How to Deal With Jetlag

Thursday, June 12th

So we settle in to rest in our home for the next few days, Guardia. This was the house where my parents and Aunt Jeanne and Uncle Jerry would stay for the week. It is adorable, a great kitchen with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room and a backyard area.

However, we just needed to clean up and relax. Oh, and put down the wedding dress.

I guess I haven't mentioned that we carried the wedding dress from Chicago to Florence. And when I say "we" I guess I really mean "Jason" since he did most of the carrying. We started referring to it as "Bernie". One large piece of dead weight we couldn't let out of our sight. When we left I had been worried about the state the dress might be in once we arrived. But today, I was too damn tired to care.

We relaxed for awhile, walked around the property a bit. By 3:30pm we were fading. And fast. We knew that falling asleep might screw up our sleep/wake cycles for the week. We had to think fast. What could we do? The prospect of going into Florence seemed to daunting in our state. But we couldn't stay where we were or we would be sound asleep.

So, we did what anyone else would have done, drove to Greve to drink wine!

The town of Greve is about a 45 minute drive from Torre a Cona, in the opposite direction from Florence. It is the heart of the Chianti Classico region. The last time we were there, Jason, Nancy and I had quite an experience and met some characters tasting wine in Chianti.

So, renewed by our sense of purpose, we took off into the countryside. First stop Vicchiomaggio. http://www.vicchiomaggio.it/eng There, we met a lovely woman named Nancy working in the tasting room. She spoke impeccable Italian, but was a British ex-pat who had been living in Italy for about 8 years.

Stop number two, the tasting room of Villa Calcinaia. Villa Calcinaia was to be the location of our "rehearsal" dinner on Monday. One Saturday afternoon at Sam's Wine, Jason had met Count Sebastiano Capponi, whose family, the Capponi Counts had owned the property since the 1500s and who was in charge of the wine making business. Jason had brought me home a bottle of their chianti but I was curious to taste the rest. So we stopped.

The woman running the tasting room spoke little English, although certainly more english than we spoke Italian. We seemed to get across to her that we were getting married and that we were having dinner with our group on Monday night on the estate. We tasted through all the wines and they were great. I loved their white, the Comitale. We also tried their 3 Chiantis (Piegaia, Chianti Classico and Chianti Classico Reserva) and the Super Tuscan, Casarsa which is 100% Merlot. Outstanding. I didn't know how this dinner would all play out on Monday but I was getting excited. To be honest, at this point I didn't even know if anyone was going to show up, if this wedding planner actually existed, if we would really get married. But at this point too happy to care!

Our final stop was the one we had been talking about all year. We were going back to see David.