Our arrival on our rumbling scooters caused a ripple of curiosity, not alarm. A woman with silver hair piled on top of her head approached us. She was perhaps seventy, with the posture of a ballet dancer and a necklace made of river stones. “Visitors!” she announced with delight. “Did Bernard find you? He’s our scout. He takes the old Ciao to the ridge every morning to look for lost travelers.”

“We got everything,” I said.

We had been riding for two hours under a sky so intensely blue it looked Photoshopped. The landscape had shifted from dense pine forests to rolling, golden hills. Then we saw the first one. A rogue sunflower, standing alone by a barbed-wire fence, its head tilted toward the sun like a radar dish. Then two. Then a dozen. Finally, as we crested a gentle rise, we killed our engines and just stared.