Archive for May, 2010

Literary Mileage
The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Hiking from Hotel La Veranda to Villa Scapone

The ‘short’ uphill description in our hiking book in no way gave a hint of the steepness of our ascent to a ‘high ridge’ overlooking the Adriatic and the Gargano’s mountainous countryside. We literally poled our way straight up, stepping (crawling?) carefully over loose rocks, holding on to vegetation for balance. (Thank God for wild rosemary bushes). It took us over 2 hours to bushwhack our way to the high ridge.

After congratulating ourselves, we decided to take the ‘short cut’ that was supposed to help us avoid going down and back up yet another mountain. There again, the lack of clarity in our directions led to a dead end and having to backtrack, although I will ‘own’ that we screwed up by not paying enough attention to the number of meters we walked before reaching the next point on our route. At any rate, by about 1:00 we were lost, tired, and hungry, so we found a grassy spot to plop down, eat lunch and recuperate somewhat. Before we sat down to eat I tried without success to call our route manager and our 3 friends who had skipped today’s hike, but couldn’t get a phone signal.

After we ate lunch, we were visited by an angel of mercy with exquisite timing! Three vehicles suddenly crested a hill and stopped right in front of us. An older man in a battered green truck walked up to us and in some combination of German/Italian offered to drive us to a point where we’d be able to see our destination. After he dropped us off, we began a downhill descent, thinking we were home free. “You are now approximately 3 km from the end of the route” has to be the cruelest sentence in our book. We were following directions, but they were wrong, skewed, stupid, inexact, vague, and other words I will not utter here.

At any rate, we eventually descended into a sandy river bed as directed, walking by a small pen of goats and several sheep. We then took a path up to the right that would allegedly lead to a track to the main road a short distance away. Going through three almost impossible gates, we realized we had to be in the wrong place. As we began to backtrack for the third time that day, we saw a recently plowed olive grove that we decided to trudge through, because we could hear traffic on the road beyond it where we needed to be. We kept walking through the grove until we stumbled up a short grassy rise to the road. Hallelujah! This is where the directions said, “go left.” We did that, ending up one final time in the wrong place. However, we were able to call the hotel and ask someone to come get us. Our second angel of the day arrived in 10 minutes. We knew we were close, but we absolutely were not going to walk another 2 km—not after 7 hours and being lost so many times.

The other girls had grown concerned when we didn’t appear for lunch, and were sure we were lost or injured, especially when they learned that the Swiss couple who were a day ahead of us had also gotten lost and had to be rescued.

When we finally dragged our tired butts into Villa Scapone, we had campari and soda to celebrate our survival. Then we went to our rooms to nap, take exquisitely hot showers and meet again for dinner. I can’t remember what we had to eat. I can only remember how sore every single muscle in my body was by the time we finished eating and hobbled off to bed.

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