A month ago I left Finale and started my journey back to Arizona. I’ve been lost in time and space ever since. My airplane time machine should have just taken me back nine hours, and if I had only been gone a few weeks, I would have adjusted to my present after a few days of strange sleep. But after three months living my dream life, moving backwards wasn’t as simple as sleeping off jet lag. I got off the plane not just 90 days in the past, but 16 years. I was a stranger in a strange land starting my life in desert again. I was confused as Rip Van Winkle. Friends had lost weight, gotten pregnant,...

Or How to Take the Train from Nice to Finale Traveling for me has always been a balance of letting go of my Type A tendencies to over plan and opening myself up to the unexpected things that happen when you move on the fly. While I’ve gotten better about arriving in towns without a place to stay, know the basics of city planning to find my way around without a map, and have ridden enough trains and busses to have a feel for schedules, every now and then I’m reminded that these are things I’ve learned over time. One quiet Sunday in Finale, it was by chance that I logged onto the social networks...

This time of year in Northern Italy life is literally and figuratively a bowl of cherries. Not only has spring turned to long and eventful summer days, but the pink blossoms that exploded in April have now filled the trees with fruit. Cherries are everywhere. We climb in the hills outside Finale hiking through orchards and pulling snacks from the limbs as we go; at the agritouristica for dinner friends who maybe have had too much wine scramble into the trees and lower the high branches still covered with fruit down to us; walk into any restaurant, cafe or house and someone has a bowl spilling over with...

I’m always discovering different side trips to take from Finale – whether it’s up to France, down the coast to the Cinque Terre, or island hoping by way of ferry. With friends in town, we were looking for something different to do on our climbing rest days. The islands were too far, so we headed north to the Italian Alps. The Alpi Maritime are only 2+ hours by train and offer spectacular hikes between remote refugio huts in the summer, and Alpine skiing in the winter. There are also interesting mountain goats like the Ibex and the Chamoix. We made our way to the small town of...

A good friend sent me a care package of American magazines including the latest issue of Vanity Fair. Inside was a short article on the arrival of the Fiat Cinquecento to the U.S. market and a mention of a Fiat you won’t see anytime soon – the classic Jolly. This modified Fiat 600 was created for a very niche group of Riviera elite looking for cars they could carry on their yachts from beach town to beach town. With only 100 or so still around, they’re a rare breed. So imagine my surprise when I spotted one along the Finale boardwalk on Sunday. I had to turn the bike around for a...