3/17/08 — For the next month Climbing.com contributor Bruce Willey and his wife Caroline Schaumann will be sending dispatches from Sardinia—an Online exclusive. This is their story: A story of average climbers, with average means on an average quest to explore the uncommon island off the coast of Italy. 

Every time I turn around I catch the missus reading the Sardegna guidebook. Later in bed, she marks off climbs we have done today, highlighting climbs we are going to do tomorrow, and climbs we will never get around to doing. There’s simply too much rock in the world. But she tries. I suppose if you hang around on million year-old rocks long enough it’s easy to forget that a human life is so short in comparison to geologic time as to barely register at all. 

Yet climbing in a foreign country is travel with a purpose. You miss out on a lot of museums, churches, cafes, shopping, sightseeing trips, and luxurious hotels when you climb—just like the locals. But having a purpose lets you experience the country more closely. And a purpose gets you off the beaten track, far and away from the tourist traps in the first place. You begin to see the world around you with renewed freshness. Grocery stores are a great place to start.

Same goes for driving. Now into our second week here, I’m starting to finally get the hang of being an Italian driver. Which is to say I drive about as well as an old lady in a scarf puttering along in a Panda Fiat. Aside from a few good unfinished two-lane “freeways” crisscrossing the island, the roads are nothing short of curvaceous. All of this is due of course to the utter sexiness of the landscape. Or put another way, Sardegna is rather mountainous. It is not uncommon to drive over snow-covered passes in the wintertime as we have this week. 

Driving here requires the hand-eye coordination of a video game addict and a keen sense of spatial arrangements. And since it’s difficult to tear yourself off the rock until it’s absolutely dark, there tends to be lot of night driving. You drive miles of neuron stimulating roads, dodging sheep, goats, pigs, and the occasional cow until you hit a small town where your focus must be spot-on lest you run over something unmentionable. The towns can be as confusing as a rat’s maze and your task is to squeeze between cars and the ubiquitous old women wearing all black going to and fro from daily Mass. They’re difficult to see, and their piousness gives them an ungodly amount of pedestrian courage. And then there’s hazardous walking cactus to avoid at all cost.