Snapshots from the Road
Plus an essay on a chicken soup smelling hike.
Hello and welcome to a combo post: a photo essay from the road and a quick little essay about a hike. Next week, paid subscribers will receive a recipe for a roasted veggie and polenta bowl. As always, learn more about my work here.
An excerpt from my travel journals:
Ventimiglia, Italy
On Sunday, we go to the agroturismo across the valley for lunch, and we realize as we arrive that they have opened just to serve us. Just one table is unfettered from the others, with two chairs and wine glasses waiting for us. We eat antipasti, primi, secondi, contorni, and dolci. We try their wines, white and red, and are pleasantly surprised by both. We look over the valley, across to the tiny village of less than 30 people where we are staying. It is perfectly peaceful, just the sounds of the birds and the clattering of the kitchen to keep us company, until someone doing yard work below us turns on, inexplicably, Rhianna and Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie.” Something about the acoustics of the hills ensures that we can hear every beat, and somehow, it works. We leave feeling stuffed, certain we’re waddling home for a nap.
Instead, we hop in the car and drive up the top of one of the endless hills, to the start of a hiking trail we spotted yesterday. We park the car on the side of the road, next to the tiny shrine, and start up the side of the hill. The trail is narrow but well-hewn, traversing over the solid rock of the mountain. Either the air is twice as thin up here or my breaths are half as deep (maybe it’s all the food taking up room in my torso?), because I cannot resist breathing in, deeply, over and over again to fill my lungs with the sweet perfume of the Alpine air.
We can’t hear anything over here, not even the honking of cars turning the switchbacks below. There are birds, but they’re staying below where we are, so the soundtrack to our walk is the occasional whip of wind through the branches and the buzzing of bees as they stumble drunkenly from flower to flower.
Colin walks ahead of me, brushing against the plants that line the trail. The smell of chicken soup rises in his wake: rosemary bushes, taller than I am, sage with its yellow flowers, and the most wildly fragrant thyme I’ve smelled in my life, straggling along beneath the others. We walk above terraces of olives dotted with fig trees. The grass around us smells sweet and the rocks we’re turning over with our feet have a salty edge to them. Everything here reminds me of food, and I’m drinking it in like I haven’t just eaten my calories for the week in one heady lunch.
We stop at an old map painted on a piece of wood and survey where we are on the trail. Seven miles ahead of us is France. Three miles south is Monaco. Back behind us is Italy. Tomorrow, we’ve planned a walk along the sea that will take us through all three of them. Today, we’re high above all that, where it feels like nobody cares what stamp we have on our passports or what language we speak. All that is here is the chicken soup scent on the wind and the rocky ground beneath our feet.
See you back here next week for a polenta bowl recipe. Thanks as always for reading—you’re making my writer dreams come true.
what an incredible trip! The pictures are beautiful.