Thunder, lightning, heavy rain and laundry day

 This was the vista at waking hour:

Those grumpy-looking clouds were in a bad mood, and heading straight for us, after getting holes poked into them by Vesuvius.   I dithered about whether we could make it into town for a quick shop but it was so early, and it’s Sunday today.   Instead we elected to do battle with our Italian washing machine, who decided to wash our load of clothes for upwards of three hours.   And not an agitating wash, just the occasional, spin, stop, think.   Spin, stop, think.   After a few hours of this we wondered whether we’d have any zippers or buttons left on anything and so consulted the Goggle manual, which was about as helpful as a novel written in Sanskrit.   Instead, we just pushed a lot of buttons and finally, voila, she went into a paroxysms of spins and spat out all the clean duds in about 15 minutes.  Bonus.   By then, I had hauled our dryer rack back from our sun deck  (there are no dryers in Italy, everyone dries out in the fresh (ha) air.   So, dryer rack needed drying first and then we loaded her up and used every hanger and doorknob for all the rest.    Kinda looked like a Chinese/Italian laundromat.

The rain continued to pour, sometimes so heavily we couldn’t even see the road below us.   And so, wrapped in my favorite Italian scarf, we attempted Italian TV, which was actually pretty good because it was all about polar bears and you don’t really need much translation to understand what “I’m gonna eat that seal” means.

Around 2 pm, the not-smart-sibling brightly offered that the rain was lessening and that if we were going to do a provision run, now was the time.   Backpacks were loaded, coats on and our single umbrella (still working fine despite the Siena blowout) and off we went, down the windy long road to the market, almost 2 km.   Ground zero turned out to be much wetter than what I judged from our lofty perch and it took no time until we were soaked, and I mean right down to the intestines.  Dave’s ponytail was a conduit for an elegant little waterfall, but I didn’t dare tell him that at the time.   After surfing our way around the last corner, there it was, our favorite market and we all but cried when the man standing outside of it shook his head and simply said… chiuso.    WHAT?  Per quanto? We asked, water dripping off our noses.    He shrugged.   Tutti il giorno.    All day.   Domenica, he shrugged again.   Sunday.   Oh.

In fact, thanks to the storm, so were all the trattorias in the area, chuiso.   There was nothing to do but to head back up the hill, our packs dripping and our spirits with them.   But!   I remember spying a tiny pizza place, tucked into a corner about halfway up and low and behold, they were open.  We bundled in the door, effectively washing their floor for them, and asked plaintively “takeaway?”   And thank God, he took pity on us as we shivered and dripped and watched them make our two pizzas.    I’ll tell you something, there are worse places to wait in a storm then about 2 feet from an open brick pizza oven, watching the owner as he crafted a perfect crust over wood coals.    He felt sorry for the two dumb, wet Canadians who lived “high up on the hill” and double wrapped our hot pizza with plastic bags.   I spied two large Peroni beers and added them to the pack, along with a package of salted peanuts, circa 1945.    And up the hill we went again, dodging washouts and car splashes and watching our feet as we sloshed through the mud mixed with fallen fruit, nuts and grapes.   But we made it.   And we added our shoes, socks, coats and packs to the Chinese Italian laundry, poured a Peroni each and tucked ourselves in for the rest of this tropical storm.   The weather does not bode well for our trip to Napoli tomorrow, but it is what it is, and we will survive it.