Bill and Suzy's Excellent Adventures goes all Wall Street Journal on you!  A single weekend edition (because news likes to take the weekend off, too) just like Rupert's Excellent Adventures (soon to be prison blog?).  Hope you enjoy the new format.  We have updated our pencil sketched photos in favor of real pixels, too!

And now to the news . . .
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Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from this tropic port
Aboard this tiny ship.

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I am a Red Sox fan. In 2004, after 89 years of World Series futility, the Sawx made an improbable comeback from a three game deficit in the American League Championship Series to beat their archnemesis Yankees and advance to the World Series, sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals for the title. A few weeks later a documentary was released (a copy of which sits in my house in Washington, DC) chronicling their magical season. The documentary was titled "Faith Rewarded," a reference to the faith of Red Sox Nation, which carried them through eight decades of penantless seasons. I liked the title.

Yesterday we experienced our own version of Faith Rewarded.
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One of the appeals of coming to Sardinia for us was the opportunity to experience and understand its strangeness, its uniqueness. Like Sicily, Sardinia, at least from afar, seems a place of mystery, a land flying the Italian flag but more than Italian while not quite Italian. A little off center, wild, rough, exotic.
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Three and a half months ago, we finished up our idyllic Italy trip of a lifetime. Five weeks of exploration, discovery, and fun, an itinerary that took us from north central Trentino to the wine region of Friuli, to Carnevale in Venice and along the coastline of Le Marche. Along the way we made time to visit our friend Rita in l'Aquila, stay at our villa in Umbria and catch up with old friends there. Oh, yes. We also bought ourselves a Mercedes in Stuttgart.
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Bill and Suzy's Excellent Adventures is intended to chronicle, well, our excellent adventures. Wherever they take place.  But since its inception, we have pretty much restricted ourselves to writing about our adventures in the place we love the most, the place we feel is our second home — Italy.  It's not that we don't travel to other places and it's not as though we don't have excellent adventures in those locales.  It's just that the Italian experience is the one that so animates us, that so excites us that we feel a need to bang words into a keyboard so we can share those experiences with you.  The "Italian" experiences are the ones we feel are worth posting and (hopefully) worth reading.  So it was just a little bit strange when earlier this year, we wrote to you of our excellent adventures in Germany on the way to Italy. Wilhelm and Zuzanna's ausgezeichnete Abenteuer.
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If you want to be a writer, don't have a day job! It's been two and a half weeks since we returned from our five week Italian odyssey and despite truly best intentions of posting some follow up stories and photos, writing about our Iron Chef tour of the Eastern seabord and musing about the difference between life in Italy and America, my keyboard has been silent. Life has a way of intruding.

But I would be absolutely remiss if I didn't at least post the briefest tease and an ode to what I am absolutely confident will become one of Washington's hottest restaurants – Fiola di Fabio Trabocchi.
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Why Cannara? The answer to that question could be summed up in one word. Ernesto.
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Over four weeks into our trip here, and entering the home stretch. We head to Rome in three days and then back to the U.S. the following day. What a journey it's been.

As the final days whiz by, here are some random musings and images from the past couple of days . . .
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I can remember the first time I visited Assisi nearly twenty years ago. My father was driving a rental car with Suzy, my mother and me and we had been planning to visit the basilica of St. Francis to see the famous frescos by Giotto that depict the life of the saint. As we arrived in town, despite there being a perfectly good parking lot below the basilica, my father insisted on getting closer to the basilica, ignoring the "pedestrian only" and "restricted access" signs and driving into the enormous piazza right in front of the church. I had no idea how athletic my mother really was until that moment, as she was able to fold herself in half and literally hide herself underneath the passenger seat as we parked our van in front of a sign that read "reserved parking." I'm sure the pope didn't mind that we parked there that day.
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We're back home in Cannara after an overnight in Florence to pick up our twin sons. Today will be a short post. We have a house full of 16. With a group this size there's not a lot of time to think or write.
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