From Orvieto

Tomorrow we train from Orvieto to Naples. In Naples we will take a regional train to Sorrento where we have an apartment with a distant sea view (who knows what that means!).

In Orvieto, the Jazz Fest has not interfered for the most part except by making it a bit more congested with traffic and increasing the price of accommodations.

We enjoyed two nights out to eat, both with great pasta dishes and one adventurous meal that included wild boar (not too adventurous...).

The Duomo (church) here has cool mosaic tiles and is one of the more interesting, but the church in Siena remains the coolest on the inside.

Josh says: "And Shannon pines for some Italian dude's wood." Don't worry! The link will only take you to an Italian woodworker's website featuring all their beautiful, hand-carved wood art. It's amazing.

Holiday Hugs from our hearts to yours!

Christmas in Italy

Hello and Happy Holidays to all!

We picked up our 2 rental cars and left Florence (a city not too dear to any of our hearts) by way of a scenic highway. Florence was neat for the major sites, but the apartment we ended up with was not great. It was very large but had many issues. The most discouraging one being that the on demand hot water heater kept going into hibernation mode or something crazy, because it would transition from warm to very COLD water in the middle of showers. It was also connected somehow to the heat throughout the apartment because that too would go out for hours on end. We were happy to get out of the large city environment of Florence and travel throughout the hill country near Siena. Both Josh and I got a 24 hour bug (potentially food poisoning) in Florence, which made the experience that much more unappealing. Everywhere throughout Florence the water is very chlorinated which makes everything smell awful. We also accidentally bought bleach instead of washer detergent and so we had a few pieces of clothes ruined (the worst being Josh's brand new button-down shirt). So suffice it to say, we were happy to leave!

We arrived in a rainy Siena yesterday afternoon with a nauseous Josh, who immediately crashed in our room and slept the rest of the day. It hasn't been super warm throughout our trip. Mostly its remained in the 40s and at night dips down into the high 20s. We have been in a few towns in the Tuscany area where the temperature has reached into the 50s.

We are now both feeling better, so we are able to enjoy the beauty of the landscapes that surround us. We spent Christmas driving throughout the country-side, exploring small hill towns and geocaching. We thought often of our family and hope all is well with everyone. Tomorrow we plan to visit Siena's center again to see it when it is dry and warmer.

Love to all.

In Florence...

Well! We have gone from Venice to Verona to Florence. Verona was wonderful. There was a Christmas market that sold very tasty and affordable traditional food. Some of the booths were from neighboring countries. We especially enjoyed the German booths selling brats with Sauerkraut and potatoes!

In Verona we toured most of the open sites and by the end of our time there, it had gotten pretty chilly at night! The bed and breakfast that we stayed at was very cute and modern. We were the only people staying there, so it basically felt like we had an apartment all to our selves. We had a personal bathroom and a very large bedroom with a nice attached seating area. In comparison to our current housing arrangement here in Florence it is a well organized, well designed, well decorated homebase.

Today we arrived in Florence via a semi-bullet train. It was a very crowed train and we were assigned seats that were not even next to each other. We wandered the city and made it into 2 of the major museums. Tomorrow we are off to a side trip to Pisa and Lucca.

More later!

In Fair Verona...

Hello!
We are safe and are getting ready to go out for dinner in Verona. We arrived this afternoon by train from Venice. We had a great time in Venice, although it was a bit expensive. We were warned in Rick Steves, so we were prepared...but it was a bit alarming JUST how expensive it actually ended up being. The canals were fun to cruise and we are now going to enjoy our time in Verona.

We have already visited many of the sites and intend to take a pleasant evening tour of the town. The train ride was comfortable and all is going smoothly so far.

More later!
With love...S&J

We're off again!

We did it! We were able to pull off another trip right after having gone to Greece last year! Its approaching very fast - we leave Friday to tour Italy!

I'll relay as many stories as I can while abroad!
We'll miss everyone and think about them often.
With MUCH love....S+J

See you in other posts!

Made it to Crete!

It is 8:40pm here. We left Athens earlier today and thankfully for us, the transportation (buses and Metro) units changed their planned 24 hour strike to 12pm-4pm, so we were able to take the Metro to the airport.

Crete is very nice and the hotel is great. We have a very large balcony that I just came from sitting outside on in order to ask the desk clerk about the holiday events that are happening tomorrow. Thought I would send a quick update to let everyone know our flight to Crete was successful.

That's all for now...must go back and enjoy our view! :)

Good night!

Athens hates calves...

Hello all!
The cobbled and winding streets have sure done a number to our calves, so we are a bit stiff - but it has been great.

Its 10:40pm here on Monday. Yesterday we mostly walked around and hit all the big sites. We started the morning off, after a good 12 hours or so of sleep, by wandering to the Acropolis which as tradition has it apparently lead ultimately to us wandering into a dead end in the Plaka district and setting off an alarm. Finally we found our way to the main pedestrian walkway and saw the Theater of Herodes Atticus on the way up to the Acropolis. Here in Greece, the security people for the major sites tend to look like regularly dressed pedestrians and they enforce the regulations by way of greetings (particularly "Hello!") rather than things like "Don't touch" or "Off"...etc. Its humorous and a bit confusing when someone in the crowd just starts yelling HELLO into the crowd hoping to get their point across! The Acropolis was amazing and the views were terrific! After we also toured the Ancient Agora and walked over to Kerameikos where it looked like there had been some sort of hobo war...there were clothes and belongings everywhere!

We walked back through the main shop area and glanced at the goods on our way back to the hotel to drop off our things before dinner. We ended up eating at a restaurant called Scholario that serves Mezedes (much like Tapas). It was very good and we tasted our first ouzo in Greece. It was very reasonable and pleasant!

That night we watched some weird Greek TV and saw what American programs were broadcasting (the selection is very interesting)...Michaela, we watched a little Jaime Oliver for you! Unfortunately we ended up waking up at about 3am and not being able to get back to sleep until a few hours later, which at that point we only had a little more time before we had planned to get up for today's events.

Today was amazing! We started the day off by taking the Metro to Likavittos, which is the highest point around here. The view was spectacular! We could see the Acropolis and so much more! We then took the metro back after enjoying the view and resting from the long trek up the hill. We bought some water and headed back out to go to the Archeological Museum, which was nice - but some of it was closed including the shop which was a little disappointing. When we returned we enjoyed a gyro in Ministiraki and then went back to the hotel for a quick nap and to regroup for the evening. We had a pleasant dinner and enjoyed an after dinner drink in one of the oldest bars in Athens.

There are more details, but I've run out of time and we must go to bed for now in order to get up for tomorrow's adventures.

Goodnight for now.

So Tired...

Hello all!
What an adventure! We arrived at ORD around 8:45am and got through security with a breeze, so that was nice because we could just relax and not worry about missing our flight. Turns out that is not what we should have been worried about. Seems the chaos from the big storm hadn't yet cleared, since there were still people who were stuck there since Monday! A few of those who had been stuck, were able to get booked onto our flight and things seemed to be looking up for them. One family in particular, with small children, seemed at their wits end and about to snap if anything else went wrong...so today was also not their lucky day!

Our flight was delayed at first to 11:47am (20min out from its original departure), which seemed manageable since we had about an 1 hour and 20 min layover at JFK. Then it was delayed to 11:55am - still OK. Then 12:25pm...12:26pm...12:40pm...12:55pm and by this time the captain had come out to announce what was going on. Seems a crack was found in the plane so they had to take pictures and send it to the company to get the ok to fly, so we were waiting on maintenance as well as Delta. At 1:20pm they finally boarded us after getting the OK from Delta. There was lots of chaos and many frustrated people who had started rebooking to other flights.

During all this chaos, we happened to meet our first Greek person, Maria. She was on her way home after visiting with her cousin in Chicago for 15 days. She was very nice and we sat and talked while we were waiting to hear what was going on with the plane. It was also nice to find someone else who was going in the same direction and throughout the rest of the flights we looked out for each other (and we helped when she needed with English although her English was quite good).

At 1:47pm we were sitting on the plane and waiting for it to take off finally, hoping that we would still make our connecting flight. No such luck! Another problem was identified: water leaking into the airplane from who knows where, so they ultimately had to deplane all of us and almost had to have someone escorted off the plane by the police because they were so upset about again not being able to go home. So after deplaning everyone and again having people start to rebook - they announced that everything was a go and that the water had only been from someones water bottle having been spilled! Man, so many people were upset at that person, who smartly remained anonymous. By this point though, we definitely were not going to make our connecting flight in New York, so we had to rebook - which meant leaving our current terminal and going to the international terminal and going through security once again!

Turns out we got a pretty sweet deal! The flight on KLM (our new favorite I think!)we got booked on left from Chicago at 4:15pm and flew straight to the Amsterdam. Lots of leg room and decent food. We didn't sleep for long on that flight and then had to connect from Amsterdam to Athens which took about another 3 hours after a couple hour delay in the airport.

After all that we are now in Athens and have had our first Suflaky (I am not even going to pretend I can spell that correctly right now!) and have walked around a little and will probably just take showers and go right to sleep! We are both just floating right now!

Miss you.
Will right more later.