A Day of Rest, a Bit of Jetlag. At Home.

Italy Travelog #30
Back Home - Sunday, 1 Jun 2025, 6am

We returned home from our Italy trip yesterday evening. No, we didn't leave directly from the beach on Friday morning. That was merely the last blog I posted. As usual I'm backlogged a bit— though not too badly this time. I've got 3-4 more blogs from our last day and our trip home to publish, then of course the 3-4 I skipped over earlier in the week from visiting the Vatican and a few additional sites around Rome. ....Okay, so maybe it is a lot. 😔 I'm skipping ahead again now because I want to put a stake in the ground about when we're home..... Because tomorrow afternoon I leave again, on another trip. 😅

BTW, yes, I really am writing this blog at 6am. On a Sunday. I've been up since 5am. I figure it's a bit of jetlag from Italy, where 5am California is already 2pm. If waking up at 5am for the next few days is the jetlag I suffer, I'm fine with it. I've certainly had way worse before.

Part of what I hope keeps helping the jetlag from being worse was staying awake the entire time yesterday on our 13 hour flight from connecting in Barcelona. By the time we got home-home last night, at 6:45pm, it had been a 22.5 hour day for us. I unpacked, went out for dinner— it helps to switch eating to a normal schedule— and came back and took it easy for a bit before taking a shower and going to be. I was in bed shortly after 9pm, which makes waking up at 5 a bit more reasonable. But staying awake for 25 hours yesterday and then eating and sleeping on a normal-ish schedule helps shock my system into getting over jetlag.

What's on tap for today? Well, amid my no-rest-for-the-wicked situation of arriving home nearly wasted last night and having to ship out on another trip tomorrow, I'm going to rest today. It'll be a normal take-it-easy Sunday. Well, normal-ish because taking it easy usually doesn't begin with waking up at 5am. I'll putter around the house for a while, clean and put away clothes and other stuff from the trip, enjoy some comfort food meals, and ideally spend a while at the pool this afternoon. Yesterday would have been the perfect day for pool lounging, with a high of 90°. Today it's cooler (it figures 🙄) with a forecast of only 79°. It may not be warm enough to enjoy the pool. But I'll try.

Then, Monday, it's back to work, and I pack a bag for a quickie business trip!

Another Afternoon at the Almost-Hot Tubs; Beer on the Patio

Italy Travelog #26
Chia, Sardinia - Friday, 30 May 2025, 5pm

Yesterday afternoon it was relaxing to spend time at the resort's hot tubs—or almost hot tubs, as I noted yesterday, so we decided to do it again this afternoon after a relaxing morning at the beach today. As we figured out yesterady which were worth using and which were not— two of them have pumps are connected backwards, Buttoh!— we spent our time today mostly in this hot tub that looks like a cross between a pool and a maze for kids in the newspaper's puzzles page.



I think this pool is kind of is meant to be a maze. As you walk around the curve at the bottom of the photo, pairs of jets at different depths massage your calves, knees, thighs, and sides. I alternated between the deepest and shallowest jets, maneuvering around in front of them, to loosen my ankles and my back. My ankles are still sore from all that walking we did in Rome a few days ago!

After a good, long soak we're back at our room now, stretched out on the chaise lounges on our private patio. Dinner's not until 7pm, the earliest reservation available as that's when the restaurant opens, so we're pre-gaming with potato chips and beer here on the patio.



This photo's actually from yesterday with lunch at the pool, but it's the same beer. I mean, not the same bottle of beer 😂 but the same brand, Ichnusa. It's the local beer made in Sardinia. The one I bought yesterday at the pool-side cafe was, like, €10 or something ridiculous like that. At the beach-side cafe it was "only" €6. After coming back from the beach I bought a few bottles at the convenience store across the street for €2 apiece to enjoy here in our room. Other beers, all of which have to be imported by ship, are more expensive. Fortunately Ichnusa is a fairly standard European lager with a mild, but not too-mild flavor. It's good for drinking with made-for-Americans Italian food or enjoying by itself on a warm afternoon.

An Elegant Dinner at the Resort... with a Side of WTF

Italy Travelog #27
Chia, Sardinia - Friday, 30 May 2025, 8:30pm

This evening we sat for an elegant dinner at one of the resort's restaurants. We weren't planning on it originally, but after the oopsie at breakfast this morning the restaurant manager offered to comp us dinner.



At 7pm, the earlier reservation available as that's when the restaurant opens for dinner— restaurants in Italy generally only start serving dinner at 7 or even 7:30pm— the weather was still warm, so we opted to sit out on the terrazza. The view was lovely. Though we still had to stand up and crane our necks to see the beach in the distance. 😅

Hawk ordered a dish of spaghetti while I ordered grilled duck. We shared an appetizer of hummus— "Just one?" the waitress asked, bordering on snidely— and a side dish of roasted potatoes.



The duck arrived artfully prepared on a plate with some kind of stacked scalloped potato and either kale or spinach or something else similar. It tasted kind of like kale in that it tasted like spinach but not as good. 😅 And it was served with a chocolate sauce. Yes, that's chocolate sauce you can see on my plate in the photo above. It's a strange choice on the part of the chef, IMO. While it didn't go poorly with the duck it also didn't strike me as, "OMG, why haven't I ever had this pairing before?"

Dessert was a case of "WTF?" customer service. Every item on the dessert menu seemed to have chocolate in it. Hawk, who can't eat chocolate (it gives her stomach problems), asked if any of the desserts could be prepared without chocolate. The waitress initially said no but then, apparently because she wasn't sure about what Hawk was asking given language differences, brought out her manager. The manager was kind of combative about what was in the food, so Hawk said No to dessert. Forcefully.

The manager then, showing that she actually was combative, brought out a dessert anyway and starting pointing out things about it. The manager and the waitress both had agitated tones of voice and body language that conveyed, "We can't believe you're so rude as to not want our dessert." Hawk practically shouted at them, "I said No three times already!"

The total was €99, all comped. Although that's more than we almost ever spend on ourselves for dinner, these are resort prices. We left only modestly full. If we'd eaten our fill the bill would've been at least €150, and if we'd had two glasses of wine apiece (instead of just me and just one glass) it would've been over 200. Of course, even if dinner wasn't comped by the restaurant it would've been at least partly covered by my company's club stipend.

Alas, our reason for eating cheap at this pricey restaurant wasn't being cheap. It was that there was only 1 entree on the menu that Hawk could eat. Then there was the WTF antagonism from the staff about dessert. That left Hawk seething and made me uninterested in ordering anything for dessert myself, even a second glass of wine. We're past the point in life where we'll eat more food just because it's free.