I'm Back

Hi to all,

It has been a long time since my last post - you only need so much of my minutia. There have been new things happening. Chuck and I took a trip to Egypt. This was our very first tour and we were worried about the enforced togetherness with so many strangers. It turned out to be a wonderful experience. I didn't blog on that trip because we didn't have good internet and we were kept soooo busy that I really didn't have time.

Right now, we are in Gran Sasso, Italy with good access and I must admit more than enough time. So this series of entries will be about both trips. It will be a little confusing but I think that you all can follow the thread.

First: Gran Sasso is a mountain range about 150 km east of Rome. There is a tunnel through the mountain with a physics lab grafted on to it. (The story goes that the Italian government wanted to build the tunnel to help the economy of the area east of the mountain range. The Italian physicists said, "Since you are spendening a gazillion lira to do this, why not spend 100 million more and have a great physics facility too?" So, this is why we are here - Chuck is working in the tunnel.

We are traveling with a Chinese grad student named Brian. He made all of the travel arrangements while we were on our Egypt trip.

We had the normal very long flight LAX - Philadelphia - Rome. We all had aisle seats which really helped. Chuck and I both had an empty next to us. (Sometimes we just live right!)

We picked up our car at the airport and Chuck wanted me to drive. It has been a long time since he drove stick shift and he didn't want to embarrass himself jerking away from the rental place. We had showers on the way, but once we left Rome there was almost no traffic.

We are staying at a hotel up the mountain from the lab. One of the buildings used to be the base of the chair lift. Now, it is a dining room.

The first day we walked around and saw the lift, and the 2 other restaurants in the area. I was trying to stay awake until after dinner.

The plan is that I take Chuck and Brian to the lab and then get to explore on my own for the day. Day 1 showed the first problem with the plan.

It had started to snow during the night. We scraped the car and took off. After dropping the guys, I checked out the 2 towns further on down the mountain. One of them had a pharmacy. The other had nothing. I tried following a sign up a hill, but ended up at a dead end and had to turn around. Remember the 3 point turn? This was about a 12 pt.

Since the weather was deteriorating, I went back to the hotel where I had a lovely lunch:

Italian Mac 'n Cheese. The waitress just brought this - no menu, so I suppose that it was a set lunch. Then there was a meat choice - but I passed. The waitress needed me to have something more which turned out to be some vegetables.

These were baked with a few breadcrumbs.

Very please with my lunch, I returned to the room. I learned a new Italian word today: Neve. It means snow. It neve'd alllllll day. C & B were in the tunnel and didn't realize how bad it was getting. They didn't call until 5pm.

I almost couldn't get out of the parking lot. They met me at the gate because their co-worker said that I might have a hard time getting up the hills in the lab.

Getting back to the hotel was really bad. The car has a light that goes on when the tires don't have traction - it was on a lot. I was thanking my lucky stars that no one else was on the road. Just then 2 cars appeared and we started sliding into their lane. I was able to get us back where we belonged in time to go by them.

We walked to the hotel next door for dinner. It was still snowing.

This morning was lovely - many people are arriving to ski and snowboard - but we won't be going anyplace until the roads are clear!!