Brief update today as it’s been a very full day of hiking and finding a suitable campsite for the night.

We began at roughly 6:15 a.m. local time here in Italy and hiked until nearly 5:00 p.m. with brief breaks for lunch and water.

We enjoyed a strong first day of hiking today. We traveled a bit farther than planned in order to find a suitable campsite for the evening.

Trail Magic

We experienced our first encounter with “trail magic” today as our paths crossed with two serendipitous moments: the first was a timely meeting with our first trail friend Andrea (English translation – Andrew, he says) and the second with a young Sherpa.

As we approached the City of Nus around 10:15 a.m. looking for a cappuccino and a snack, a man approached us heading down the hill in our direction and asked us about our journey. Turns out, he is a 45 year old Italian on holiday from his bank job as an accountant in Verona, Italy. He joins us as we travel down the hill into Nus and helps us locate a cafe’ for cappuccinos and a “mini-mart” in which we order a couple of delicious paninis at Andrea’s suggestion (after he navigates the language barrier for us with the counter staff). After drinking our cappuccino’s and eating our paninis together, we part ways with Andrea only to run into him again twice later on the trail with hearty hello’s in our horrible Italian – “Buongiorno!” and his far better English.

The second episode of “trail magic” occurred roughly an hour after lunch as Gabe and I were chatting away winding our way through a small hamlet and around a vineyard and winery when we passed right by our trail’s next turn. No more than 15 feet past our errant oblivion to the turn, a young man bolted out of the storehouse of a neighborhood winery to direct us downhill (literally through two grape vines on a recently mowed stretch of grass) to the Via Francigena path. Other than Andrea just prior to lunch and a few passing pleasantries with locals (“Bongiorno!”), we’d seen no one prior to this encounter. We were very grateful for this young man’s help.

Hoping a picture is truly worth a thousand words …