Truffle Hunting

Happy anniversary to the most wonderful parents and beautiful soul mates! (Yes, Ima and Daddy, I am referring to you) We knew the day had to be something special, to celebrate their 20^th wedding anniversary.  And it was.

            The day started off with a dream of Daddy’s: truffle hunting. I always had assumed that pigs rooted out the truffles, but apparently the pigs are too dumb to be trained and end up eating the truffles they find. So they have now turned to using dogs.

            So we pull up to a small villa type place (again, I was sleeping during the drive). We then transfer to an incredibly dirty van with an adorable dog in a little cage in the back. Seeing this dog made me want to get my own. A regular dog, not a truffle hunting one (Well, I did want a truffle hunting one, until I learned you had to train it to dig out truffles for three years from when it is just a pup, then you had to take it truffle hunting for at least two hours a day for at least five days a week and you had to get a special permit and truffles don’t grow near Claremont and so it just didn’t pan out logically).

            We all get in the van (which smells heavily of dog), and drive for a few minutes (I didn’t sleep on this ride, be proud!) to a small dirt road in the middle of a huge field. We were having a major flashback to Trochenbrough. The owner/truffle hunter only spoke Italian, so we had a translator, Marco, translate everything for us.

            We started walking down the dirt road towards the truffle hunting area. Apparently, which I did not know when we starting, you have to walk for about twenty minutes to get to the place with the trees where there MIGHT be truffles. Luckily, (spoiler) there were truffles today.

            Anyways, we followed the owner and his dog, which was named Jolé. It was incredible the stamina both of them had, considering the owner was a grandpa, probably in his late sixties to early seventies, and Jolé was ten years old, which is seventy in dog years.

            It was a lot of walking, but occasionally Jolé would sniff around and start digging rapidly, after which the owner would come in with his shovel and dig out the truffle. Jolé was incredibly talented for a truffle-hunting dog. It was really exciting.

            We walked across fields, hiked into forests, ducked under trees, sweat disgustingly because of humidity, tripped on branches, jumped over ditches, hopped over mud, and our day wasn’t even halfway finished. But it was off to a great start.