Mon 23 Apr - Bikes, Vipers & Baths

Feeling much revived by our early night, and with our usual zest reappearing along with the sunshine, a long session out on the bikes seemed like a good way of kicking off the week.  

The road to Chieti

And what a brilliant ride we had!  All the way to Chieti, 52km round trip.  Best yet.  Three hours of fabulous sunshine, long, long far reaching views, empty sweeping roads and great rolling tarmac.  With 600 metres of climbing and descending we certainly felt we'd worked.  

But it was Monday and we do have to work so we rolled into Kokopelli and set about our separate agendas for the day.  An admin day for me of networking, promoting and website design researching which was actually and surprisingly rather pleasant.  

The kitchen was a deliciously cool place to be working.  Cat thought so too and spent the afternoon with me sprawled across the marble floor. This cool, shady house is going to be an utter godsend as the temperatures rise.

KP, by contrast was working in the heat of the day clearing old, discarded bonfires to give the grass a chance of reclaiming the land.  

And playing with vipers.

I knew from the call of "Max, Max!" that something wasn't quite right.  It was the slightly high pitch with a few tremors in it that was the dead give-away, so I listened with interest.  Va bene?  said KP.   No bene, came the reply.  A swift slice of the head with a spade and the stand-off between KP and the viper was over.  Viper was il morte.  Rather sad really, but I guess they know more about these things than we do.

A site visit from the gas board came next and a decision on where to sink the bombol was made.  Now this really was very exciting.  Although only intended as a back up to the solar panels, the gas bombol was a sign that our days of limited hot water and 4 inch baths were now numbered.  A proper bath will be heaven indeed.

As the sun was going down so it was  time to down tools, or shut down computer in my case, and make the dreaded supermarket trip.  But it was quite painless and should see us through for the next couple of weeks.

A big bowl of pasta when we got back was just perfect for refuelling the energy sapped from the bike ride this morning.  Or at least I thought so, KP was clearly yearning for sausages and steak.  Domani, KP.  Tomorrow.