Travel wish list

Our last couple of hotels have been ones that I would never choose on my own and that always makes for harder travel. I’m always wishing for more space, a chair, a window, a little bit of charm. Someone on our tour called me a Princess for those dreams and I guess I can’t argue. Here’s our Matera room pictured below. I should confess that it does have a (mostly) functional shower, with hot water, room to pick up a dropped bar of soap, and a bathmat. The only non-functional item is the shower head itself, which exists, but does not know how to disperse any water, leaving us to shower with a small hand-held sprayer.

I was further discussing the room with that same tour mate, and she told me a story of a room she once stayed in that had no bathing facilities at all – each morning someone brought in a bucket of warmish water and she had to “bathe” in that. I try to distract myself with that vision each time we enter our tiny room.

I’m utilizing other distraction techniques as well and allowing myself little luxuries. For instance, I refused to go to the Road Scholar plated restaurant dinner tonight on a variety of grounds (too late to eat, food too elaborate etc.) and Ron was loyal enough to skip dinner to let me go to the market, where I found a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread and, utilizing the “kitchen” area of our room, prepared this meal:

The presentation of the meal above reminds me that I have a story to tell you about Ron. Earlier today, we went to a tiny village called Castelmezzano. Here’s Castelmezzano:

There’s really nothing to do there but, somehow, this little village has a Michelin starred restaurant. Road Scholar, probably using all of the money they saved on our Matera hotel rooms, booked us a lunch at Al Becco Della Civetta. Look at the number of awards this restaurant has won!

It’s important that you know that Ron is no food connoisseur. No matter what I make for dinner at home, he eats it, looks over at me and says Good Dinner. Frozen pizza and iceberg lettuce salad? Good dinner. Marie Callender’s chicken pot pie and frozen peas, microwaved right in their bag? Good dinner. (I am sure we all realize I am also no food connoisseur).

There are only 2,817 Michelin starred restaurants on the entire planet. Now that I’ve done a little research, I see that we don’t even seem to have one in Seattle. But I was pleasantly surprised by the meal. Basically, it was a small finger of a veal roll (I skipped it and failed to photograph) and this plate of pasta, much like I would heat up and serve at home:

When the wait staff of Al Becco Della Civetta came over later and asked how our four course lunch was? Ron, who will heat up a can of Campbell’s soup and call it “cooking”, looked up at the Michelin waiter and, maybe, feeling like he couldn’t offer the standard Good dinner at lunch time, shared this instead: It was kind of salty.

I’ll leave you with this two pictures. The first is Matera at night. It’s really a magical city:

The last one is from Castelmezzano, population 300 during the summer and 80 during the winter. There is no one there. No traffic, no tour buses. And yet, there is this traffic light on the main square. While I was sitting nearby, having coffee and some potato chips to make sure I was not hungry when we were served the fancy meal, a car came up and stopped at the light to patiently wait for the green. I hope the driver never goes over to the Triple Parking/Abandon Your Car city of Bari, where I’m thinking the other citizens will brazenly just drive right over him for stopping, probably, just like Ron, on their hurried way to insult a Michelin chef.