Horrible sickness and caving adventures~!

Since my last post many things have happened. We are now in Italy near the heel, in a the region called Puglio.  We stayed at a town  called Monopoli (yes like the game) and we stayed there for a while because Jack was horribly sick. While Jack was  lying in bed back at our hotel the rest of us decided to go explore the surrounding area. We learned that there was a very old village near by that had lots of "trullis". Trullis are small cone shaped houses built in the 1600’s form piles stone.. Peasants would live in them but there are still people living in some of them.. One of the things about trullis is that no mortar was used when making them because at the time there was a tax on the rich for any people who used mortar in building their house.

Our hotel which was just outside Monopoli, turned out to be built in the 1400s as a monastery. The people who owned it had the land in their possession for more than 250 years and had turned it into an olive farm/winery and a later a B&B. Under our rooms there were 2 levels into the ground that were used to age and store wine.  The couple who owned the place invited us to lunch and dinner which resulted in some interesting food. For lunch they made us rabbit.  At  one point they farmed rabbits on their land. Along with the rabbit , that tasted at lot like turkey, we also had pork  liver, YUM!. For dinner we had some classic Italian spaghetti, that tasted a lot different than the way we would make it in Canada. They cook it for much less time which results in harder noodles. When we told them that in Canada we cook it until it will stick to the wall they looked at us like we were from another universe.

Only in Italy

The next day Jack had recuperated enough for use to go see the cave near by. At the cave we got our own private English tour because we were the only English speaking people. We took the short tour that was only 1km rather than the 3km one that only goes twice a day. The cave wasn't much like the ones we went to in Mexico because it was a show cave so there was a paved path to follow and that meant there was no crawling necessary like we had to do many times when we caved in Mexico. In the cave there were 2 main caverns  that were both about 40 meters wide and 50 meters deep. The cave experts believe that the cave is up to 2 million years old. After doing the 1km loop we returned to the surface we started driving in the direction of Naples.