On our last day in SF the fog rolled in.  

Photo from Flickr

It transpires that we’re going to San Francisco next Friday (the Husband has managed to arrange yet another business trip), which will hopefully be a great opportunity to do some SHOPPING.

I’ve never been before, so all suggestions for great interiors shops, restaurants, sightseeing trips etc. most gratefully received, though do remember that I will sadly have a two-year old in tow most of the time.

Here’s one for all the Londoners out there.  Which area of West London was I visiting this weekend?

Actually you can stop guessing now because I wasn’t in West London at all, but in Victoria, the capital of Vancouver Island, and also capital of British Columbia. 

It’s about two and a half hours away by high-speed catamaran, so we popped over to visit my Canadian friend, who by an amazing coincidence lives there, and felt like we’d stepped onto another continent. Most of Victoria’s downtown area was built by the British in the late Victorian era and the buildings could so easily be in Hammersmith or Shepherd’s Bush. I never knew architecture could be so comforting.

The only difference is that they go in for picking out the details of the facades in  bright paint colours, which looked rather jolly and kitsch and might be a good fashion to adopt in London.

While Seattle still sometimes feels like the Wild West, Victoria felt as English as Wimbledon or Miss Marple.  The bookshops were filled with books by English authors, the supermarkets stocked such wondrous delicacies as Branston pickle and mushroom ketchup and we had a magnificent afternoon tea in a teashop decorated with portraits of the Royal Family past and present, which would have been perfectly at home in Henley-on-Thames. And all this with scarcely a hint of irony or theme parkishness.

The  only downside to a fab weekend was the journey out.  The winds whipped up a huge swell on the water and we had to take a very circuitous route to stay as long as possible within the protected waters of Puget Sound.  When finally we did reach the open the sea the boat was pitching up and down rather impressively.

At first the Minx found it very exciting but her shrieks of joy soon turned to howls of anguish and she started to throw up everywhere in most spectacular fashion. And of course the only place a miserable vomiting little girl wants to be is in her mother’s arms. How nice.

So on Friday I had a bit of a dilemma. 

I was still feeling rather weak and sorry for myself and the hole in my abdomen was still somewhat painful, but we also had tickets to fly on Saturday morning to pay a whistlestop visit to my relatives in Italy. 

In the end I decided to ignore the commonsense option and go to Italy.  I hadn’t been for three years and my elderly aunt and cousins had never met the Minx, and I really wanted them to do so before we left for Seattle.

My relatives live in Cuneo, a largish town at the foot of the Alps, equidistant between Turin and the French border – a couple of hours’ drive from both the beaches of the Riviera and the slopes of Mont Blanc. With its spacious squares, colonnaded avenues, baroque palazzi and Art Nouveau patisseries, it is light years away from the typical Tuscan hilltop town of crumbling stone and fading paintwork which springs to most peoples’ minds when they think of Italy. The region is richly agricultural and renowned for good food and fine wine, and the town has a well-fed, contented, self-satisfied air, with none of the danger and excitement of say, Naples or Sicily. 

I just about made it through the weekend on adrenaline and painkillers, but was so glad we went because Cuneo is where I always feel closest to my mother.  She died twenty years ago of breast cancer but was born and spent the first half of her life in this town near the mountains and everywhere I look I see vistas she would have known and loved. I still think about her everyday and have missed her enormously since the Minx was born.

I chatted a lot about my mother with her sister, my aunt, who is now one of the few people who remember her well.  We spent an afternoon in Arione, a stunningly beautiful Art Nouveau pasticceria which doesn’t look like it’s changed since it opened in 1923 and must have looked exactly the same when my mother lived here.

After being spoilt rotten all weekend, we left feeling well-fed, contented and self-satisfied, and although I’ve been feeling very tired since we got home, it really was just what the doctor ordered.

I didn’t take my camera out and about with me, so you’ll have to make do with not very good images found online.  Off to get my staples out this afternoon.  I think I can finally say I’m on the mend.

Things I learned while in Tuscany.

• Wild irises grow in profusion by the side of the roads
• Even Italian men shouldn’t wear tights
• It is impossible to feed the Minx too much gnocchi and pesto
• English tomatoes are ghastly (not actually a new insight)
• Poggio Antico Brunello di Montalcino Riserva 1997 is a very fine wine indeed

(The first photo is of the hotel)

CLICK FOR GLIMPSE OF THE VIEW FROM OUR BEDROOM WINDOW

The most amazing thing about the Castello di Velona was the incredible view. The hotel is set in an ancient stone castle perched on a rocky outcrop with a full 360 degree view of the softly undulating Tuscan countryside. The area is known as the Val d’Orcia (the valley of the Orcia river) and is a World Heritage site – protected because it represents an almost unspoilt view of the Tuscan landscape as it would have been in Renaissance times.

It was a comfortable view – though different every morning and evening. Somehow its very timelessness was soothing to the soul.