Views from the Slow Lane

A group of my SlowTrav friends are leaving soon to spend a week together in Montisi, a charming hilltown just north of Pienza (Tuscany, Italy). Several years ago we spent three weeks in a house that looked out onto Montisi and loved being in this area. You are close to several great towns - Montepulciano, Pienza, San Quirico d’Orcia, Montalcino - and lots of beautiful smaller towns. You can soak your feet in the natural hot springs that run through Bagno Vignoni, see the Sodoma frescoes in Monte Oliveto Maggiore, hear the monks chanting in Sant’Antimo, go up to Siena for a day trip.

Beautiful countryside, charming towns, art, walking trails, great restaurants - everything you need for a perfect vacation.

Who is going on the trip?

• Gail Hecko runs tours to Montisi, where a group of people stay together in a large, luxury villa and tour the area together - Gail’s Great Escapes. For this tour, a group of her SlowTrav friends signed up!
• Palma and Brad are doing the cooking for the group. Palma wrote a detailed post on her blog about what she is bringing for the trip - Palma’s Passions - Packing Light … WHY?. Palma and Brad leave on Friday and are spending a week in Rome before going up to Montisi.
• Jerry and Paul from Toronto will be there for the week. Jerry blogs at Jerry’s Thoughts, Musings, and Rants. From today’s entry, it looks like he has left already!
• Sandi (Bugalu on the SlowTrav board) will also be there. She writes the Whistlestop Cafe Cooking blog.

The Montisi week is May 24 - 31. I noted it on my calendar six months ago hoping that we might just happen to be in Italy at the same time and could drop in on the group - but we won’t be. If you are going to be there that week, they are having a GTG (SlowTrav party).

This week in Montisi is going to be a lot of fun! I would love to be there with them, but at least I can follow along with them on their blogs and be with them.

Have a wonderful time in Italy - and write lots of details on your blogs!!

The photos with this post are both from Pienza, the last time we were there in September 2003. The top photo is the main piazza in the center of town. The second one is the lane behind the church where you get a lovely view.

I like to bring some type of “project” with me on trips, something to do in the evenings or when taking a break during the day. During our year in Europe, 20 years ago, we were traveling light so I brought a deck of cards and played endless games of Solitare. After that I went through a needlepoint phase. Needlepoint projects are good because they are small and light, but take a long time to complete, which is just what you need on a long trip. However, we now have a dozen beautiful needlepoint pillows and don’t need any more.

Last summer, when we were in Switzerland, I worked on cotton crochet slippers, which were really fun to make, but never really worked as good slippers. I think if I use a stiffer cotton and find a good insole to make them keep their shape, these will work.

I taught myself to knit in the mid 90s when we were living in Seattle and Steve had one of those jobs where he was at work all the time and I had turned into a bored housewife. I love knitting. I am not a great knitter and I knit slowly, but I love the feel of the wool and making things that we wear. The only trouble is that most knitting projects are too big to bring on a trip.

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I wrote my second blog article for the Tuscany Villas website. Read the article here: Finding Your Perfect Vacation Rental. This is the second in a four part series about vacation rentals in Tuscany. Next week is what to expect in Italian vacation rentals.

It is interesting writing about Tuscany again. It brings back memories of our wonderful vacations there. I remember the first time I saw the main piazza of Siena - Il Campo - and how I cried because it was so beautiful. Other memories: walking around Siena in the moonlight; sitting outside on the terrace of Osteria alla Piazza in the countryside near Panzano for a Sunday lunch; seeing the Sodoma frescoes at Monte Oliveto Maggiore for the first time (and the second, and the third); seeing the mountains above Carrara from the A12 and thinking it was snow, but realizing it was marble; jumping into the very cold and very salty water off the southern Tuscany coast on Monte Argentario.

These days I am writing about the Cotswolds in England for Cotswolder (soon to be launched) and about Tuscany for Tuscany Villas. Plus working on a friend’s site with her paintings of Italy (Betsy Bauer). And getting the house ready for summer (it was 75 in Santa Fe today!).

The conclusions to my article is that there is no perfect vaction rental. They all have their pros and cons as does any place that you live. But we are not striving for perfect, are we? Just for a wonderful travel experience and that is what you get in vacation rentals.

Are you a Slow Traveler, but don’t have the time to plan every detail of your vacation yourself? If you want to spend a week in one place and get to know the area, and want to be part of an organized small group, try one of the small group tours listed on Slow Travel Tours.

These are all members of the Slow Travel community whose love of travel has led them to create these travel businesses. We created the Slow Travel Tours website to have a place to list these like minded businesses.

These are not your typical “tours” with a large bus full of travelers. These are small groups led by people who know the area well and want to share their love of travel with you. Kathy Wood and I picked this group of small group tour operators who follow the “slow travel” principles that we believe in.

P.S. www.slowtraveltours.com used to be our April Fool website when I ran the Slow Travel Forums. That absolutely hilarious, and even funnier now after April 1 2008, site has moved to www.slowtravtours.com.

P.P.S I created the Slow Travel Tours website, but I do not run a small group tour. Believe me, no one would want to spend seven days traveling with me in charge! On the other hand, if you like to sleep in until 9, spend the whole morning having coffee and reading the paper, then go for lunch and after that consider a nap, then maybe I could do this. But I would make everyone on the tour be my slaves. Hummm, this is sounding like something I could do …

We spent the winter in England and it was wonderful! The weather was cold, but mostly dry and sunny. Days are very short (pitch black by 5pm in January).

Read our travel journal on our Cotswolder blog.

I wrote a blog article for the Tuscany Villas website. Read the article here: Experience the Real Tuscany. This is the first in a four part series about Vacation Rentals in Tuscany.

It has been several years since we have been in Tuscany - seems like we have been working through an England obsession on our last few trips - but writing this article brought back to me how much we love Tuscany and I think we will go back soon.

I met Jim Stiller who runs Tuscany Villas and Italy Villas at the Atlanta Vacation Home Expo earlier this month. Their agency is based in the US, Ireland and Italy. Their site makes it easy to search their listings (over 1000 just for Tuscany) and they have good support people that you can phone for help.

Hello Travelers! I have been running my “Views from the Slow Lane” blog for several years on the Slow Travel website, which I used to own and run. I sold the site to Internet Brands last year. I am still part of the Slow Travel community and like what Internet Brands is doing with the site, but I decided to move my blog to my own site.

Slow Europe is my current project. Steve and I are working on it, but it won’t be ready for several months. Slow Europe is going to be what Slow Travel started out as (but changed as the site grew and the community developed) - a guide to finding vacation rentals in Europe. There will be lists of my recommended vacation rental agencies by country and region. Agencies that I have used or worked with during my Slow Travel days. Agencies that I think we, as travelers, can depend on.

I will also talk about “listings sites” where you can rent directly from owners. Slow Europe will show you all the ways you can find vacation rentals and will describe typical booking procedures and what to expect on your vacation. It will also point to relevant review sites, like Slow Travel, to help you make your decision.

For now, I will write my Europe travel notes on this blog. Please comment if you have something to say or ask about a blog entry.

Now that I am not consumed with running Slow Travel and endlessly talking on the forums, I have more time to keep my blog up to date and interesting. Stay tuned!

I have been using Movable Type to run my blog for years. It is not the simplest blogging system (Blogger wins that award) but I liked the extra features you get, even though you have to work hard for them. The new MT4 release is quite different from earlier releases. I installed it last December then dug in and figured out the template system, the widgets, the style sheets and was pretty happy with it. I ran my Cotswolder blog on it for the first months of 2008.

My main complaint with Movable Type is the overdone styling - divisions inside of divisions inside of divisions (divisionitis). It takes forever to figure out the stylesheet. I like the sidebar widgets, but they are complicated and have to be defined in HTML - there is no easy to use interface.

Last weekend, after spending three days working on the Movable Type stylesheet and widgets so I could move my “Views from the Slow Lane” blog from slowtrav.com (my old site) to sloweurope.com (my new site) I reached my limit with Movable Type. It was over a silly issue that I could have resolved - creating a page to show all entries for a category instead of their default page which shows only recent entries - but instead I stomped my feet, screamed in anguish, ate some chocolate, then downloaded WordPress. Then I spent three days setting up the stylesheet and templates for WordPress. Nothing comes easy on the web.

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Steve and I, and about 90 other Slow Travelers, are in Savannah, Georgia for a weekend party. Tonight was the pre-event - a cocktail party at the house the organizers rented. What a rush! Only about half our group was there - others arriving tonight and tomorrow - but it was great to see people we have met over our SlowTrav years and meet new people.

Steve set up a webcam for us and then wrote a program to capture one snap a minute from the webcam. I uploaded these snaps to Flicker. Photos from the Thursday party webcam.

We will have the webcam on Friday and Saturday night, from about 6pm - 10pm ET. Here is the Slow Travel Gathering webcam.

Come to the Vacation Home Expo, the weekend of April 12 - 13, in Atlanta, at the Cobb Galleria Centre!

Pauline Kenny, founder of Slow Travel, and Kathy Wood, from The Luberon Experience, present “Slow Travel … We’re moving too fast”. Find out about this emerging vacation rental lifestyle that’s spreading throughout Europe and worldwide. Gail Hecko of Gail’s Great Escapes will join Pauline and Kathy at the Slow Travel booth for the weekend. Drop by and say hello!

The Vacation Home Expo is happening side by side with the Atlanta Travel Expo. Two great travel shows for the price of one, both presented by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.