Dolomite Redux & the Case of the Flushed Phone

September 08, 2025

Lago Maggiore

Back in Italia for my second annual guitar workshop in the Dolomites. Spent the first few days visiting with friends living around Lago Maggiore in Arona and Venegono. Arona is the perfect spot to dine Italian and enjoy a mountain lake view. There was a new restaurant just sound of Arona centro, on a boat. Really a great place to hang out with my good friend Matteo. The food and outdoors never disappoint. Well, almost never. My friend Miriam treated me to supposedly great pizza at a restaurant near the east bank of Lago di Commabio. Honestly, I like Blaze Pizza better than the pizza in Italy.

Tuesday morning, I began my six-hour drive east on the autostrada to Pipistrel Aircraft manufacturing company, located in Gorizia (near the Slovenian border northeast of Venice), to give a talk to their flight testers. Two hours out from my destination, it happened. I stopped at an Autogrill for a "pitstop." When I stood up from the toilet, I was puzzled as to why the toilet wouldn't stop flushing. I looked down with great dismay to see my phone in the toilet, surrounded by water that was surging around it. I pulled it out, using the washroom dryer to dry it out. It flickered a few times, but was done. I didn't panic. I went to the car, retrieved my spare phone (which I hadn't used in two years). It had no SIM card, but no worries, I thought I would put in the one in my primary phone. But I couldn’t figure out how to make it fit! And the autogrill didn't sell SIM cards. So now what? Two hours left to Pipistrel, a place I had never been, with my time margin to arrive at zero. So I used the Wi-Fi at the Autogrill to email my colleague a Pipistrel. And I brought up the Google Maps app, updating it so it would function. I took a screen capture of the route and set off. Fortunately, Google Maps in offline mode updated my position. I made it to Pipistrel an hour late and gave my SFTE brief, and had an amazing airplane tour.

The Pipistrel engineers showed me how to put the SIM card into my spare phone (I hadn’t turned it correctly). So I stayed in the town of Goiza for the night. Booked into a nice hotel and spent the next 2 hours updating all the apps so they work. Only to discover, my old spare was at its memory limit, which limited its usefulness as the most important app, Google Maps would keep failing. And the old OS wasn’t compatible with my password manager, limiting what I could log into (Big lesson, same as flight test. Ops, check everything BEFORE takeoff. Found a fabulous ristorante in the typical nice Italian centro.

The next day, I drove 3 hours to Roberto della Vecchia's guitar workshop in the Dolomites. The views were as stunning as I remember. And most of the attendees were people from the previous year.

Roberto Del Vecchio had arranged for Steve Kaufman, a world-famous flat picker, to be his co-instructor. The next 3 days were magic. I started to understand more, and for the first time, how to improvise. The instructors were patient, and this group was so friendly. It feels like a real family.

I left feeling like I had made it to a new level, at least in understanding, of how to improvise and not just read the music one way. I resolved to play the guitar every day (let’s see how that works out). On the last day, we went for a mountain hike. After we stopped for some Italian hot cioccolato, which is sooo much better than any hot chocolate in the U.S.