Being on empty roads was easily the highlight of my morning. Later, I went to work and put together a quiz and wrote an AP Style primer and then lectured a tiny bit on news writing. I was supposed to go into the studio this evening and watch some historic television being made, but that got delayed until next week. History waits for no one! Except when it does.
A few times a week I walk by the building named in honor of the scrawny old Indiana journalist. We’re just rich with the Ernie Pyle stuff around here. His desk is one floor beneath my office. Two floors down they’ve recently created an installation showing off his medals, some of his books, his war correspondent field jacket and a whole bunch more. Just outside our building is a sculpture of him sitting at a table and banging away at a story, somewhere in Europe or the Pacific. One day his ghost will show up and point out my typos. (He’ll be a busy spirit.)
Also, I got to ride my bike this morning:
I climbed two little hills on my short ride. It was all a freewheeling, downhill adventure from there.
We woke up so early this morning that I actually demonstrated how upset I was. On any other day, this would be strange. But this was a vacation day, of course, and so there’s a layer. And I’m terrible at time zone adjustments, so there’s another layer. And it was obscenely earlier, friends. Had it been any regular day, then, this would be the thing that was remembered, the bit that was etched into family lore, the part of the tale never untold.
But, we did this, and this is a way better story:
Now, I don’t know about you, but occasionally I see a hot air balloon and I think, “Oh, how neat.” But it has never really occurred to me to be a thing I should pursue. I’ve always thought I’d enjoy it. But it always seemed like it belonged in a different world than mine, maybe. I’ll just blame all of the places I saw it on television as a child. It was always an extravagance, or an incredibly low-speed getaway. Well, no one chases me, thankfully, and I’m not an extravagant person, so the hot air balloon ride was someone else’s achievement, some other person’s signal.
And to do it in Italy? Well, friend, that just seems right out, doesn’t it?
But, of course, if you’re going to enjoy a hot air balloon ride — and how we did enjoy it! — you probably ought to start in Tuscany. So we did. And there it is. So much fun, so beautiful it all was, that I really struggled cutting this footage down. But if you’re going to glide over Tuscany, you want to record a lot of it. And you may as well show it off, so people can see, and you can remember.
And if you’re going to glide over Tuscany in a hot air balloon, make sure you get the pilot that struggles coordinating the landing zone with the proper speed and gas variables, so your flight is longer.
These things are very weather-dependent, as you might imagine. We shared our balloon with a very fidgety couple down from Rome. They’d been trying to take this trip for some time and had their flights canceled four times because of one kind of weather or another. They both worked the overnight shift at the da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport and had come down at the last minute to finally get this in. We were fortunate to get our balloon ride on our first try, despite unseasonably gray skies.
And after you do that, make sure you stand around in a Tuscan field and eat meats and cheeses and drink heavy drinks because it is barely 9 a.m. and you’re on vacation and you were just up there, using physics and the wind and basic aeronautical design that started carrying people more than 300 years ago. Also, you’re in Italy and it’s beautiful and wonderful and perfect.
Then you go back to your 17th century farmhouse and take a nap, because this is going to be a beautiful and wonderful and perfect trip — it already is … — but you need your rest.
When you wake up, your rental bikes have arrived. And so we’ll spend a week going up and down the hills of Tuscany on a pair of nice, 10-year-old-or-so Motobecanes. We took our first ride this afternoon, a simple shake out ride, but I didn’t take my phone because it looked gray and rainy and I was too tired to remember it anyway. We road up and down the Via di Botanaccio, a perfectly unremarkable country road suitable for bicycles. Except we’re in Tuscany and there’s vineyards over there and olive groves over here and that’s just everything. Oh, and there are two 15-degree ascent climbs on the road. We’re going to be trying to get over the top of those a lot in the next few days, too.
We hold onto it for as long as we can, and that makes the days more fleeting somehow.
The sun is getting higher and the skies are growing warmer and those things will keep changing until they reach their own stasis that is its own status quo.
The signs are all there.
But we’ll hold onto this for just a little while.
I actually, finally, got on my bicycle yesterday. I just cruised around the neighborhood, trying to figure out if I still know how to do this.
So far this “spring” I have found free time on days with bad weather and every warm day I was indoors. It’s been almost comical. I somehow get a little more of my time back in the summer. It’s a curious mystery, but it is what it is. This is thing I figured out on my bike today: those things flow right off the back when you’re in the right gear.
It takes forever to get here, but for the late start and short term of it, the spring isn’t too bad at all. Here are a few quick flowering trees that prove the point:
Each of the last two years, this has been the weekend where we could really say, with resignation and weariness and confidence, that this was when spring had arrived. This is also the weekend of the big bike races. The women’s Little 500 was today. Here’s some of the pageantry:
A man jumped out of his plane carrying this flag. We cheered the continual demonstration of gravity.
One of The Yankee’s students was on that team. I had students interview them the year before. They work hard, they all do, it’s a big race and the students that take part treat it like a big deal year-round. It’s a big part of the tradition on campus. They race hard and fast and put on a great show.
Tomorrow, the men will take their turns around the track.
