Okay. So my in-laws flew in from Arkansas and brought wth them my freshly 11 year old daughter. They're back home, now, so all of my writing will be in retrospect. (Retro, fyi, means behind in Italian. Go figure.)
Now that you know that much, I must inform you that I will be picking out stories in somewhat of an orderly fashion to tell you. It just wouldn't be prudent to attempt to tell you all about it in one fail swoop. So in this edition, I will introduce you to my family and my father-in-law's newfound addiction to gelato.
My mother-in-law, Becky, is a very awesome lady... if somewhat (extremely) unfit for Italian driving. My father-in-law, Bill, is always right on point (which helps out in "where did we park the car" type situations) and has discovered the many joys of gelato and the many letdowns of Italian coffee.
I'll bypass most of the mundane and skip right over to things like the MP hitting a garbage can and staying 2 days in a "rustic cabin" where you walked to the bathroom and took cold showers. Yes.
On this trip, we went to Pisa, Rome, Vatican City and Venice. All of which are awesome, all of which I have more pictures than necessary of. (A total of 1500+, just so you know.)
First, we drove from Aviano to Pisa, Camp Darby to be exact. I should've know something was bound to be, well, normal (for us) when Lady Garmin decided she was going to "recalculate" for half the trip. I pulled up Google Maps and she decided - for fear of replacement - to get us to our destination. Only thing is, the GPS coordinates they posted on the website for Sea Pines take you to the middle of the autostrada with no exit for 5km on either side and she says "arriving at destination on left". Guh-reat. After detouring hopefully yet fruitlessly (unless you count the grapes we could've picked with the windows rolled down) down a 2 lane road made for mopeds and skinny folk, we finally got back on track and found our destination was actually 2 km past one seriouly wrong turn. Go figure. Keep this scenario in mind. Copy and paste it into subsequent blogs in this series. It's a pretty consistant thing.
So after turning a 4 hour drive into a... 5 1/2 hour search... we decide to head over to check out the tower. Yes, the famous leaning tower. Lady Garmin gets us there (hallelujah) and you can just feel the excitement building. Everyone is looking around waiting for the sight of postcards to breach our view and then we see it...
"Is THAT it? I thought it'd be taller." "Yes... that's it, I mean, it's the leaning tower of Pisa." "Are you sure? Maybe there's two..." "Uh, yeah... because they built the second on to confuse tourists." Much like the lasagna... the Tower was a disappointment to my lovely mother in law.
But all in all, we were impressed with the cathedrals and museums surrounding the tower. Nooooot so much by the bright yellow crane blocking the cliche photograph of holding up the tower. Stupid yellow crane. But we did get pics... albeit not great ones... Hey, are YOURS any better???
I will say, however, that Pisa had the best spaghetti I've had yet. I mean, the butter sage was good, but I'm not a fan of eyeballs, so that automatically loses points. I'll take this tomato basil spaghetti any day. See... now I feel all drooly...
Cheap souveniers and a flooded shower later, we're all in bed preparing for our next adventure... Driving in Rome. Yes, that's right... I said driving. Screw the autobahn... Rome is where you earn the t-shirt. And I've driven both. And survived. But that's a blog for tomorrow. Trust me... it's MUCH more eventful that this one.
