A sandwich and a tin of muffins with chocolate chips in my backpack

Well before dawn she packed her sack for a long day of mountain trekking: the proper shoes, a bottle of water, two sandwiches with cheese and walnuts made the evening before and a tin box with a dozen muffins dotted with chocolate chips. These things happen when a foodblogger packs for a walk.

When spring comes you can suddenly notice a burst of activity in our world, just as in Nature. While the trees are busy producing tender leaves that in a few days will explode in shady groves, we humans dust off the activities hung up in the cold winter months.

Cyclists in single file – but more and more often in groups of two or three, damn – invade our country roads, while teenagers with spring jackets ride their scooters as if they were horses, enjoying the daylight after school. The evening sky fades to a pale white, the golden light kisses the trees and the monuments, cities that I’m learning to know just like Florence change under my eyes and turn into an amazing show that you feel like your own private moment of bliss.ng is coming and you restart the outdoor activities that you had set aside for a while. To be precise, in my case it is a brand new start, a long to-do-list for this 2013, a list that we are crossing out consistently with satisfaction and fun with my friends. I began with mountains in winter to launch the new year with style, Sunday it was the turn of trekking in the mountains.

I supposte that after more than four years of friendship and blog you have now understood that I am not that athletic, I found my balance in Pilates where I feel almost harmonious and feminine. Other sports or outdoor activities usually find me clumsy or hampered, yet a walk in the Nature always gives me new energies and cleanses my mind.

Let alone doing it in the mountains with a group of friends, it was even more cathartic: the mind is cleared of all thoughts, you just focus on the next step, or at least it was like this for me, facing it for the first time. You have an ultimate goal, but you keep it there in a corner of your mind and you face just the here and now. You deal with your limitations and fears, find the solution to the current difficulties – like that narrow path overlooking the waterfall, but, oh the satisfaction once you got through it!

Then you reach the top, you sit there, stretch your legs, enjoy the sun kisses on your face, and embrace with your eyes the horizon. That is the most beautiful moment along with the shower in the evening once you get home. There, overlooking the world, that sandwich with soft cheese, walnuts and radishes made the night before and put in the backpack at dawn gives you an immense satisfaction, nothing comparable to a dinner in a fancy restaurant, it tastes of challenge, victory, achievements.

After the sandwich I pulled out of my packpack a few muffins with chocolate chips, baked late in the evening as breakfast for the trip. They eded up with a sweet bite an unforgettable lunch on top of Monte Croce of the Apuan Alps, 1,314 meters, the sea in the far background, smiling friends around me and other snow-capped mountains behind.

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