Subject: Bob's Travelogue: Driving to work I turn on my Fiat rental car and it flashes the temperature on the console. The temperatures have been hovering around freezing, which is so much more dramatic in Centigrade ("It was -7 when I left the lab last night!"). Next, I remind myself how careful I have to be. The Italians are comfortable with much narrower margins of safety than Americans. This is apparent in where they choose to park, where they choose to walk, how far they choose to stray into the oncoming lane on blind curves, etc. People who need lines on the highway to know where to drive are like people who need lines on the page to know where to write. There is safety, but the margins are thin and you really have to pay attention all the time. My friend Dogbert actually thinks it's safer in Italy -- Americans, he maintains, are lulled by the wide margins. My friend OC Liberal used to be enamored of what he called the Three Lane Pass. Suppose you are on a 2-lane road, behind someone slow, and can't pass because there is oncoming traffic. With the Three Lane Pass, you just pass anyway, and trust the oncoming traffic to be paying attention and scoot over enough for you to get by. I was never quite sure OCL had understood all the subtleties of when it was appropriate, and whenever he did it I always had my jaw clenched. But to his credit, he (and I) are still alive. I drive up the driveway to a blind corner, eek my nose out until I can see, and turn left to reach the highway. I weave through parked cars, pedestrians and street vendors in the center of town without hitting anyone. I roll through a stop sign in second gear. I can't explain logically why I run this stop sign in Italy and stop at all stop signs in the U.S. It just seems like the right thing to do. Once I leave the city of Paganica (which Dogbert calls "a sweltering stinkhole", which I find a little harsh -- a little) I am on an amazing narrow highway that winds up a tortuous creek valley all the way to the lab. Although it is never steep, it is sloped enough that on the way home at night I coast in neutral most of the time. Last Sunday morning, there was a light snow/rain in Paganica that was not sticking. During my 15 minute ascent to the lab it changed to a thick snow fall with cars stuck in the ditches. On my way home an hour later, it changed back to a light rain. I follow the creek up and out of town, and start hugging the walls at the bottom of the canyon. Then, the canyon gets to its narrowest point -- perhaps 30 feet across. But there's absolutely no room for a highway to pass because 25 of the 30 available feet are taken up by a church that a shepherd built there 400 years ago. He saw Saint Mary, and she told him to build a church right there. The highway zigs and then zags through a narrow tunnel blasted out of the solid rock about 10 feet from the church. And here the Italian margin of safety is just too small for me. If you take it at normal speed, every once in a while just as you finish the zig and start the zag, you see an enormous orange bus speeding toward you, with the back half in the zag and the front half already starting the zig, and no conceivable place for you. Did I mention the bus is enormous? It could crush a Fiat without noticing the bump. I have experienced this 4 or 5 times in years past, and every time everyone in the car has screamed. Somehow, the bus passed unperturbed and we survived. But now I have taken to peeking around the corner before I commit to the zag. Above the tunnel, the valley widens out a bit and I get my first look at the Big Rock of Italy (Gran Sasso d'Italia sounds better). Half the days it is shrouded in mists, clouds or snow. The other half, it is truly spectacular. I pass Camarda, plastered on the valley wall to my left, climb out of the valley at Assergi, overpass the freeway and arrive at the external lab. On the freeway, there is a 7-mile-long tunnel blasted under the Big Rock of Italy, and in the middle of this tunnel, a mile underground, is the underground lab. If you need to lay hands on the detector, you can catch a van once an hour from the external lab, or if you're in a hurry try (in Italian!) to talk the guard into letting you drive your own car in. Once he hands you the magic pass, you enter the freeway just above Assergi, drive east all the way through the tunnel, take a turnabout built specially for the lab, drive west halfway through the tunnel and then exit to the right. When the guards recognize you they push a button and this enormous Get Smart door slowly hinges open and you're in. It's about 8 degrees Centigrade (45 F) in the tunnel all year, which seems cold in the summer and warm in the winter. When the work is done, you drive west through the rest of the tunnel and exit the freeway where you entered it. On weekdays, you can get a decent but non-memorable pasta lunch at the external lab cafeteria. On weekends, or for a change, the nearest place to eat is at the cable car station a half-mile further up the mountain. There is a big ski basin just to the south of the Big Rock, and a thousand Romans drive out on the weekend to take the cable car up to the ski lift. You can have a $12 sitdown meal in a hotel restaurant, or buy some fatty, gristly, but mighty tasty pork from a street vendor. I was up there a week ago with The Father of the Motherboard, whose non-physicist wife, Hardball Hillary, openly mocked him as he tried to impress me with his GPS device. "See, we're right here. You can't really tell where that is though. Let me zoom out. OK, see, there's the lab." "But isn't the lab that way?" "It's not a compass, it doesn't tell directions. Unless you're moving. See, we're walking, it says we're moving 2 mph toward ... well, no.... This thing is a lot more useful in a car." Today at the cable car station I suffered the ignominy of being told by a cop I couldn't park where I wanted. In general, people park wherever the hell they want. I'm looking around, and seeing these stacks of cars obstructing roadways far worse than I, and he's telling me to move. I think he felt bad that the other people had parked badly before he got there, and at least he wasn't going to let the situation get worse. By the time I parked down the hill and walked back, someone else had already parked where he wouldn't let me, while his back was turned I guess. Back at the lab, the work is done, and it's time to coast home in the dark. My biggest fear is that I will kill someone while coasting through Camarda. Narrow margins are one things, but these people have no instinct for survival. Some say they have an annual moron festival in Camarda, and it lasts all year. A couple of nights ago, a woman with black hair, a black leather jacket and black pants was walking away from me in my lane. I just happened to catch the sheen of the leather jacket and veered in time to leave her genes in the pool. You'll hear more from me next week, if I'm not in jail for running down some hapless Camardan. Allesandra DiCredico Quote of the Week: "These are not, shall I say, easy wines."