Italy

4 days after we got home from California I took off on a trip with my mom to Italy. However, it was not the typical Italian trip. We were in a small small village called Sinio...it is about 2 hours south west of Milan and about an hour south of Torino. The area is called Piemonte and they are known for their hazelnuts and wine. They are a bunch of small villages all set on these ridges with hills/vineyards in between. My dad's cousin Denise has been in Italy for 7 years. Her dad, Hank, is Italian and that's what compelled her to go there. He is also the same guy who married Kurt and I in the temple. Anyway, she bought the castle in this town. All of the small towns have these castles on top of a hill. I am assuming they are the old fortress castle used to protect the village. She renovated it and made it into a hotel with about 20 rooms. It is gorgeous. She also does cooking classes there, which is one of the main reasons we went. We went with my Aunt Gloria, her two girls, Katie and Susan, and then 3 other people who we had never met before, but were great-Anne, Jan and Kendra. We did four nights of cooking classes that were amazing. I have yet to make any of them, but am planning to soon. It's just a lot more time than I'm used to for dinner. We also learned how to make home made pasta and it is to die for. Store bought pasta just does not do it for me anymore. The desserts were incredible too, especially this molten chocolate cake...we had that twice!! I was so impressed with myself too because I tried this typical dish, which I can't remember the name, but it was raw meat sprinkled with dark truffles (mushroomish thing) and truffle oil. All three pasta dishes were my favorite! Other than cooking classes which was my favorite part we drove around the country side, which was beautiful...rolling hills of vineyards everywhere. The pictures just don't capture the beauty at all. We also took an adventure to a port town called Portifino. It was beautiful, with houses built on the cliffs and the water was so blue. We took a little boat ride and the driver accidentally soaked my cousin Katie. The drivers are crazy in Italy...I was the navigator and I'm not sure who was more tense, me or my mom who was driving. There were these small windy roads that were barely big enough for two cars and then you'd have buses on them and people walking on the sides. If you stayed in the "fast" lane cars would come up as fast as possible and ride your bumper until you got over. And the signs were ridiculous. They would tell you the starting point of the freeway and the ending point, but nothing in between until you were right at the exit, so we had a few quick exits off the freeway, but never got lost. I was quite impressed with myself and my mom and Aunt Gloria (the other driver). We also made a trip to Torino, but the roads weren't quite as bad. We took a few other excursions to see a cheese making place, a grainery and a chocolate factory. They were all such small scaled operations. So different than what we see in the United States. Most of them didn't speak English where we were (not touristy at all) so we would just nod our heads when they spoke like we understood, but really had not clue. It was quite comical. It was cool though because the Chocolate factory we went to is the place the exclusively supplies it's nougat (hard and soft) to William Sonoma.
One other interesting experience we had was a "walk" through the vineyards. Katie had asked about doing this and Denise said there was this one that was the best and took about 45 minutes....well, we were a little misled. First off, there were no signs leading to where we needed to go. We didn't bring any water, even though my mom told us to. We had envisioned a "walk" through these beautiful vineyards, however, this was not the case. We were all in flip flops climbing these soft dirt hills. We were in the vineyard for about 15 minutes of the 2 hour hike. It was crazy and Susan and I couldn't help but laugh. Aunt Gloria was waiting on us where we were suppose to end up. The trail ended on the outskirts of town, so in the end we were walking on the main road. I had said a prayer on the way to ask Heavenly Father to let Gloria know that we were coming and to just wait and not go back to the starting point, which was our original plan. And when we walked into this little plaza area, there she was. She had run into someone who spoke English and knew the trail we were taking and said it would take close to 2 hours, so Gloria waited and she had just shown these people our pictures so they would know who we were. We were suppose to call her when we got there. There were plenty of places for us to make wrong turns, but I feel like we were really led the right way and back to Aunt Gloria safely. It was an amazing trip and so much fun to be with my mom. I have such wonderful friends too who were so willing to watch my girls, so I could go.