DAY 169 - BESCIA TO PALAZZOLO SULL'OGLIO

8 October, 2011

21.8 miles (Total: 1694.5 miles) 43,600 steps (Total: 3,690, 601 steps)

I have navigated my way through the Pindos Mountains in Greece and remote Albania, but I got lost in IKEA. How is it that there isn’t a simple entrance to the restaurant and you are required to walk a veritable yellow brick road of home furnishings, candles, and candles, and more candles when all you want are Swedish meatballs and chips? They even offer tantalising short cuts from the odd shaped candles section to the scented candles section, but none of them seem to lead to the seasoned meatballs section.

I still haven’t worked out the rationale for the pricing structure of drinks in Italy, but here is an example from today: a Diet Coke is 3 euros; a cappuccino is 3.5 euros; still water 2 euros; a glass of wine 1.5 euros. How do you get as system where a glass of wine is half the price of a soft drink? Surely there is a bit of an excise revenue opportunity for the Italian government here should they ever find themselves in need of a few extra euro.

Whilst I am having a bit of a moan—mosquitoes are the dumbest insects ever: first, after they have taking your blood you would think they would escape as quickly as possible from the scene of the crime, but no, not the mosquito, they then decide to dive bomb your ear like a scene from Top Gun when Maverick buzz’s the control tower. Do they not know that this is likely to stir their victim and he/she ain’t going to be too happy about it? So then, and here is the clever part, when the person you have just drained of blood, as effortlessly as a mobile phone operator, switches on the light and comes for you with a flip flop, where do you hide? Answer—on the wall beside the headboard. “Wo—above the headboard, you don’t say….almost had me there mossy.” It’s like game we play when our kids are three—“I wonder where Matthew is?” ignoring the bulge in the curtain, the heavy breathing and the tiny feet poking out from beneath the drapes, we conclude “Well I just can’t see him anywhere he must have gone away.” They don’t even realise that having provided a regular buffet for his mates all the way from Greece to Italy, that I might have just figured out their cunning plan. Well there was one less mosquito around to pass on the bad news that their cover has been blown—for the record the truce hasn’t started yet.

In case you were having a ‘IKEA moment’ and couldn’t follow where I was going with this entry….SUMMARY: not much happened today.