Taking a Break with a Cool Pool

Whew! It has been another week of SCORCHING temps here in Italia. We have a very full roster of itinerary clients, and a couple of research trips of our own coming up; so we have been just sitting in the house chained to a computer all day.

Having all this work is not that bad (at this time of year), because it’s too damn hot to do anything outside anyway. But we both get stir crazy after 8 hours or so of screen time, and after a couple of days we lose track of what day it is!

It looked like we were wrapping things up by this weekend, so we did a last minute search and booked ourselves another day at an agriturismo/restaurant with a pool, in Umbria about an hour from our house. (We did the same thing last week, with a place outside a little Tuscan hill-town.)

The place was beautiful, surrounded by acres of corn and sunflower fields. The grounds were beautiful, the interiors were quaint restorations of old farm buildings; and of course the pool was just what the doctor ordered for this summer of 95-105° days.

Dinner was on a lovely patio at a restaurant on-site.

This move to Italy has shifted our thinking in many ways, and one of them is that we choose to “outsource” some things instead of owning them. For example, our house is too small to have a tub, so if one of us feels like we need a soak, we have to go rent a room with a tub. Obviously we have no garden, so no pool, so if we feel like we need a dip in a pool, we go rent a place. We bought our house for €26K, and when we moved here we wondered if it would feel too small.

Plenty of people say “You should buy a bigger place,” or “You will want to get something larger” — but so far, we feel like this idea of renting spaces occasionally, instead of owning them, is perfection.