Here is our Christmas Eve angel. We're in Cortona, after driving without breakfast since Arezzo. We had missed “prima colazione” at the hotel, but were determined to find this house with no address and no steet name. Just a picture map. Every stone house looking very very similar, clustered with a few other dwellings, fields stretching around in the most Tuscan charming way. A shrine marked our gravel path, and it was a ‘first driveway’. We found the house, walked inside, shivering, and left to have lunch. Gord saw signs for a place up by the castle, and we began on this path -- turns out it was a 2 kilometre road barely wide enough for our compact car which wound into the hills treacherously, only to find a beautiful resort in the middle of nowhere, closed up tight as a drum.

When we finally arrived at Cortona, it was so late, we’d missed lunch! I peeked into the window of a wine shop with a table down the middle; a woman sat at the table talking loudly in French; I could tell it was her second language. The meal was delightful; it wasn’t really a restaurant, just a wine shop which also sells pasta and sauces and he poured wine, fixed us a salad and pasta. It was our first meal of the day. I could tell Gord was at the end of his rope, it was Christmas Eve, and we just wanted to relax. Laura is her name, she's a travel agent, and she took care of us on Christmas Eve, so we could stay here, and go to midnight mass.