1. In this Bonus Episode Michele and Sally have fun doing an overview of the entire podcast. First Michele lists her favorite quotes from the memoir, and Sally chimes in with her usual probing questions. It turns out that Michele had to pare down the list from about 150 quotes to 50 or so. Lots of pith to discuss! Next, our love heroine reveals her most cherished LoveCapades. Once again the intention was to list the Top Ten, but she ended up with 17 faves. We find out that Michele would have done some things differently over the course of her life, that is, made other choices along the trail. So she created a funny “Do Over” List. And lastly, Michele and Sally propose a very interesting idea for the listeners to contemplate. Would they like to tell one of their LoveCapades in a future podcast? Wouldn’t’ it be fun to hear your love stories? So, stay tuned for future developments…

In this final episode Michele ties up loose ends and draws conclusions from the myriad of exhilarating LoveCapades she’d experienced over many years. What had she learned about love? One lesson is that a real love story never ends. Such was the case with her first boyfriend, high school Bobby. Fifty years after they’d first met, he was on her doorstep once again declaring his love for her. The next rendezvous with destiny occurred in 2006 when Michele and her dear Australian friend Trish took a trip to France and Italy. Upon checking into a charming country albergo in Piemonte, she asked the receptionist Valentina to do a Google search for her Sicilian lover Nicola. And voila—she discovered his address and phone number. A few days later Michele fortified herself with an entire bottle of Piemonte’s best red wine and then dialed his number. The conversation that ensued was a remarkable testament to amore! Finding him made her happy and sad all at once. But isn’t that the way with love? As Michele says in the book and in the podcast, “It makes us come alive like nothing else. It defines us, it describes us, it propels us forward, and it stops us dead in our tracks. It makes our world spin on its axis.” In this last look at love, Michele shares more poignant conclusions and professes that hope springs eternal. She poses the final question …will she find her true love in the end?

We hear about Michele’s most recent and perhaps most fascinating and unexpected LoveCapade. It’s an affair of the heart that no one would have predicted, including our heroine. Michele hired a young gardener named Jorge to spiff up her garden before an upcoming surgery to remove fibroids. After she’d recovered, while spending time in the garden during Jorge’s maintenance visits, he would flirt with her unabashedly. It was very surprising since he was decades younger, much smaller in girth, and barely spoke English. But his advances continued, and one day they crossed a line so flagrant that Michele was flummoxed to the max. She knew this was what the universe was offering then in the love department, but it looked so very different than what she expected. What to do? After a serious talk with herself under the moonlight one night, she decided to give it a try. Luckily that adventurous side of her took over once again. What transpired was a delicious five-year romance that they kept very private and secret from the rest of the world. Theirs was an intimate fairytale romance—a Camelot-like affair that taught them both many lessons of the heart. It helped Michele realize once and for all that love may appear different than what you expect but that is part of what makes it magical. Once the romance ended she realized that Jorge had come into her life to cultivate much more than her garden. Their fairytale story had awakened Sleeping Beauty and made her very happy.