Italy #2 - Alba

Note! For the visual guide (pictures), please check the gallery.

Started off strong, we felt that a week was enough time in one place and that it was time to move on. Now we did want to go to Tuscany at first instead of Alba, Piedmont, but that was too far away from the route to our goal, so, naturally, just booked something and figured that we’ll see what’s there when we get there.

 So, the plan with Alba

• Drive there

• Do some pics between the vineyards

• Find a swimming pool to call us down

• Go to a winery

As you can already see, we were there for 7 days, but the plan consisted of almost nothing. NOTHING, oh it will surely be boring and there will be nothing to tell to the grandkids.

The Drive

The drive there was awful. Not for the women (yet), but for me, the driver. I never knew at what speed I should be driving on the motorways when there were roadworks and there were a lot of those. Why didn’t I know? Because whatever the sign was, I was always the slowest one driving. Awful feeling to block traffic but also not brave enough to drive faster because of being afraid of fines.

And when you’re off highways it’s even worse. Still no-one respects the signs but then there’s only room for either only one car or on a rare occasion 2 smaller cars. Spoiler alert: this doesn’t change in France either.

The locations of our accommodation

• We try to never book our stays at the centre of the town, because, well the centre would be

  • more expensive

  • less roomy on the outside

  • and hopefully better views

• It is, however, a hit and miss, especially when not investigating enough beforehand. For example:

  • In Austria we were 20 minutes away from the centre with only one restaurant in somewhat walking distance. That’s too far away for someone who wants to see the city.

  • In Switzerland we were 40 minutes walking distance away from a store and centre of a town. That was fine, because we like to have walks with Reet (walking Emmi to sleep).

  • Spoiler: In France, after Italy, we’re 1 hour walking distance away even from just being able to walk with a stroller without being afraid of a car hitting you. That’s just too far away from civilization.

With Alba’s stay at La casa in Collina, we got lucky

• Yes, it was 40 minutes away on foot from a grocery store (but You could at least go there by foot, that luxury is not everywhere, turns out later in France). Because of a lot warmer weather than Switzerland, bringing home milk and food on foot, is a no-go. Let’s just say: Dario thinks that everything spoils in minutes in warm weather. But it was a really easy drive to the store, so even Reet finally drove when she craved for something.

• We had a huge terrace where I was sitting practically every night editing photos.

• But most importantly, in our garden, we had apples that we could eat and outside our garden were vineyards where we could get grapes (if we stole some). And of course… walk 5 minutes and… the views were… well, okay for what they were (no mountains).

• Also, we never felt too hot or too cold indoors of any of the places we stayed at (and none of them had air conditioning). I’m thinking we were lucky that we came in September, not in July.

Some things we could and do complain about, though

• Why no swimming pool. It’s so hot outside, why… why. Or a natural swimming place, which alba didn’t have.

• Dishwasher… Where’s the dishwasher, why waste our valuable time on that.

• In Alba we also didn’t have a washing machine. One would think that you can manage a week without washing clothes, because you have a car full of those, but we started missing it in a half a week already. In the next place it felt we were only washing clothes for days (well, Reet was).

• No-one likes to tell us where to bring the trash when the bag gets full. And I mean no-one, it feels like people usually just stay for a day or two in these places (or other people usually just ask).

• Kitchen had only two spots for the pots and pans and no oven. And the fridge was small, even though we went shopping almost every day.

• And most importantly. We’re dealing with AirBnB style apartments here. Meaning: in case of Alba, we lived on one side of the house and the people renting the place lived on the other side. And as it happened, we were on the side of the parking lot And the people living on the other side had like a million visitors a day. So, a lot of foot traffic right by our door which we always kept open, because… we could… by people not interested in talking with us (mostly because on this side of Europe, English isn’t the most popular language).

More important things first. Visiting a Winery! 

Do you trust your navigation app?

Google maps said that the Winery that’s the largest in Alba and also the closest to us, takes us an hour to walk to. Maps.me said that Google knows nothing and you could get there by foot in 20 minutes on an unpaved road.

I trust maps.me (at least I did, until…) and off we went. So what that the road said private. We walked past it. Then there were signs of dogs on them on both sides of the roads IF we’d go off the road. That was fine as well. Then there were actual dogs, but they were in their cages. We even went past them. And then there was an even bigger sign with a dog face on it and a horizontal post in front. That’s when we figured that we’d rather not drink then and just go and drive there.

Ceretto Winery

• Drive there for 10 minutes.

• Go in, say that we didn’t book anything in advance, though we read that we should have. They said that it’s better this way actually, we can take a hike outside on our own and then come in and taste some wines if we wanted to.

• Went out to take a hike. It was the warmest day I think. No-one was happy about that hike. Especially Reet, who wanted to first drink and only then take a hike.

• Anyway, hike was like 3x longer than we would have liked thus instead of not drinking at all or just reet drinking, we asked If people drink and drive there and the people serving wine for tastings said that “you’re in a wine country, yes we drink and drive” and “you won’t be drinking that much anyway when tasting”.

• So, we got our tasting of 5 wines with some “how we make them” stories about them which we never write down and thus never remember afterwards.

• Then I had to go and pay, because a man should do it. Argh. And I went and said “Tell me the bad news”. And he said. It’s good. I said what’s good. He said, we are good. I said: What? He said: “It’s okay, you don’t have to pay”.

  • And I was like. Wooopwoop. And I went to Reet and said that it was cheap etc and then understood what the “don’t have to pay” meant. They expect us to buy some bottles (I understand that if we don’t it’s still fine, but they expect us to buy something still).

  • So, we bought a wine as a gift to a friend who collects them. ~50 Euros well spent (still cheaper than a tour that we would have booked through the internet).

• And then Reet (drank and) drove, becauseI didn’t want to lose my driver’s license.

• All in all, a great experience. They allowed us to walk around the fields and the inside the building between the barrels on our own (which we prefer, because then we have time for pictures) and did the tasting for free. And while I don’t like wine, it tasted okay.

Now to the swimming part

 Talk about wasting money. We wanted to go to spend time at a swimming pool. But as it was beginning of September. We found that the 3 swimming pools we drove to were closed. And it’s not like they were close to our home and each other. We wasted almost a day on that.

So we went home, disappointed with a wasted day in our bag of experiences that will start eating away my soul. Tomorrow will surely be better!

Reet did some research in the evening. And indeed, a place with a pool was still open, until mid September even (so until the end of our stay). A bit far, about 50 minutes drive, but it was soo warm (28 degrees or so) that we just needed it so badly (I think we actually could have lived without it without any problems, but because we had wasted a day to it, we couldn’t just let it go).

Family park, it was called

• Drive there for an hour

• Not many people, like 5 cars, that’s fine, even good, it’s off season and mid-week.

• Buy tickets. If we take the park in addition to the pool, it’s only a few EURs more.

• Of course, buy the park ticket as well, we have two children with us.

• Enter the park and…

• Wow.

  • Everything was old, most toys were broken and in our opinion, not safe at all.

    • In Estonia, the park would have been fined and closed down or at least I hope that in Estonia they would check for safety etc.

  • But the more fun we had because of that I think. It wouldn’t have been fun at all, though, had we not been almost the only ones at the park.

• But… there were animals (goats, donkeys… the usual), some toys were not broken and we had the park almost to ourselves. So, off season Family park. A cool experience.

  • Okay, what actually made it cool, was one goat who had, in our minds, jumped over the fence and wanted to do bad things to us, because of it’s rough childhood and followed us for 15 minutes. Had to run even a few times, because it tried to approach me a bit too fast.

• Go to the pool, need to wear a hat, because of some reasons, that was only an EUR each, so we all got one (I wonder where they are now, when you check the pics, you’ll see how fancy they are).

• There were even slides. And they even turned them on at one point for 15 minutes, which was 14 minutes too many for Saskia.

A fun fun day.

Returning home, we also passed two places (mentioning them only, because the gallery includes pics of them)

• A big pink bench, which i absolutely needed to see, because i had searched for one closer to home a few days earlier and never found (but… maps.me had said that it was there!!!!)

• A field with some huge pencils on it

Took 30 minutes longer because of that (plus the actual time on location). Luckily the women didn’t know that the drive could have been significantly shorter, so everyone was happy. 

Them hikes in Alba 

Naturally we did walk a lot while in Alba (either as a family or just me with Emmi or just Reet with Emmi), there were even 3 paths described on a board right outside our premises. And we could always do them with our Easywalker Blabla lightweight stroller.  There were playing “parks” for Emmi on almost every walk. So, everything was paved and easy (though, up and down and up and down, you know, interesting).

Well, not every track.

• One path described on the wall of paths was along the river. That was no fun at all, gravel road and zero views (I would imagine that a river is something people would like to view, but not in Alba, you could peek at the river at some points, but never get to actually go next to it). At least I think that it was no fun. If Emmi sleeps better because of constant shaking, then, it was a perfect hike)

• And then that one hike.

That one hike in Alba

Preparations

• So. Even before reaching Alba, I had found a hiking path near it. Presented it to Reet and agreed that that’s something we would want to do.

• One review was important:

  • “Drove throught it in low speed by car. Very beautiful” or something like that.

• Description of the hike itself was something like:

  • Brings you through the local vineyards.

• Naturally, another hike with the stroller. An easy one, but has a proper climb and descent still and also has some distance.

• What time? Let’s go there after like 15:00, because, then in the end when tired, it wouldn’t at least be too hot.

That hike itself, though

• Arrived at about 15:30 to the starting point of the hike. Hike should take about 3,5 hours, we have an hour to spare after before it gets dark.

• Found out that my 3-year-old phone had only 30% battery, which meant that it won’t last until the end of the hike.

  • Also, remember that in the morning I removed the battery pack from the backpack because of it weighing almost nothing.

• At 15:35 had to pick up the stroller for some meters, because not doable by stroller.

  • Too late to turn back now, though, what else are we going to do, go home and drink wine? No!

• So, usually the road was paved and fine for the stroller. But then there were the walks through the awesome where we would steal some grapes vineyards

  • Note! the path really actually took us officially through the vineyards, which is a big relief for a person like me, who’s always afraid of doing something illegal, even if something as small as trespassing by a few meters to go next to the tree and take a pic.

  • On those roads, we would lift the stroller up and carry it with Emmi in it.

  • And then on the more gravely parts, we’d just shake Emmi.

• Now, the shaking and lifting the stroller is important, because Reet keeps her phone at the bottom of the stroller and it could fall off at any moment.

• And then it did. It did fall off the stroller, because we couldn’t see it anywhere and we could not hear it ringing when I called it.

• No problem! I still had 10% of battery left. I’d just continue calling and Reet would run back to find it.

• About 10-20 minutes later or so, she returned with no phone.

• Okay, something that we should have thought of before. Locate my phone! I finally thought of it.

  • 4% of battery left, that’s enough, let’s hope.

  • Yes, yes it was, because you can locate your phone only when you have access to some other Apple device or your phone (which we didn’t have with us on our hike) and thus it was a totally useless feature. Stupid, stupid feature.

• So, if Reet couldn’t find it, maybe Dario, with his glasses, could. So I went as well. Ran (yes, I did some running moves) and kept calling her phone.

• Then Reet answered my call.

• The phone had been found. It was in the stroller all along with the phone on silent.

• Went back and we could continue our journey home with my phone dead now, of course.

• Continued until the path took us to a steep hill which we needed to climb down with our stroller.

• Did not want to do that, so instead of walking down, we were walking to the side, meaning we were walking at an angle. Reet pushing from the side so that the stroller wouldn’t fall and I from the back to the goal.

• Then, when reaching the road next to the field, because we had lost some daylight to the phone incidend, we had a few options:

  • Option A

    • Go down to where we think the hiking path would have led us, and arrive probably in the dark to the finish line.

  • Option B

    • Go to the finish on the road that google suggests and be certain that you’ll get to the finish line before dark.

  • Option C

    • Ignore paved roads and try to use another path to get to the finish even quicker

  • There could have been other options as well, like downloading Maps.me’s Italy’s map to Reet’s phone or use Alltrails app, but… why, we already had 3 good options.

  • Now, because we’re travelling with Yours truly, option C was chosen, because Dario knows best. And Dario knows, that option C is best, because when Option A goes to the right and option B goes to the left then Option C goes straight (and that’s where our finish line is). Must be the quickest way.

    • Also, what helped choose option C is the fact that I remembered that while out path was labelled nr “7”, our path crossed with a hiking path labelled nr 6 and the option C, though moving ideally in the opposite direction, was the nr 6 path.

  • On we went, to find the next nr 6 path’s post.

  • We never found it. Turns out, that that hike is not meant for being done in the opposite way. We did, however, found out that, after losing about 20 more minutes, we’re back at the same point where we had the 3 options.

• So, after being humiliated, we took the Maps’ way.

• Now, the problem with that is: cars drive there, and we lost 20 minutes, so we’re going to arrive in the dark. Not that the other route would have been safer, as we had no idea where that led and how long that would have been and if it would have been on the roads as well still.

• In any case, I left the girls without a phone (to be used by me for navigation purposes), next to the road somewhere and went on alone and reached the car and drove and picked them up and arrived home by the time we had promised Saskia that we’d arrive.

• This hike definitely went to the Dario’s hikes hall of fame, but not because of the views (vineyards, they all look the same).

The days, though, were getting colder and we needed to move closer to Southern Spain, thus, France. Back to the Alps again (well, close to the Alps), for a week, surely, now that we have a whole week near the alps, in one place, it will be even better than Switzerland?