What now?
We blitzed through Cinque Terre. Most of the trails between the villages have been wiped out by landslides last year, including the walk of love. So we hopped on and off the train to see the cute little villages clinging to the cliffs. Jonah found the perfect park with an amazing view and we sat and watched him play.
Florence is always beautiful. The Duomo is one of my favorites. Sadly we were all too exhausted to climb the bell tower and see the beautiful view. We did however make reservations to skip the 2.5 hour line and take a peak in the Uffizi. I was particularly impressed with a number of paintings of mothers adoring their babies. I love the expression painted on both the mothers’ and the babes’ faces of complete adoration for each other…probably because I completely relate. We decided to skip the statue of David as you can see a reproduction of him in the square where he used to stand for free.
We headed for the outskirts of Rome while Nick’s family went to the Vatican. Hadrian’s villa is an impressive, expansive, never ending, large, pile of ruins and rubble. After a few hours of wandering around and imagining the villa in it’s heyday, we were ruined out.
Ah Rome. The beautiful and sometimes awful city. There is so much to see it can really run you down if you’re not careful…and we weren’t. There is never a lack of things to see in Rome. And see we did. After our exhausting day in Rome, the cold that we had all been on the verge of catching finally caught a good hold of all of us.
After Jonah’s graduation we headed for Rome. Some exciting things happened on the way. We came WAY too close to running out of gas (we had pulled into a station that was OUT of gas! And the next station was almost too far…I think the “miles to empty” meter just makes things worse.) But then we stopped at an amazingly beautiful hill town called Civita. It is on a cliff and you have to walk over a bridge to get to it. We found a little alley way in the town and heated up soup on a camp stove, super classy like. But hey, ya gotta eat!
Jonah’s school has a little end of the year ceremony for the kiddos. In Italy kids do three years of preschool and then start first grade. (So it’s really only one extra year when you consider we do preschool and kindergarten.) Jonah graduated from the “littles” and next year he’ll be in the “mediums”. AND we even got to have family here for his graduation! Thanks to Grandma and Grandpa Lloyd and Uncle Paul for sitting through a boring ceremony in a foreign language!
A day in Venice (with the whole crew) and a day in Verona (minus Jen and kids)
It has been been almost 3 years since Nick has seen his family, and a little less for me and Jonah. And of course for Declan it was “nice to meet you!” Grandma, Grandpa and uncle Paul flew in to Germany, where Nick met up with them. Then they took a few days to sight see and make their way to us. We were SO excited to have them here. Jonah got presents from Grandma pretty much every day and she always had treats in her purse (Grandma’s love to spoil!). Declan was more than happy to have more arms to hold him.
Ah the joys of having a child with asthma. When Jonah gets a little cold, he often gets a flare up. We are hoping it is just the air quality in Italy or that it is just a childhood thing. While Nick was on his way out the door to fly to Germany and meet up with his family, Jonah and I were hanging out in the emergency room trying to get his oxygen levels up. Then while Daddy was driving down from Germany with his family, we had fun doing “breathing” every few hours. Good thing he’s a good sport about it all.
We wrapped up our last few days with Taylor with some rock climbing, some relaxing and some good food. Even Jonah got to rock climb (his first time ever!), he was fearless. We were very sad to say goodbye to Taylor. He won’t be in the states when we get back as he is headed to Brazil in August. ta-ta for now tater! We really enjoyed spending some quality time with you before you leave!
