Travels with My Mother

I first encountered Tuscany in September 2007. My mother had, for a number of years, dreamed of traveling to Tuscany, and somehow her passion became mine. I proposed the idea of a joint excursion in March of 2006, and after she read some sample tour itineraries, she became as excited as I. I researched tour possibilities exhaustively, because that's what I do. I plan! We hadn't traveled together since I was a teenager, so this was a new experience for us both. Because my mother is "gently aged", and I was down with a excruciating case of Plantar Fascitis, we elected to take a Elderhostel tour for mature adults. It promised an interesting and educational tour of Tuscany with only a moderate amount of walking. It was a wonderful trip, however my mother's overriding memory is of the large and strenuous hills we climbed with exhausting frequency. Now, because I am a kind and considerate daughter, I resist the urge to point out the fact that the name of the tour was in fact "Siena and the HILL TOWNS of Tuscany." Climbing all those hills certainly whetted our appetites for a variety of traditional Tuscan foods. Ahhh, the food...now I could digress into a discussion of the gastronomical delights offered by the Tuscans, but I won't. Why not? Well, because I'd like to take a moment to discuss Spanx.

What are Spanx, you ask? Well, Spanx is just another word for girdle, and girdle is just another word for torture. After eating a variety of waist expanding Italian dishes, I had to resort to shoe-horning myself into a pair of Spanx, just to get my pants buttoned. Makes me wonder why they're called "Spanx". Perhaps it's because when trying to wrestle oneself into a pair of these unfortunate numbers, the elastic has a nasty habit of slipping from betwixt fumbling fingers and snapping painfully against tender body parts which haven't seen the light of day in decades. And, heaven forbid, if one is not completely dry before attempting to squeeze into a pair of Spanx, one has to resort to a series of violent contortions and hip gyrations worthy of a cheap Elvis impersonator who's being paid by the wiggle...minus the bell-bottomed jumpsuit and rhinestoned sunglasses, of course. At the moment I am anticipating 8 months of freedom. No pantyhose, no skirts...and no Spanx!