Events

Today I'm going to get a salad from Whole Foods Market. But last Thursday, at Ristorante Arté al Lago in Lugano, Switzerland, I had this: That is a venison tortellini in a broth that must have taken them two days to cook. The only pasta I have ever had in my life that topped it was the peacock ravioli I ate at Mistral the night before. Why did we go hiking so much? So we could fit into the clothes we brought with us, of course.

Security guru Bruce Schneier, writing for CNN, is not surprised that TSA screeners missed 95% of guns in a recent drill: For those of us who have been watching the TSA, the 95% number wasn't that much of a surprise. The TSA has been failing these sorts of tests since its inception: failures in 2003, a 91% failure rate at Newark Liberty International in 2006, a 75% failure rate at Los Angeles International in 2007, more failures in 2008. And those are just the public test results; I'm sure there are many...

Part of the reason one stays in an Agriturismo is to go hiking. This is a state highway (scala provincale) near the closest village: Despite being as far north (46°27') as Quebec City and Portland, Ore., Dosso del Liro is surprisingly warm and dry, the perfect environment for these guys, which we saw all over: These guys (common Italian wall lizards) are about 8 cm nose to tail, and very fast. We didn't even try to catch them. But they're also hard to photograph; I got lucky and moved very slowly for...

Northern Italian Alpine lake village, go: This is another example of how a little HDR makes a big difference. Tomorrow: photos from Thursday, including lunch in Lugano.

Last Wednesday we had one of the best dinners of our lives at Mistral, in Bellagio, Italy. I don't have the ability at the moment to describe it, except to say that I will never look at a peacock again without salivating. We had 8 courses each, one set of molecular-gastronomy dishes and the other more traditional, ending with a batch of vanilla gelato made with eggs, milk, cream, sugar, and liquid nitrogen. Oh, and we had a view: Someday, I will have better words to describe the food. I think it was...

When you're crossing Lake Como from Cadenabbia to Bellagio on a sunny day, it looks like this: I've also uploaded a full-sized JPEG (15 MB) to Azure storage. Enjoy.

I can imagine why the Catholic Church build Gallio Palace on the shore of Lake Como: We didn't make it to the palace because we were distracted by food. I'll have more to say about Wednesday's dinner in my next couple of posts.

After Venice, we stayed here, way up in the hills above Gravedona on Lake Como: It was gorgeous, and Mariella was a gracious and lovely host. Just one thing, though. It's 825 m up in the foothills of the Alps, reachable on a winding road with 6 km of switchbacks, ending at this driveway: In this car: We named the little guy Boba Fiat. It's not one of those high-powered North American models; no, it's a 0.9-liter European model that took four attempts to get up the Agriturismo's driveway the first time....

The Venetian church, viewed from the terrace of the Hotel Danieli:

I took 324 photos on Monday, so I'm not all the way through them yet. I'll just start with a photo of our hotel's lobby. We stayed at the Hotel Danieli, a 193-year-old hotel in a 600-year-old building: This was our one hotel splurge. I do not know the exact bill, except that it was approximately the same as the next four nights' lodging combined.