Why I Came Back Four Times

The first time I went to Tuscany with CDV, I almost didn't go. I'd done group tours before — the kind where you're herded through museums and dropped at restaurants with laminated menus — and I was done with that. My daughter convinced me. She said this was different. She was right, but not in the way I expected.

What I didn't expect was Maria. Not just Maria in the abstract — "local cooking instructor" — but Maria specifically: a woman who tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear with a flour-dusted hand, who laughed at my terrible pasta-rolling technique with zero pity, and who later sat with us at her family table and told us about her grandmother, who had taught her the same way. I left that day not having learned to make pasta. I left having met someone I'll think about for the rest of my life.

The second trip, I brought my sister. The third, my college roommate. The fourth time, last fall, I went alone — which felt strange until I realized the group would become my people within 48 hours, the way it always does. There's something about learning to cook together, eating together, wandering through a morning market with someone you met yesterday and already trust completely. CDV creates conditions for real connection, and then gets out of the way.

I'm going again in September. I've been trying to talk my neighbor into coming. She keeps asking what's so special about it, and I keep failing to explain. Maybe that's the point. Some things you just have to be inside of to understand.