Friday morning we left Perugia by Steffis car and went to the Abruzzo National Parc, to the farm where Gro was living and working for the last 3 weeks. You can find it in the region Abruzzo, which is in the east of Lazio, means Rome. It took us 4 h to get there, but it was really worth it. The landscape is quite the same like in the austrian mountains, but much more green, much warmer and there are olive trees and grapes everywhere. Really gorgeous!
We were taken up very friendly by Antonello, the current owner of the farm. He is the son of Giuseppe and Maria, the previous owners. We got to know many stories from Giuseppe, his origins are in Sicily, he came to Italy as a soldier...and so on...you probably make out the whole story by your own! But he is a really nice guy, he had so much fun of taking us for a ride on his donkey, it was really cute. On the farm there are quite constantly 3 volunteers living with the family. There is also a second farm where 3 guys are staying (one of them is austrian). They are really living very down-to-earth, which means without heating, electricity, no bathroom, no warm water...etc. It is really amazing how they are managing their life there, and how happy they are with what they've got, but I would not at all be able to do this! There are definitely limits I wouldn't ever get below. And this was quite far below those limits! But this doesn't mean that I disrespect it, it just means that I couldn't do it by myself!
In the evening we went out for having dinner in a very selected restaurant together with austrian volunteer girl, Anna, who is staying at the farm since 2007 and is studying in the nearby town which is called Sora. The food was absolutely great, but you know what? It's really hard to find awful food here in Italy! So I was absolutely expecting it to be great! :-)The next day we had our very farm-like breakfast with self-made bread, self-made pumpkin-jam, eggs from their chickens and goat-milk. After that, we decided to have a nice hike in the National Park. Steffi and Gro figured out the hiking track, I decided to be lead by them ;-)
We went by car to a town in the middle of the park, which is supposed to be one of the main starting points for hiking.
But it actually turned out to be very difficult to find a damn hiking track in Italy!! It's a total chaos everywhere. Don't expect anything to be signed. So we had to ask at the local tourism office, which told us that the way we had already figured out was still covered with snow! So we had to decide for another... Finally we managed to find a starting point and even a parking space. We just wanted to walk up, have a nice rest and walk down on the other side again... Not so in Italy! The markers of our track were so hard to find that on some point we had to turn round and go back the way we came up.. :-(
But we even found snow up there! Steffi was so happy, even Gro felt quite homesick ;-)
Driving back we wanted to ask some other volunteers at the second farm if they wanted to have barbecue with us for dinner when suddenly the police turned up behind us and stopped our car!Steffi got out, we had to hand out our ID's, which of course were at the farm... It turned out that there had been a huge amount of rubbish being deposed near to the farm and they suspected us for having done so. But Steffi was able to convince the police that we were innocent, so they let us pass. Actually we wanted to have a barbecue for dinner, but everyone was too afraid of the weather turning bad so we had dinner at the farm with all the others.
On sunday we had our breakfast and then we had to say goodbye to Gro again! Very hard, very hard...:-( But I know I will see her again, she has promised to visit us in Austria like we did to visit Norway :-D
On the way back we drove by Terni, Spoleto and Foligno, 3 other cities we have to discover soon a little closer ;-)
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