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I couldn’t sleep all night. I don’t know why. I borrowed Cheri’s mask of Zorro to keep the light out. I had earplugs. The whole nine. And Fran had even come to take the spider out of my room when I started screaming bloody murder after dinner.

I got up grumpy from lack of sleep. And feeling like I was getting sick. I had a sore throat. My head felt stuffed up. I went to breakfast and had a couple cappuccinos. Italian cappuccinos can fix many of the world’s woes. And I don’t even drink coffee in the states.

But even after I drank them, I didn’t want to ride my bike. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted to hole up and hide away from the crowd. The louder voices that Rolando talks about, those were telling me to go back to my room and coddle my mood.

“It’s going to rain,” Colleen told us at breakfast. “A few of us will still be riding, but if some of you don’t want to, you don’t have to. Ashley will be riding. Cheri will be riding. I’ll be riding. Sabrina, Colleen, Jen.” I scowled.

I don’t want to go to the abbey. I don’t want to ride. I hate the rain. No. No. No.

The louder voice was screaming.

But somewhere deeper inside me, a quieter voice was saying: Just go. Ride your bike. It’s what you do. It’s what you always do when you’re grumpy. You force yourself to go out and ride until you feel like yourself again. And like Rolando said: I have to train my mind to make this quieter voice into the habitual voice. Keep listening to these voices so they can become more rote. They say the brain forms neural pathways because the synapses fire repeatedly between them. And the more the synapses fire, the easier it is for these pathways to be traveled. They form relationships with each other and those relationships are the patterns of thinking that become your norm.

So train those patterns to work for you. Wear in the pathways that benefit you. Get on your bike and go for a ride. It was settled.

And as soon as I stepped over the top tube and started riding out the gravel driveway with the others, I felt my personality come back. Riding brings me back to myself. It is my living meditation. Before long I was cracking jokes and we were laughing ourselves off the side of the road, just like every other day.

The repetitive motion of turning over my pedals was like going through the beads of a rosary to me. Not to be sacrilegious, but riding is my religion.

It was overcast out there, the hills stacked in layers like cardboard cutouts in a gradient of greys extending into the distance. It started to rain just as we approached the abbey and we went inside just in time to join a group of our women who were viewing the frescoes.

It was about a half hour later, upstairs in the monk’s library, when I realized how hungry I was. I’d eaten a light breakfast, thinking I wasn’t going to ride at all. And I hadn’t brought any food in the pockets of my jersey. So I’m standing in front of a wall of tattered books, tranced out with hunger, when one of the women tapped me on the shoulder and said, “There you are, I’ve been looking for you. I wanted to give you this.”

She handed me one of the dried fruit bars her husband’s company manufactures. The bar shone like a bar of gold in my hand. I barely thanked her, just tore into it and devoured it. But it was a tiny affirmation, a symbol that I’d done the right thing. I’d listened to that quieter voice, the one that was better for me, and so the world had lined up its resources to give me what I need.

We rode back in the rain and Cheri, Julia and I went into our daily laugh track of hysterics because a car drove by with an EU license plate that said PL. We couldn’t figure out what country it stood for, so we just started making up names. Plovakia. Plundervania. Plutokostan. We learned later that it was just Poland, but not before we almost crashed our bikes into the hillside with laughter. Poland. How could we forget Poland?

We were set to leave on the buses back to Castagneto Carducci that afternoon. So we packed up our luggage and got ourselves situated in the buses. There was one large bus to carry all the people and one smaller van to carry the luggage. I decided that somehow I’d rather ride cargo and I left a seat clear in the luggage van for Cheri and me.

The guy driving the van seemed surprised to see a couple human beings belted in with all the luggage, but he was friendly enough. At least until it became clear that there was a problem with the clutch in the bus. The drivers all turned into mechanics. They had the rear flap inside the bus open and they were lying on their stomachs, staring into the guts of the engine. It seemed like they knew what they were doing. But then one of them asked for some masking tape. And we knew we were in trouble.

At some point, they got it fixed and we rolled out. We got about a half mile down the road, right to the steep uphill section into Trequanda, and the bus stopped dead in the road. Our van pulled up next to it. Our driver’s eyes flashing impatience and anger. As we rolled up even to the driver in the bus, he just looked out his window at us and shrugged. Another wrestling session with the bus innards. And several minutes later, we were rolling again.

Only to stop on the next major incline. The guy driving our van started to look infuriated. Cheri and I were laughing, because of course it wasn’t funny at all and that made the whole situation hilarious. But we were trying not to get on the nerves of the guy driving, so I was folded in half, laughing into my knees that kind of squeaking and shaking laugh that most people can’t hear or see. My throat was emitting a high-pitched wine that a dog could probably hear.

“Offer him a cookie,” I told Cheri. “Maybe he just needs a cookie.”

She gave me the dagger eyes and we both cried with laughter.

Next thing we knew, our little luggage van was speeding down the hill in the opposite direction from the bus, looking for a mechanic shop. When we found one, we did a wild spinning turn, came to a halt at the shop, and a man got in with us carrying wire hangers, dental floss and a couple wrenches. I couldn’t even look at Cheri, but I could feel her fist pounding on my leg, both of us bent in half to avoid any eye contact. Dental floss???

They had to bring the bus back to the mechanics shop after all. And it took about 45 minutes, but they managed to get the thing fixed (while we all spilled from our quarters and roamed the inside of the garage staring at the carcasses of old Citroens). One thing we all learn about Italy very quickly on our first trip there is that part of the reason it has retained its quaint charm is because nothing can get done in a hurry. There’s bureaucracy and paperwork and a million opinions and things that should take fifteen minutes (like making a bank deposit) often take fifteen days.

So it was nothing short of a miracle that we were back out the door in that bus less than an hour later. And a miracle upon miracles when we were able to get back to Castagneto at almost the same time we’d originally planned to be back.

I’m going to have to attribute it to the power of Colleen’s fairy dust. She sprinkled it on the mechanics while they were working. Just dusted them in glitter.

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