Nicole Sheets finished her 26 months of Peace Corps service and have been traveling in a van with five other Peace Corps friends, a Moldovan driver and a sprightly blue remorca (trailer) stuffed with suitcases, groceries and blankets
Road trip gives a taste of Tuscan sun
Nicole Sheets
FORTE DEI MARMI, Italy -- At a campsite in Tuscany, between the ragged teeth of the Northern Appenine Mountains and the Ligurian Sea, I chase two cappuccinos with a makeshift breakfast of cantaloupe we bought somewhere in Rome and a bottle of Moldovan champagne.
At the end of July, I finished my 26 months of Peace Corps service and have been traveling in a van with five other Peace Corps friends, a Moldovan driver and a sprightly blue remorca (trailer) stuffed with suitcases, groceries and blankets.
Already we’ve racked up more than 4,000 kilometers in our journey westward.
After the press of tourists in Venice and Rome, I’m happy to stretch out in this quiet beach town, reading a forgettable memoir under our flimsy umbrellas.
Bicycles rule the sidewalks here. Bikes with baskets lean against the walkway railing toward the spiaggia libera, free beach.
The nearby mountains look as though they’ve been covered with a green carpet, worn threadbare in patches. The highest peaks are almost bald.
Dark-skinned men weave among sunbathers, selling gelatti, ice cream, breezy linen shirts, beaded belts, swim trunks. Emily bought wrap-around sunglasses, talking the price down by 15 Euro. One vendor meowed incessantly like a cat, a gimmick to turn heads toward his armful of wares.
A man selling drinks passes by singing lilting, slightly mournful songs in Romanian, the language my friends and I attempted to learn while in Moldova. He’s from Romania and chats with us when he has a spare moment. The work is hard, walking on the hot beach all day, he says. We tell him Romania is beautiful; we drove across it en route to Italy and most of us have vacationed there at least once during our Peace Corps service. Beautiful, yes, he says. But the salaries are low and so he works far from home for better pay.
My friends and I missed the last bus hours ago, but our campground isn’t a far walk. Lights twinkle from distant Tuscan towns tucked in the hills.
When we arrive, a Deep Purple party is rocking out a few tents down at the campground. Although at check-in we chose the "young" side rather than the "family" part of the camp, I pass on the party and sink into deep sleep.
Nicole Sheets, a returned Peace Corps volunteer who served in Moldova, will return to West Virginia for an extended visit. She can be reached by e-mail at moldovanicole@yahoo.com.
