Here it is in google maps. Runs from the curve just before Brayton Hollow to the end of the large island.
maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&g … 4&t=h&z=14
How else would you fry food?
Vic-k you been influencing this boy?
I live not too far from the town of St. Valentine. I recently did a trip there, after a hard day of work, and I did it happily, because the voyage goes through fantastic places - and because my beloved was at the other end of the voyage.
Going there means pointing towards the Monti Sibillini, one of the most magical, mystic place in Italy. And you do it via modern highways, crossing a fast growing land profile, from the flat coastline to delicate hills to rude mountains, with rest places mixing utterly modern and traditional, direct mountain style.
After my second hometown, in the middle of an island bordered by three rivers and a crown of green mountains, you go though a long valley that you can see from Google Earth as a deep wound in the earth, similar but not equal to a canyon. A gentle, poetic canyon. A place where you look to the border between the earth and the sky, and see small brick villages abandoned by centuries. There is also a repository of mummies, if you really look after ancient, thrilling things. They rest unburied, testimony of a not completely civilized society.
When I was a drinker, I stopped at all small bars along the way. Now I just look for “panini” (sandwiches) made in wood ovens, with great traditional sheep cheese ( made with fresh milk and real essence of stomachs of young sheep). One of my preferred places also offers a rude red wine, that you can drink just over a vertiginous bridge made by ancient Romans more than two thousand years ago, and still resisting to the car traffic.
The end of this voyage is bordering the Marmore Falls. Nothing more than the highest European falls, if you like this kind of things. The Romans cut the rock separating two rivers at different levels, and the resulting fall is still there, with all its energy and absolute beauty. You pay the ticket (or, during the week, cross unseen the gates), take some photos, stay there mumbling and thinking to the power of the nature. Sometimes, a German, Dutch or British girl exchanges some words with you, and you are happy enough to think that you are living a wonderful life.
Are you ready to take your car again? A few minutes, and you are in the town of St. Valentine. The grey, dark buildings of the “Acciai Speciali Terni” foundries welcome you. You park your car next to a small bar where you take a great ice cream, and you are in the cathedral. Bombing did its work, but this is not a bad place. Better still, you go there, to the utter grey town, a place of grey skyscrapers against a reddish-bluish sky in the middle of the greenest part of Italy, and you can go to the festival where your beloved is waiting for you. Closely guarded by her boyfriend.
However, I can’t imagine a better place than the town of St. Valentine to meet her. The return path will be just a fast recovery path in the middle of your own earth. Marmore falls will be shut at the time, and the thin rope of water will be your idea of calm you will keep with you going back home. Your second hometown will welcome you with the last coffee of the day. The town will be empty. An hour in the middle of sleeping mountain villages and the highway, and you are sleeping in your bed.
Think to it as just a dream.
I thought it said “try”
I should probably wear my glasses more often.