Farewell to Italy and hello to the Burgh

Back home now after a long day of travelling. We were up early - perhaps earlier than was needed, as it was too early to check in for the flight when we got to Ancona airport. Likewise, we had quite a long wait in Stansted and couldn't re-check the bag or go through security until three hours before the flight.

Good to be home, but I have a horrific amount of work to do in the next few weeks. It's scary.

And it's not that long before I'm going back to Italy - in fact I have a couple of visits in the pipeline in late May and early June.

I was going to blip the extra - taken out of the hotel window this morning as a reminder of the Italian countryside, but the bright lights of Edinburgh this evening persuaded me otherwise. So now it's just the extra.

And a final Italian note about our dinner yesterday evening. We'd lined up what looked like a good restaurant close by the hotel, but it was completely full and couldn't offer us a table even though we turned up at opening time. We wandered across to the only other restaurant in that part of Falconara Maritima and had a quite remarkable experience. We opened the door to what looked like an old fashioned bar/cafe and were immediately ushered out again across the road to choose our food directly in the kitchen. No menu. Just what the elderly female cook had on the go, so we chose Spag Bol and some stuffed vegetables. All excellent. And quite eccentric, as all the food was brought across the road from the kitchen. And all of the people running the place were septuagenerians. At least.

Even washed down with quite some house red wine, our bill barely crept over 30 euros.