Killing Batteries

This is a bonus, second post this week, because 1) next week’s “Best of Tuscany” and “What Happened?” lists will be posted very late due to three days of lavish wine drinking and sleeping ceremonies I’ve scheduled to mark the end of my one month of high-impact travel in Tuscany and 2) every time I lose another shade of dignity, I feel inexplicably compelled to make the event public for the benefit of those who are secretly working on biographies about me. So here goes…

First off, it doesn’t matter what I do while I’m in Italy, everyone can tell from miles away that I’m not from around here. I’m blond, I’ve got my stunning, Nordic good looks, my sunglasses cover less than 80% of my face, I don’t smoke and my hair gets less attention in a year than these guys give their hair each morning. I’m the antithesis of the average Italian male. Everyone knows it, so I don’t even try.

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I’m on the home stretch. Just under a week to go on my Tuscany road research. It’s been pretty great all around; sunny and in the upper 70s each day, the longest uninterrupted stretch of great food and wine I’ve had in my whole life and I haven’t had any near-death experiences (yet). Basically the opposite of Romania and Moldova, in every respect. Though to be fair, I didn’t get bed bugs (twice!) or food poisoning in Romania or Moldova, so there’s that to consider.

If you’re wondering about the title of this post, I’m not actually referring to the sizable, blue, smoky vapor trail of crazy (with a hint of coffee), that I’ve personally left behind in Tuscany over the past three weeks. I’m talking about the nuts who are working in the hotels and year-round tourist offices, that I’ve dealt with, meaning that eventually some lucky Lonely Planet reader is going to have to deal with them as well.

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Last year, very soon after completing my road research in Romania and Moldova, I wrote this post literally giving away the greatest reality TV concept of all time, that being following around a Lonely Planet author. Bafflingly, no one has scooped up the idea yet, probably because it was so embarrassingly good that humiliated network executives sent all their reality TV writers in for mandatory full lobotomies and they’re all still in recovery, re-learning how to send emails.

Now Tuscany is no Romania and Moldova, but that doesn’t mean that following me around still wouldn’t make great TV. I’ve been on the road for a bit over two weeks and have done/suffered the following:

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I promised you incoherent sentence fragments from the road when a free WiFi cloud and a toilet intersected, and by god I keep my promises. Though, to be honest, I wrote most of this on a bed in a two-star hotel, not the toilet, though I was tempted to stay true to my art for form’s sake…

In no particularly logical order, here are the current issues:

This is my car:

It’s a four-door, diesel, Lancia “Musa”. I ordered a sub-compact Fiat Panda, because I knew I was going to be traversing absurdly narrow mountain roads and fettuccini-thin, medieval hilltop town “streets” with three inches clearance between the mirrors and people’s front doors. But they were all out of the Panda’s, so they gave me this monster. It’s a bit schizophrenic. When it’s at a full stop it starts daydreaming that it’s an arthritic mule. As such, it only manages to get off its ass and go from zero to 5KPH in about four seconds. At 5KPH, it suddenly remembers that it’s a car and makes the jump from 5KPH to 100KPH in a more reasonable six seconds. This acceleration hesitation has almost gotten me smooshed by trucks on three occasions.

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Travel Writer Tip 152 – “How to eat dinner alone in a restaurant, while sitting front-and-center to an audience of 20 people standing in the rain waiting for tables and not look like a total jackhole”

I got some quick on-the-job-training in this arena on my final night in Florence.

To start, eating alone is almost never sexy, unless the Polish waitress is blatantly hitting on you, then it’s better than eating with your best friend, your mom and a drunken, absentminded lottery winner all at the same time.

Eating alone once or twice a week is doable, but when you get to five times or more in a week, you start to feel like a radioactive leper, no matter how many Lonely Planet groupies read your blog (unless those groupies picked up a copy of Europe on a Shoestring 5, featuring an infuriatingly inconvenient typo in my bio, in which case they’ll be Googling one “Leif Petterson” and wondering why they can’t find any pictures of my spectacular booty).

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