Benodust: retroactive, sardinia italy june 30, 2014

Sardinia, Italy

Cindy Brooks living the life

OK, the three of us that pay attention to this blog know that CB, CM, and I, landed in in LA more then a few days ago, and are currently struggling to re-enter life in southern california. There were many reasons for returning, but right know i can not seem to remember any of them. we are slowly moving back into the house on gundry and getting re-acquainted with neighborhood friends.
in the hubbub of returning i was unable to write about our last few weeks away. so here i go retroactive:

Sardinia, Italy June 30, 2014
we have made it to Sardinia, with ten bags weighing in at 258 pounds. It was a slow process from taxi to bus to plane to car to hotel, but we made it in one piece. And we only have to do this four more times before we reach los angeles. joy, joy, joy.

Sardinia is a small mediterranean island with thousands of secluded, clear blue, shallow water coves with tranquil little beaches. The catch is that you have to get to the secluded cove in order to enjoy the secluded cove. Sometimes that takes some work and work is something that I have grown accustomed to doing without.
Cindy has learned that if you work corrinne and I too hard at the beginning of a trip we tend to get cranky and make her life miserable. So this time she tried a different technique. this excursion started with getting to sardinia and parking ourselves in the same hotel for a few days of recuperation, and acclimation to a new environment. So we spent two days in a seafront hotel swimming and watching the sun go up and down. Not a bad lifestyle. At breakfast the first morning corrinne came back to the table with her second piece of Italian breakfast cake. Being a responsible parent I gave her the universal parental disapproval stare. She looked at me and said,”what , it comes with the hotel.” Cindy said it was ok, "but only because we're on vacation." Go figure, we're on a vacation.

After taking a few days to get into vacation mode, we took off to visit other parts of the island. It's not long. We could probably drive it in about four hours. We stopped and climbed up and down 600 steps to visit a cave that local fishermen had discovered. hundreds of years ago pirates used the caves around the island to hide both booties.

We traveled to the city of stinton to catch a boat to a small island called asinara. We wanted to see the elusive white donkeys that inhabit asinara, the island is a national park so the white donkeys are protected. unfortunately the weather was not to the captains liking so the he canceled the boat-ride over to asinara. not sure what the real reason was for canceling because the see didn't look that rough to me (and i'm the king of the sea-sick club). I think he was tired and just wanted to spend the day painting his boat, either that, or Italians are a bunch of fraidy-cats. unfortunately the white donkeys went unseen.

on our drive from stinton we drove past a wheat farm that had several wind turbines whirling away, providing electricity to the island. not only did this farm have wind turbines, it also had an open gate. how often do you get to get up close to one of these bad boys. it was very cool, and made a neat whirling noise

the base was this large

we moved on to another port-city, Palau. Here, Cindy had scheduled a three hour kayak trip for beginners. well, this trip was fantastic, but defiantly not for beginners. we paddled over 12 miles along the coast. we set out on our 3 hour tour, and returned 6 hours later. on this trip I learned what Corrinne was made of. we finally stopped for lunch, in a lovely little cove, and my arms were pretty tired. at the time, i was a little irritated with the italian interpretation of "beginner." after a few dips in the water and lunch i was feeling a little better. when we set of again the paddling did not seem as hard and i realized that my kayak partner Corrinne had taken over. she was working. her little arms were paddling away. she did most of the work getting us back. I just kept us going in the right direction. the return trip was fab for me. we are all now confirmed kayak lovers and look forward to the next opportunity.