but I got a good lead on a huge plumbing supply store. As it turns out, the place had changed names. After a morning looking for the place and then looking for the piece, I still came up blank. I went to a couple of other stores suggested by the clerk but, as usual, they looked at me like I had just landed in a flying saucer. These guys were complete idiots. Hopefully it is just the ones that run the supply chain and not all the plumbers in the valley. I was in a three story warehouse of plumbing supplies with a very clear picture of what I needed and these guys couldn’t get the least bit creative to find a substitute and weren’t about to let me wander the warehouse to look for what I needed. They kept telling me I needed a plumber with a pipe welding machine to fix the pipe when I know very well that all I needed was a stupid rubber sleeve.

“So where else does one find a 12cm rubber sleeve?”, I asked they guy at the hardware store where I went to look for adhesive numbers. You know the numbers I’m talking about, right? The ones you stick on mailboxes, over doors, etc. I should have known better but it seemed simple enough. Once again, Luke looks like a fool asking for something that doesn’t exist. Anyway, the guy at the hardware store suggests a farm supply store for a piece of straight rubber tube ( I had abandoned hope of finding something purpose-made). At the farm store the guy actually laughed in my face when I asked for a piece of 12cm diameter rubber tube. He said for a tube that big it had to be special ordered, could only be purchased by the meter and cost almost $100 a meter. Ouch! Before walking out I asked the lady at the checkout of there was a gommista nearby. Gommista literally means rubberist or gummist (which is what I prefer to call them because it sounds funny) but, as you can probably imagine, it is a tire-guy. I don’t know why I didn’t think of looking at a tire shop earlier. The gummist let me loose on his pile of busted inner-tubes and I found almost exactly what I needed. The moral of the story: if it is gum your looking for, go to a gummist instead of a leadist. Or in Italian: se e’ gomma che cercavi, vai al gommista invece di un piombista.

So after a day of running circles around Aosta city I went up to stay in Val Veny at Matteo’s where he tells me about the Guides Course plan to do the Tronchey ridge. In the morning I meet up with the guys from the Alpine Club. I first meet up with the president of the Hut Commission. Actually, I almost hit him because he is standing in the middle of the road. He is a really great guy in his late 60s. He told us that before he had open heart surgery, he drank at least 13 espressos and smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day. Now he only drinks the coffee. He is very pro-Boccalatte and as you can imagine, hyperactive, which is how I managed to find and get approved and purchased the benches and tables in less than a day in bureaucracy saturated Italy. He has a really hard time waiting for the helicopter which is always at least an hour later than they say they will be.

After we unload the tables, paint and inner-tubes from my van, Rebola arrives. He is their minor works contractor who immediately says, “who bought these crappy tables? I could have gotten you much better ones.” This guy makes his living ripping off the alpine club. He does bad work at inflated prices in less time than he says he does it in. We have told them that nearly all the work he has done at the hut has been done poorly and they have seen it themselves but for whatever reason they keep working with him. I don’t think they have a choice because I think he is mafia. Part of the reason I went ahead and got the table, paint, etc. was because I was afraid of what we would wind up with if Rebola was put in charge of it. Of course I knew he would get worked up that they didn’t offer him the work and would do his best to make me feel like I had made the wrong choices. By the way, he and his gang of thugs have fixed our poop pipe twice and it has broken at least that many times.

Rebola and Co. have done such incompetent work on Boccalatte that we told the Pres that if he was going to be the one to re-do the walkway that we wanted a written statement absolving us from any injury incurred by failure of said structure. The Pres told us that they were getting an engineer to draw up the design and to calculate stress caused by the snow falling off the roof onto it. The decision is ultimately theirs considering it is their building. The engineer seemed like a nice guy. He steps out of Rebola’s jeep in camouflage. I figured he probably got his training with the army corps of engineers (or the Italian equivalent). I assumed he was still in the military but as it turns out they are the only clothes he has that are suitable for work in the mountains. He works for an engineering firm in Turin now. Nice guy. Didn’t say much though. The Iron worker was a piece of work. He easily weighed 250lbs. I don’t think Rebola told him where he’d be going be cause he showed up wearing slacks and loafers.

Because the tables and benches are too long to fit in a helo bag we have to wait for the helicopter to arrive a with a net. An hour and a half later the helo arrives and I fly up with Vasco and the engineer while the Pres and the heavyweight ironworker build the sling load. The pilot is new and looks no older than 20. He doesn’t know where the hut is. I start to get nervous. He is supposed to hover over the roof of the hut while we disembark; a delicate task for a seasoned pilot. He approaches the hut and gets much to close to the rock wall behind the hut for comfort and is much to high off the roof for us to get out. After a couple of minutes of maneuvering we get safely onto the roof.
When the sling load arrives, the paint is under about 600lbs of furniture in the net. This means that if the net is set down the way it is that the paint risks bursting under the weight of the tables. The inexperience of the pilot works to our advantage because he works slowly and there is time between when the paint touches the porch and the full weight of the tables does. It gives me just enough time to pull the paint out from underneath to avoid bursting them. That would have been a mess. Finally the helo arrives with the Pres and the heavyweight ironworker. Luci had set up our metal folding ladder so that everyone could get off the roof safely. When the HWIW put his full weight on the top rung, it bent under his foot. But, he got down and back up again with out causing major damage to himself or the hut.

So the next hour was the typical haranguing over who pays for what and who is ripping off who. They did take a couple of pictures of the old walkway. After they were satisfied that they had achieved what they had set out to do they all remounted the roof in waiting for the helo. In the end they spent more time on the roof waiting to for the helo to fly them down than they spent doing what they came to do. Comic though: the Pres jumping at every little sound thinking it was the helo arriving; Rebola talking about how he is going to buy his own helicopter and hire a pilot (with the Alpine Club’s money, of course), the HWIW being gruff and the Engineer being timid.

The Helo finally arrives and they load up. I am given the charge of loading the net into one of the side baskets. These nets are made of rope and are pretty heavy. The pilot is being cautious now and is keeping clear of the wall which means the basket is hanging over the roof and is hard to access with out stepping right on the edge of the roof. To make matters worse it is above head level so I have to lift the net over my head. Eventually I wriggle the whole net is the basket and everyone loads and they fly off into the sunset.

Whew! It is such a nice feeling when the Alpine Circus Club leaves town. With the help of some day hikers we take the tables out and set the new ones up. Not so easy because the old ones need to be disassembled
to get them out the door. We keep the better benches to place around the hut for guests but the most battered ones we put into a big pile. The idea is that on the 4th of July we are going to have a big bonfire with the old benches and tables. We also got ribs and barbecue sauce for the grill which is becoming a tradition here at Boccalatte.

As of last Wednesday, Rifugio Boccalatte is officially open for the climbing season on the Grandes Jorasses. Luci made a convincing argument to open by helicopter. We came up to Valle d’Aosta on Monday and stayed with our friend Matteo at his campsite in Val Veny. We traveled with Matteo in New Zealand back in February.

On Tuesday we did our big shopping to initiate the season. The guy that usually transports our supplies up to Val Ferret, where we stage our airlift, was unavailable which was potentially disastrous for us. We talked to the owner of the wholesale warehouse where we get our supplies and he set us up with a new driver. He has a much larger truck which barely fit up the narrow road in the upper reaches of Val Ferret. The nice thing was that it has a lift on the back which make for much less work for us. This way we can build our helo loads right at the store checkout down in Aosta city and load them pre-made into the transport. The morning of our flight we just have to wheel the two helo-bags out of the back of the truck and we’re ready to go. It saves having to build a palette only to break it down and build the sling load the next day.

Wednesday was the big opening day. We still had one glitch in the plan though. We needed someone to empty our garbage bags. The Region of Valle d’Aosta reimburses us for half our flight minutes if we are flying down garbage. This helps to discourage hut keepers from starting their own little dumps around their huts.

Two weeks ago I was up at Boccalatte with some friends from Antarctica. Meg I know from my days with the Appalachian Mountain Club. She met her friend Kirk at the South Pole about the time Luci and I were looking into working in Antarctica. We stayed with Kirk’s parents in Denver when we went to the RPSC job fair. Andy was the head of the Science Support division when we starting working in the field at Siple Dome, and I met Guillaume via his website when he was doing the first winter-over at Concordia; the joint Franco-Italian base on the south-polar plateau. Meg and Kirk were in Europe on vacation visiting a friend in Switzerland and they came over to see the hut. Andy happened to be in Europe at the same time. He keeps a motorcycle in storage in Heidelberg, Germany and comes over every year to ride for a few weeks. Guillaume lives nearby in the French town of Briancion with his Italian wife. Since we were all going to be in the same area at the same time I figured it would be a good excuse to get together a bunch of Antarcticans to play around in the snow.
There was still a bunch of snow on the hike up to the hut so we got equipped with axes and crampons; none of which we used in the end. We were able to kick steps up to the hut with out any problems. Once up at the hut, we all got to work digging it out of the snow and airing it out from the long winter. There was no major damage over the winter so we got right to work getting the place ready for the summer. With everyone’s help we got the railing and gutters up and two helo-bags of waste staged on the porch. We also put together a great sausage grilling for dinner.

So, for the flight on Wednesday we already had the trash staged on the porch but, since we were flying up first we needed someone to empty the trash when it arrived in the valley. Usually our truck driver takes care of it but the new guy had other work to do elsewhere. We talked with one of the other hut managers in the valley who was also doing sling-loads at the same time. She agreed to help us with the trash. To make it easier on them we did our air-lift from the same pad they do their’s from. This adds about 3 minutes to our rotation but it was worthwhile for their help.

We are using a new helicopter company this year organized by the hut keepers association. The company, Pelissier Helicopters, was founded recently by a well-known Valdotain helicopter pilot and his sons. He knows the area well and has flown for us before when he worked for a different company. He was a couple of hours late through no fault of his own (the clouds rolled in at a hut in another valley) but when he finally arrived the air-lift went off without a hitch. Luci and I flew up and he dropped us on the roof of the hut. We lashed together our two bags of trash that were still on the porch from the week before and waited for our 1000kg of shopping to arrive. It still amazes me how they can drop a 500kg bag on our front porch that is only a few centimeters wider than the bag itself, as if they were putting a carton of milk in the refrigerator door.
We spent the better part of two days trying to find space for everything in this tiny hut. We managed, as always. We are still fine tuning but are, for the most part, up and running. We have had a steady stream of guests including our old guide friend Christophe Profit who came up a grand total of 7 times in 2004. He made an effortless ascent with two clients up to Point Walker and back leaving a good track in the snow for successive climbers who will inevitably be arriving throughout the summer. We also have a steady stream of water which is a great boon to running a foodservice operation.

I am going to try to keep updated every Sunday throughout the summer so stay tuned.

I passed the motorcycle safety course, got my permit and got the motorcycle endorsement on my international drivers license. Now I’m more legal than usual to drive my ageing 1991 Honda Transalp xl600vm. I have been spending quite a bit of time at my friends shop working on it. In addition to replacing parts that have reached the end of their operational lifetimes, I have been doing a bit of customizing all in preparation for our trip to Sardinia.

I have been having problems with bearings. The steering stem bearings were completely shot; rusted and pitted to the point that I’m amazed I could still steer. The rear wheel bearings were also starting to go so I changed them preemptively while changing the rear brake pads and tires (it was all apart anyway). The brakes turned out to be the most difficult project. The pads are held in place by a pin that goes through a loop in the pad. The pin is stainless and the housing is aluminum and the corrosion that forms between the two has incredibly adhesive properties. We spent the better part of a day trying everything to free the pin with no luck. Ultimately we had to drill it out and tap a new hole for a custom-made pin. I also changed the spark plugs and made some long-overdue and very successful carburetor adjustments as well as an oil change in the forks and the crankcase to top it off.

When we were in Christchurch, NZ after our season at Siple was over, we ordered a new seat for the Transalp from the American saddle manufacturer Corbin. We had it shipped to my parent’s in Lebanon, Maine where we hand carried it to Italy. It took a bit of tweaking of the top-box to make it comfortable for Luci. Now it is really starting to take on a look of its own. Not many Transalps with Corbin seats around. It was a bit hard a first but, with a passenger, the difference is incredible.

At this point we were more-or-less ready to embark for Sardinia. We had a bit of a problem with the new front tire and the front wheel bearings still hadn’t arrived from the dealer. After messing around with the front tire a bit, we determined that it must be a flaw. The hard part was convincing the tire people (gummists as I call them). Italian companies have not all discovered the benefit of customer service and would rather have you pay for a new tire. If I hadn’t had my mechanic friend Cristiano with me that is probably what I would have wound up with. But he put up a good argument and got me a warranty replacement. The same goes for tools here. Tool makers would rather make cheap tools that break so people buy more. Even top-end tools like Beta are crap with poor warranty service. We broke more than one Beta tool just working on my bike. My friends tell me that they do have a warranty but it takes months to get a replacement. They still don’t believe me that you can just pop by Sears with your broken Craftsman tool and they give you a new one or that Snap-on will deliver to your shop.

The Honda dealer kept telling us, “the bearings will be in tomorrow”. This went on for two weeks so we just decided to go a head and leave for our trip. We left on Friday, May 11th for the Cinque Terre. When I talk to Americans who have been to Italy they always talk about how great the Cinque Terre are but in the 10 years I’ve been coming to Italy I have never been. It is not a big destination for Italian tourists. A friend of mine from Antarctica’s parents have a gestalt meditation center nearby and he recommended that we stay in the town of Levanto. Since we were going to be exploring the Cinque Terre on a weekend we convinced Luci’s parents to drive down and meet us there on Saturday.

What an amazing place to go on a motorcycle. The roads are beautifully curvy and variable enough that I can really put to good use my multi-terrain motorcycle. On Saturday morning, my birthday, we rode and walked to the town of Vernazza, before meeting Luci’s parents. We didn’t have too much time to mess around because we had to meet them in Porto Venere at the bottom end of the Cinque Terre for lunch. After lunch, Luci’s parents took the coastal route to Lucca while we took the inland Via Francigena along a medieval pilgrimage route between Rome and Paris. In Lucca we fell victim to poor dining. Because Tuscany is so full of foreign tourists who don’t know how truly good real Italian dining can be, there are tons of restaurants that serve a sub-par dining experience. Not the first time we have eaten poorly there. In the morning, Luci and I had to be up a the crack of dawn to drive to Livorno to catch our ferry to Olbia in Sardinia.

We have been planning this trip since January at Siple when I discovered that the Italian GP of the World Rally Competition was happening there in a favorable time slot for us. A great excuse to take a road trip to an area known for its off-road. Being much farther south than Lombardy it was also much warmer and perfect weather for camping. It is also off-season there so it was pretty tranquil even in big tourist areas. But someone who goes to Sardinia for the tourist areas is an idiot. It is one of the wildest areas of Italy. Very old-west in most areas more than 10 miles from the beach; no fences and bullet holes in all the road signs. About 80% of this, the second largest island in the Mediterranean, is mountainous with great roads for an enduro bike.

We spend the first week on Sardinia around the Gennargentu National Park. We did many kilometers of off-road riding and stayed in an argitourismo (essentially a homestead who have an extra room for guests). The Rally was scheduled to start that weekend and we had scoped out a campsite that sat right on part of the track. We spent some time running the special stages sections on the Transalp with no bags. Great fun! The way a rally works is the teams base out of a town (in this case Olbia) where they set up their mechanics and media circius. Then, during the race days they do two rounds of a circuit cobbled together out of private and public roads; a different loop each day of the weekend. On certain sections of the loop the road is closed and on others it is not. On the closed section the cars are timed for a standing in the overall. The cars MUST make it back to the service park in the host city even if they make it through the timed special stages. Otherwise they are disqualified. This means they have to do their own repairs on the road with tools they bring along with them or face disqualification. Yesterday, in the Acropolis Rally in Athens, Greece one of the leaders, Sebastian Loeb lost his whole rear end and dragged his Citroen into the Olympic Stadium using only the front wheels.

What Luci and I tried to do on our motorcycle was catch each of the two laps from a different perspective; one on a closed, timed special stage and the other on a public road from a street-side café. A good combination for our multi-terrain bike. The best combinations were the ones where we were riding against the race flow on a public road to get from one viewing point to the other. This way we could pass all the cars head-on and watch them from the bike.

After three intense days of off-roading and race chasing we were read for a couple of days of relaxation. We got a bungalow at a campground right on the water in the town of Palau on the channel between Sardinia and Corsica so we could clean off all the dust we had accumulated over the weekend. At lunch we made friends with the owners of the restaurant. They recommended that we get a zodiac and cruise around the Maddalena Islands National Park for a day. In the morning we went down to the port with our picnic and picked up a gommone with a 30 HP motor. We spent the day swimming and island hopping. We spent most of the rest of our time in Sardinia around Palau until it was time to take the ferry back to the mainland.

On the first day of our trip the speedometer gear broke so we had no speedometer or odometer the whole trip. I called my friend Cristiano to have him order me the part so it would be there when we got back. Knowing the history of our neighborhood Honda dealer (Tresoldi Honda Pessano) I knew I would have to order it far in advance because they keep nothing in house and it take forever for them to get anything out-of-house. When we got back two weeks later, not only had the speedo gear not arrived but the front wheel bearings still hadn’t arrived. I could have got the stuff quicker from Japan. To make matters worse, Cristiano said the guy told him he forgot to place the order in the first place. I sat down and called every Honda dealer in Milan looking for these parts and found one with a speedo gear. I went and picked it up and I asked Cristiano to cancel the order from Tresoldi but he said it was “too late”. They really don’t make it easy. And Italian companies can’t figure out why other European countries don’t want to do business with them.
This morning Luci and her parents went to Egypt for the week. Resort life is not for me so I stayed behind. This weekend I am meeting up with a bunch of friends from the States. We are all going up to open Boccalatte together and dig it out of the snow.

After meeting up with Luci at Auckland International we boarded the plane for LAX and then on to Denver where we met up with our friends Amy and Eric. It was a bit of a shock being back in the states after being out for almost a year. But Amy and Eric are gracious host and, having worked in the Antarctic, could understand where we were coming from.

While we spent a few days at their house getting re-adjusted we got our contracts for next season on the Ice and shopped for lift tickets for our approaching trip to Summit County. The Spelman’s once again courteously opened their condo in Silverthorne to us. We bought a couple of 4-day passes to Copper on the Boulder Craig’s List for well under cost. It was vacation week so the mountain was packed with kids. The conditions were good, though. We had two days of snow and two days of sun. I even got Luci to go off-piste and into the trees.

After another week at Amy and Eric’s, we flew back to Boston and took the Downeaster train up to Dover to my parents. We had a huge stack of mail from our year-long absence and spent the better part of two days reading it all. We had only a couple of days at my parents before going up to Conway to take a Wilderness First Responder with SOLO. What a LONG week! I have taken a WFR before but it was about 12 years ago when I worked for the AMC at Pinkham Notch. Coincidently, the instructor was my boss when I worked there, Bill Otten. Another guy I worked for at the AMC is the cook at SOLO. Having taken the course before, it got a bit redundant after a while. Good to get the practice though.

Now we are back at my parents. I have spent the past couple of days getting my little laptop back in order, and trying to slim down our pile of stuff in my parents attic. This weekend we are headed up to my brother Isaac’s house to see our new nephew, Eben. I also signed up to take the Maine Motorcycle Safety Course, finally. I am hoping I can get the motorcycle endorsement on my international drivers license.