Author Archives: ericnewell

The people of Italy are wonderful.  Everyone we met speaks several languages.  Our tour guides easily moved between Italian, French, Spanish and English.  Even the hotel janitors, restaurant waiters, and bus ticket salespeople know multiple languages.  They don’t seem upset when you don’t speak Italian, they happily switch to English for us.  If I compareContinue reading “Becky’s Impressions of Italy”

Not much for a story today – we lolly-gagged at breakfast long enough we had to sprint to get on our 7:52 train.  I actually didn’t stop sweating until a couple hours later.  From the train we got to to the airport and had to hop on a bus to get to our terminal.  WeContinue reading “Italy Day 9 – Going Home”

We had talked for a bit about making a trek to Cinque Terre on this day.  It’s a set of 5 beautiful coastal towns in the Italian Riviera.  The problem is that it’s a 4 hour train ride to get there, and we’d have to get back that night to catch our flight the nextContinue reading “Italy Day 8 – Rome”

This day was going to be about exploring the Vatican.  The day before, as we were getting off the bus, we asked our tour guide when the best time was to go – we figured he’d say right away in the morning, but he said go over lunch when everyone is eating.  So in theContinue reading “Italy Day 7 – Rome”

I can’t imagine a cooler breakfast than the one we had in Venice.  We were sitting on a deck overlooking the Grand Canal eating chocolate croissants and bacon.  I could’ve sat there all day.  However, we still had more adventure ahead of us – part of the tour included a trip to the lagoon islandContinue reading “Italy Day 6 – Venice, Murano and back to Rome”

We had to get up early and be at breakfast by 7am as the bus was leaving at 7:30.  Becky remarked how it would be nice when we get back to Rome and don’t have to worry about setting an alarm clock in the morning.  We rode over the Apennine Mountains to Bologna.  The mountainsContinue reading “Italy Day 5 – Padua and Venice”

We got to “sleep in” until 7am on Sunday as we were looking forward to spending the day in Florence.  Our hotel had a breakfast buffet, which was decent, and we dined with our companions before taking the bus to downtown Florence to begin our day at the Gallery Academie which is famous for housingContinue reading “Italy Day 4 – Florence”

As we were thinking about what we wanted to do on the trip, we knew we wanted to get out of Rome, but we weren’t sure how to do it.  I looked into renting a car, but the automatics were very expensive and I can’t really drive a manual – so this figured to beContinue reading “Italy Trip Day 3 – Assissi, Siena and Florence”

I’m calling this Day 2, but really we took about a 3 hour power nap and headed out again to see what we could before we passed out from exhaustion.  We weren’t too far away from the Colosseum, so we decided to make the trek down there and stop at a couple interesting churches alongContinue reading “Italy Trip Day 2 – Colosseum”

We said goodbye to the girls at about 9am on Thursday – we dropped them off at my parents house for the week – or as we like to call it “Camp Grandma Grandpa’s”.  They have a pretty action-packed week ahead of them.  Katie had her African Drumming and Dancing workshop at the Community CollegeContinue reading “Italy Trip Day 1 – Getting There”