Hello 2

It's been a while since I last did this. It's been a while since we took a big vacation. Four years. This time to the UK. Our Italy trip still stands out as probably the best three weeks of my life. Everything went smoothly. The scenery was magnificent. The food has had me hooked on olive oil and pasta for years. I was more motivated at work upon returning. I was refreshed. Even our marriage was better afterwards. We were less stressed and started to see each other differently, perhaps as more of a team. It's a lot for another trip to live up to. But here we are. Sitting in Bush International waiting to catch a delayed plane to Heathrow.

I feel both more prepared and less prepared this time. More prepared because we have a meticulously planned out itinerary. We are trying to see London in three days. More like two and a half by the time we get into town. There is so much to see and we want to see all of it. Meticulous planning was mostly out of necessity.

Less prepared because of technical difficulties and indecision. I won't get into all the little considerations, but I am blogging from Leslie's tablet instead of a shiny new laptop, or Surface Pro 3, or a new 10 inch tablet, or Chromebook. This tablet is not ideal. The small virtual keyboard is slow to type on and as a WiFi only tablet (purchased primarily to be a reader) doesn't have a good way to transfer photos onto it. The technical difficulties are due to the camera on my phone breaking a week ago. Good timing phone. After exhausting all routes to a solution I can take selfies only. Rough life? I know. While in Italy I blogged from internet cafes and didn't even turn on our phones (they were useless overseas), let alone have access to maps, apps, blogs, and cameras designed to take selfies. Perhaps this is more just pre-travel jitters than anything else. I really wish we were boarding and could get this vacation underway.

(Note: this is posted a day after being written due to lack of WiFi access)

Airport selfie goes here:

Cinque Terre to Lucca to Pisa to Siena to Montalcino to Orvieto

We are leaving Siena today and heading to Orvieto. After Cinque Terre we traveled to Lucca. It's a moderately charming medium sized city with a very old completely intact city wall. The best part of our visit to Lucca was renting bikes and riding on the ramparts for an hour. It was quite invigorating. The rest of the time we walked around the city and enjoyed seeing some of the old architecture. That night we grabbed dinner and I had what was essentially the pork steak with roasted potatoes. If I was a food critic and knew colorful ways to describe tastes I do so now, but I am not and my description of this pork chop will not do it justice. I will say that it was the most delicious piece of meat I have every had. The herbs used to season this steak were perfect and fresh, but not overwhelming and didn't dominate the flavor.

However, overall Lucca was not everything we had hoped it would be. It was obvious that there were many fewer tourists there, which we liked, but we found that the tourist information office didn't keep their posted hours and was closed. This, compounded with a recent and confusing change in how bus tickets are bought, resulted in us missing our bus to our next destination, Pisa, and left us (me more than Leslie) irked by Lucca.

Our arrival in Pisa was short, but nice. We saw the leaning tower, field of miracles, duomo and bapistry. However, since Pisa was only intended to be a short stop on our way to our next destination we had all our luggage with us and so we didn't bother going into any of these sights. We took a few good photos, included a perspective shot of Leslie preventing the Leaning Tower of Pisa from falling over, and headed to the train station.

We arrived in Siena and checked into our room. The view is amazing, which will be evident when I post photos. We saw their Duomo, another of many massive and ornate Italian churches, and ate gelatto on Il Campo, a massive piazza. Overall, Siena was quite lovely.

The next day, yesterday, we went to Montalcino. It's a small town on top of a large hill in Tuscany known for their Brunello and Rosso di Montalcino wines. The wines were quite good, although my Brunello was a bit too bitter and almost medicinal to me. That's unfortunate because our tour book notes how good the Brunello is. I think I just shouldn't have sprung for the cheapest Brunello. However, I really liked the Rosso di Montalcino. Montalcino is pretty small and we started to run out of things to do. That's not the worst problem to have, so we took a short nap on a bench overlooking miles upon miles of Tuscany.

I don't know if I'll update from Orvieto, or again on this trip. I think I will try to post a overview of our trip when we get home.

Cinque Terre

Today is our third full day in Cinque Terre. It's been amazing. We're staying in Vernazza, the 4th town.

On the train ride over I was nothing but smiles at the thought of finally returning here with Leslie. She was a little worried that too many people have talk-up how great Cinque Terre is. Turns out, it's not possible to over hype how amazing Cinque Terre is. Upon arrival, we went down to the harbor and just soaked in the sights and a brilliant sunset before dinner. For dinner we had the octopus appetizer - it was amazing how flavorful it was and not nearly as chewy as the calimari I've had in the US - and Leslie had the spaghetti con frutti al mare (spaghetti with the "fruit of the sea") which had amazingly good fresh mussels, clams and shrimp. I had the Termosa Vernaza, which was baked fresh anchovies with tomatoes and potatoes. It was surprising how delicious anchovies could be when fresh.

The next morning we set out to hike to Monterosso al Mare, the fifth town and also the most difficult of the four seaside hiking routes. During the hike a helicopter kept passing overhead with a giant white bundle and then returned empty. It was a bit ominous and we were worried that we were unaware of something bad going on, like a forest fire or other emergency. Turns out, it's landslide season and the helicopter was dropping off supplies to shore up the trail to prevent it from falling into the sea. That's good, but unfortunately it meant that when we got halfway we had to turn around and go back to Vernazza. Monterosso would only be reachable by train on our trip. With our plans foiled and much of the day remaining, we decided a hike in the opposite direction to Coniglia, then Manarola and finally Riomaggiore would suffice. Supposedly, the difficultly of these three hikes would be about the same as our original plan, so it seemed like a good idea. The hike to Corniglia was long (about 4km) but breathtaking. We arrived in Corniglia and ate the picnic lunch of Focaccia bread with pesto and Blood Oranges that we had packed. Cinque Terre, as the birthplace of Focaccia and pesto, might be the greatest place in the world. The Focaccia was so light, doughy and a bit oily, with big indentions poked in it by the baker's fingers to essentially aerate the dough. The pesto was amazing. As we were hiking we could see basil growing out of every cranny in the rock walls that hold the hills back. I'm a bit jealous of how easily it grows here, because I've had to fight to keep my basil alive back in Texas. Full and happy, we headed out of Corniglia but bumped into another couple that was hiking who told us that the seaside trail between Corniglia and Manarola is closed due to another landslide. In this case, there was a detoured route. It was up, then over, then down. After 1.5 hours of going up, way, way up (guessing 500 m) it finally leveled off. Here's a picture we took of Corniglia on this portion of the hike:



We trudged on through mostly level terrain through and around the vineyards of this area. The only hiccup was a brief portion of the path about two feet long that was missing and had fallen off the cliffside. It wasn't too tough to circumvent. The path finally took us downhill into Mararola, where we enjoyed gelato at the rocky beach. At the point we were exhausted. What was supposed to be two days of moderate hiking had turned into one day of strenuous climbing. It seemed the "pace of our vacationing" had not slowed down at all. The last hike from Manarola to Riomaggiore is more of a cake walk. The route is completely paved and flat. We arrived in Riomaggiore, where I stayed when I was last in Cinque Terre and sat on the rocky beach then grabbed dinner. I had the rissoto con frutti al mare and Leslie had a different version of the spaghetti con fruitti al mare that was baked in tin foil. This time our dinners included a crawfish, which, despite living so close to Lousianna and being surrounded by restaurants that have all you can eat crawfish boils, we have never had. We took a late train back to Vernazza and colapsed into bed. Here's a picture of Riomaggiore we took while there:



The next day, yesterday, we decided to take it easy and lay off the hiking. So, we took a train to Monterosso al Mare, which has the best beaches. Before beaching-it-up we decided to hop on a bus and head up to Madonna di Saviore, a church on top of on of the hills. Our plan seemed flawless: let the bus do all the work going up and we'll just walk down. Turns out, the bus doesn't go all way up. It leaves about 1km and 200 m below. By the time we figured out how far below the church we were dropped off at we were halfway up the mountain. Naturally, we continued to the top. When we finally got there, now truely exhaused from two days of much more excessive hiking than we had anticipated, we had another Focaccia lunch. We then treked down the 465 m and 2.5 km to Monterosso, grabbed more gelati and ate it on the beach. I took a brief swim in the freezing Mediteranean waters. Leslie opted to lay out.

Today we took it easy. We got smart and took a bus from Vernazza up the inland hills and took the same bus back. We found an amazing Sicilian pastry shop, called Ristorante Il Pirata. I had the Ricotta croissant for breakfast and what could be my 20th cappucino on this trip.

I also wanted to update a bit about Florence, but I'm going to opt to keep it short. Florence was a wonderful city. It was less busy than Rome, but it seemed like there were more tourists. We went to 5 museums in Florence. Much as we are all hiked out now, I was very museumed out by the end of Florence. At this point I am probably in the 99th percentile for most marble busts seen in a lifetime. Michaelangelo's David is quite incredible. It's unbelievable that someone could create a work of art like that from a large block of marble.

Here are some pics:
First, Leslie and I at the Palitine with the Colosseum in the background



Next, the Victor Emmanuel Monument in Rome at night



Eating pesto pizza in front of the Pantheon



Florence at night



Last, I know it's nerdy, but we're missing this guy:

Venice = €€€

We're in Venice now and for the next two nights. Turns out everything in Venice is way more expensive, including the internet. So, I will not be blogging for the next couple of days. I hope to catch up when we get to Cinque Terre and the pace of our vacationing slows down...

Busy, Busy, Busy...

Well, we've been extremely busy the last couple of days and that remains to be the case today. In the interest of saving time, I'm thinking I'll post some pictures and get to describing what we've been so busy with at another time. (I haven't done this before and I'm not sure how the images will display, so I'll just give a running description...)

Photo 1) Leslie enjoying her first Italian Latte as the barista picks her teeth in the background.

Photo 2) The narrow stairs up to the cupola at the top of St. Peters

Photo 3) Pizza!

I've run out of time and will have to finish updating later. Now that I've sort of figured out how to post images, I'm hoping my next post will have more content.

I meant to post this morning, but apparently the internet cafe opened late. It may be because today is a national holiday commemorating 150 years of the unification of Italy or maybe the guy who opens shop was just late coming in. Whatever the case, it's now Thursday evening and we've had two full days of sightseeing.

Yesterday it rained for most of the day, so we thought it would be good to head to the Vatican. Before we did, we stopped into a cafe for our first taste of the renowned Italian coffee experience. I have to say, the pastries and cappuccino were amazing. When we made it to the Vatican, we saw the Vatican Museum, culminating with the Sistine Chapel. The whole museum was impressive and I was quite surprised to see modern art included in their collection. No other piece of art has ever struck me quite like the Sistine Chapel. The immensity and quality is simply awesome.

Then we went into the Basilica of St. Peter and up the cupola. The size and lavishness of this church is amazing and the view of Rome from the cupola is worth the hike up hundreds of narrow steps, even with hazy skies. Then we took a few minutes to walk through the papal crypts. It was very touching to see the dozens of mourners in front of the tomb John Paul II.

We grabbed pizza for dinner. I tried my first ever sardine pizza. It was interesting but I don't think I'll order one again. Leslie went for the funghi (mushroom) pizza, which she thoroughly enjoyed. I was surprised at how flavorful a simple margherita (basic cheese) pizza is and how thin the crust was. As I stated in a previous post, I'm going to love the food over here.

We slept well and I'm pretty sure have overcome any potential jet lag in just a day. We started today with a trip to the Colosseum. Our Roman tour guide and good friend, Rhodora, mentioned that there are some theories that the whole gladiator spectacle may have been staged more like professional wrestling and less like the movie Gladiator. The Colosseum is, of course, impressive. It's pretty surprising how similar it is in design to many modern stadiums.

It started to rain pretty hard so we went inside the Capitoline Museum. It was full of ancient busts and sculptures, notably the Dying Gaul, the Capitoline Wolf, and the Capitoline Venus.

After that we headed to the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill, where it rained sporadically. It was wonderful to have Rhodora with us for this. I visited this site the last time I was in Rome and found it mildly interesting at best. With Rhodora here, an archeological scholar, we were made aware of subtle details and the context of the surrounding ruins. Aside from the food, I think this is my favorite thing we've done so far, which is evidenced by the hundreds of pictures I took.

We headed to the Trevi Fountain and threw some coins in (including Larae's €0.02 coin) which means we are assured to return. Then we grabbed dinner at L'Antica Birreria Peroni, which serves food that is best described as Italian-German fusion.

I'll try to post pictures in the future, but this internet cafe is closing so I need to head out.

We Arrived

The flight went well. It was only a little taxing and we could have used more rest. I was able to get a couple short hours of sleep on the plane. Leslie didn't get any. At least they have those fancy personl TVs that allowed us to watch any number of newly released movies on demand. It was Tangled and The Chronicles of Narnia for Leslie and True Grit for me.

We arrived in Rome without any problems and got picked up at the airport by Rhodora and Fabio. The highway driving seemed to be only a little more nerve-racking than in Houston. The city driving is another story. I was amazed by how the scooters will ride between the lanes and sometimes even zip into the opposite lane of traffic and back so as to quickly get around a couple more cars.

Our hotel is nice. It's called Hotel Sileo. The shower situation is a little odd because there is no curtain and you have to sit down. According to our Italian friends, the "sit down shower" is not that uncommon. But overall it's a nice, quaint little room.

Last night we grabbed dinner with wine and tiramisu. I can tell I'm going to love the food here.

It's raining this morning. New rain coats were a good investment. Hopefully the rain will be brief, as we're about to begin our sightseeing.

That's all for now. Ciao!