Abetone

Chuck and I revisited Abetone, this time with Jim. Jim is Chuck's fellow co-worker at Ferrari and recently came back from Toronto to work there. Abetone is an hour drive southwest of Maranello in the mountains. It's a popular ski resort in the winter and is also popular in the summer for mountain biking and hiking. We're totally excited for winter as there's a lot of ski resorts not only in Italy, but in Austria and Switzerland as well; all within a four hour drive from Maranello. For our pre-honeymoon (Chuck won't have time off work until around October for our honeymoon), we want to go to Zurmatt, Switzerland for a long weekend of skiing. Anyways, before hiking, we ate lunch in town at a small pizzeria. We became chatty with the owners as they were excited that Jim and Chuck worked at Ferrari and on the Formula One race cars (the time trials for the F1 race in Germany was on the television). So, it was nice to practice our spotty Italian but they were really good about it, talking slower and correcting our mistakes. I understood about 40% of the entire conversation. They gave us complimentary drinks of blueberry wine, which was really tasty...who knew! After a two-hour lunch, we headed to the ski lift (gondola) and went up the mountain. It's crazy to see a ski mountain without all the snow. Pretty much dirt, rocks, bushes and grass. Once we went up to the top, we hiked for an hour taking in the beautiful views and cooler temperatures. Italy is such a beautiful country. I love the varied topography from the mountains, rolling hills to the coastline. It's nice to have the same variety of landscape as I enjoy in Washington. After our hike, Chuck wanted to find White Dog Brewery in Guiglia, east of Abetone and about fourty-five minutes away. Guiglia is a really small town, really just on a street. We walked around and couldn't find a brewery, but found a castle (really, in Europe?!!). We stopped for a bite to eat and asked around about the brewery. The server was really nice and actually called the brewery to find out their location (people here are very friendly...thank goodness!) Luckily, the owners are British and spoke English. It turns out that this brewery was in the brewer's home which was also a bed and breakfast in the outskirts of Guiglia and on a dirt road. So after buying twelve bottles of beer (stout and wheat beer), we headed back home to Maranello. It was a nice day trip as it was nice to get away from the overly crowded and touristy towns and to enjoy nature.