Weeknotes #388 — Lucca

Looking out over the valley towards Lucca. We spent this week on holiday in Tuscany, Italy, with eight of our friends. Our summer break was planned to be early this year as our eldest son heads back to university next week. This holiday came and went in a flash, as they always do. Our home for the week was Il Gelsomino Bianco, a villa in the Brancoli hills, north of Lucca. A stone in the wall of the guest house was marked with the year 1729, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole villa was at least that old. Flying across the Mediterranean towards Pisa. The journey to our destination started out great. We had flights booked at a reasonable hour from Heathrow which didn’t involve us getting up earlier than the crack of dawn to be there. I looked out of my bedroom window as my family were getting ready and spotted our next-door-but-one neighbours getting into a taxi along with their suitcases. It turned out that, incredibly, they were booked on exactly the same flights as us. When we…