It has been close to a year since my wife and I spent four days relaxing along the shores of Lake Como. As I have thought back on that trip, the memories from this particular part of two weeks in Italy have bubbled to the top as my favourite. That’s not because we did a lot. It’s because at that time, I really needed a true break and some peace, and the setting and backdrop allowed me to relax and soak in some very simple pleasures.
The idea for this particular trip to Italy, and more specifically, a day of wine exploration in and around the Barolo region, started at a wine dinner we attended back in 2024 at the Vancouver International Wine Festival. With friends, we attended a dinner paired with outstanding wines from around Piedmont and my wife and I became enamoured with the idea of traveling back to Italy and exploring some of the wines in that region. We have had some wonderful wine explorations in Burgundy and Champagne, the Okanagan, and Napa and Sonoma, and were eager to have a lovely day eating and drinking in another special place.
We secured a local guide and driver, Stefania, who arranged the details for our day with a focus of showing us a couple of smaller wineries. She met us at the train station in Asti and after some getting to know each other over an espresso she drove us to our first stop in La Morra. Luckily for us, it was day one of the nebbiolo harvest for Stroppiana. Look at all those grapes!
Over the course of living in Saskatoon, we have become part of a great group of friends who take pleasure in wine tasting. That’s a fancy way of saying a group of us gets together a few times a year to enjoy wine, usually with food, sometimes on someone’s patio and sometimes in a favourite wine store in Saskatoon. We open a few bottles, then a few more, and the laughs begin to flow. Over the pandemic, we turned our group virtual for a spell and those zoom wine tasting nights felt like nights out and kept us going until things returned to normal. In those zoom wine tastings, we talked a lot about wine travel and as a group have now attended the international wine festival in Vancouver on two occasions including last year.
For this most recent wine trip, my wife and I headed to Vancouver a day before our group activities started for a bit of “us” time. On a cold, rainy night, we tucked into the cozy Chickadee Room cocktail bar for a couple of happy hour drinks and the free gluten free fried chicken that comes along with your order. This was a great first stop – excellent cocktails, tender juicy chicken all in a retro vibes bar that warmed us up.
Maybe it is because I’m heading to a Hawksley Workman concert tonight and that his song “Birds in Train Stations” became a soundtrack for my wife and me during our recent visit to Italy. It seems a reasonable way to title this quick reflection of a trip that had us spending a bit of time navigating Italy’s notoriously not on schedule trains as we crossed from Milan to Turin to Asti and eventually on to small towns on the east coast of Lake Como. I mean, if you’ve ever traveled in Italy, take a listen to this song and grin at this line:
“birds in train stations
hear the same announcements everyday
except the ones in italy because there’s always some delay
and they move at a different pace”
Pretty much spot-on. At the end of the day, a national day-long train strike and a host of other trains that had a loose association with any concept of time became laughter and opportunity inducing more than anything (Strike? Let’s spend an unexpected night in Bellano!). Italy might be the only place on earth that can attempt to simultaneously frustrate you, then ask for forgiveness with offers of 5pm spritzes, plates of heavenly agnolotti in broth, stunning natural beauty, and impossibly amazing coffee in the most unlikely of places.
The two weeks were perfect. I cried at the beauty of a ballet at La Scala. My wife and I drank Barolo and Barbaresco that completely changed my view of what those wines can be. I lounged hours away looking out over the snow-capped Alps from the absurdly-sized deck of our Turin apartment. We wandered. We ate (oh my god, we ate). We were gifted homemade limoncello from a favourite restaurant in Milan that we used to toast good-night to each day along the way. I drove a tiny Fiat 500 with the roof down along twisty mountain roads. And maybe the best part of the entire trip…. was just being in the moment and letting all of the beauty around me wash over me for two weeks.
Thanks Italy. You were pretty great. Even with your annoying trains.
Over the course of many trips I have fallen in love with the idea of the “trip within a trip”. A day trip plunked down in the middle of the longer voyage is something that almost always brings me awe and rejuvenation. Going back to the first time my wife and I traveled to Europe, an expedition to Bruges in the middle of a two city trip to Amsterdam and Belgium is something that got this concept planted firmly in most of the plans I make to this day.
So, a spring training trip to Arizona for a week needed a day trip in the middle of it and after looking at some maps and talking to some friends, I landed on getting out of the Phoenix area for some hiking, exploring and even some wine tasting (yes!) in the general vicinity of Sedona. As I was battling morning rush hour traffic through what seemed like an endless Phoenix urban landscape I briefly doubted the intelligence of my plans. But soon enough, the the number of traffic lanes got down to a reasonable number and the landscape opened up to wider vistas and I felt myself easing into the day.
My first stop was just outside of Oak Creek. I had a spectacularly beautiful day for a morning hike…. the kind of day that gives you shivers of excitement. If I was hoping to feel awe, I had definitely found the place and day for that.
Anyone who tried to travel by air in the summer of 2022 in Canada will have some sort of horror story to tell. The day before our planned trip to Vancouver Island I received the dreaded text message from Air Canada with a flight cancelation for our flight the next day. In the end, we lost the first day we were scheduled to spend in Victoria, but on the positive side, we at least arrived just in advance of the airport’s rental car location closing so we could snag our car for an extra late night drive to our downtown hotel.
We woke up fresh the next morning, but quite hungry as the previous day’s delays and flight changes left us woefully little time to actually eat en route to Victoria. My wife had picked out John’s Place, a diner a block from our hotel that had an extensive list of gluten-free goodies (waffles!) and while she had done significant research on this place, I knew nothing about it…. until we walked in and I was greeted by this sign. Instantly, I knew this was a good omen for a great day ahead.
Through the pandemic a group of our friends started a zoom-hosted wine club where one of us would pick two wines, a few recipes that would pair well, and then we’d get together to eat and drink and stare at the little electronic rectangles of our respective likenesses on our screens as we caught up and laughed. Laughed a lot. During a few of those get togethers, we chatted (as one is apt to do) about doing a real-life wine tasting trip when it was safe to do so again. Fast forward to this May when those wine-soaked plans turned real and landed us in Vancouver to attend the Vancouver International Wine Festival.
My wife and I built a fun and relaxed Vancouver itinerary around the large wine tasting we we all going to. For me, any trip to Vancouver needs to start with a hike around Stanley Park.
I know that for most people Nova Scotia is not top of mind for wine producing regions in Canada. But for those of us in the know, there is a surprisingly high quality wine region tucked into the Annapolis Valley, about an hour outside of Halifax. Take a look at a map and dig a little deeper and you’ll notice that this area of Nova Scotia is in a similar latitude range, has a similar climate, and in many areas, similar soil conditions to areas in Champagne, France. Luckily for us who were/are fortunate to live relatively close nearby, there is a true gem of a winery that started with an audacious goal. The purpose of Benjamin Bridge winery was to show that world-class sparkling wines could be made in Nova Scotia. Starting with their early vintages, in blind testings their wines scored similar to Champagnes. They have expanded their range of wines over the years, and due to the occassional free shipping special offered, we’ve accumulated a small inventory of their wines at our home in Saskatoon.
Much like we did back in the days we lived in Halifax, when we were visiting this past summer, we made a day trip to the Annapolis Valley. Our first stop was Benjamin Bridge to try a couple of tasting flights of their wines.
While waiting for the opportunity to reengage with travel over the past year, I have been looking through pictures of past trips to take some of the sting out of losing the ability to explore freely like during the pre-pandemic days. In all of those pictures are great memories. Some are grand experiences like seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time… some are more subtle memories of the smell or sense of a place from sitting on a park bench somewhere far away from home. While I was looking back through photos from a trip in 2008 to San Francisco and Northern California, there were lots of memories in both camps, including what I still to this day think is one of the best travel days I have ever had.
We tried to do this trip on a relative shoestring budget using points for hotels and our flights (that resulted in a very restless night trying to sleep in Pearson airport before the onward flight to San Francisco… booking with Aeroplan almost always guarantees you something like this) but we were torn as to which of two more extravagant experiences we wanted to include… a hot air balloon ride over the Sonoma valley or dinner at the French Laundry. We settled on the hot air balloon ride, and turned it into an amazing day trip from Sonoma that we still talk about to this day.
We got a confirmation phone call that the weather looked good at the crisp hour of 3:30am, loaded into our car for the drive to Santa Rosa, and as the sun came up, we waited for our balloon to inflate.
I am now a little over two years into being a resident of Saskatoon, and if I’m being completely honest, it feels like I’ve been living here forever (in a good way). When I got a text from my sister asking if I’d be around to play host to her on a side trip to Saskatoon from a conference she was attending in Edmonton, I immediately went into planning mode, determined to show off this great, under the radar city to my sister. I wanted her to like it here as much as do I.
With a list of ideas for restaurants, bars and interesting sites completed, I was partially foiled by the usually spectacular weather here. My sister arrived under grey skies and spent most of her visit exploring an uncommonly rainy and dreary Saskatoon. Luckily for me, I had an ace up my sleeve. A welcoming ambassador greeted her when we arrived home after a short drive from the airport. My sister, a dog lover like me and the rest of my family, got introduced to Chloe. And suddenly the rain didn’t matter. Dog selfie time!
Bluenose Traveler 