DWalker22

Sunday morning we get up and check out of our hotel and leave to go catch our Colosseum tour. Our flight doesn't leave until the evening, but our tour will run later than our checkout time, and since we only have a backpack for the weekend, we end up carrying our backpacks through the tour. Thankfully, they were relatively light! We meet up with our tour group right outside the Colosseum. It's an odd paradox to see such ancient structures along the busy streets of Rome, one feeling very out of place, but I'm not sure which, the old or the new. The ancient and the modern certainly sit side by side and at the same time, it's an impressively beautiful scene and certainly unlike anywhere else that I know. Beautiful, however, is an odd and ... read more

These all seemed to upload correctly this time but I didn't put labels on each picture just to save some time. Off to dinner here!... read more

Getting into Geneva was no problem and we picked up a rental car this time. Got to our hotel within about 20 minutes, sat and chatted with the guys that Kirk works with for a little bit, and then hit the sack. The next morning, the guys were working until 3 and then heading over to another part of Switzerland where the factory was located. Since we had two cars, I headed out around noon on my own since I knew we were headed into a pretty section of the mountains to a little ski resort town in the Alps. I thought I'd get there early and have a chance to look around and take some pictures. The only thing about driving is you can't really enjoy much of the scenery, especially when you're driving in ... read more

So our Venice trip begins with our two mile walk from the hotel to the train station. This being a much earlier walk, it was definitely cooler than our last walk, but two miles is a long way carrying roughly 50 pounds between two bags! And you still manage to work up a pretty good sweat in Milan even at 7:00 in the morning. But we made it in plenty of time to sit down and have a few cups of Cappucino and a pastry for breakfast. I do have to say that the Italians make excellent coffee! The way the trains worked in Milan, they actually don't tell you which platform you'll be leaving from until about 15 minutes before your train departs. From what we could tell, trains left from both the upstairs and ... read more

Alarm goes off 5:45, we grab showers, but still groggy, needing coffee, and stiff from a restless night, we trudge to the meeting point for our tour (with time to grab a very strong, but very tiny cup of espresso). I'm really second guessing myself at this piont, thinking I should have allowed more time in the U.K. and maybe skipped Italy all together, atleast until our Rome trip. But I also really wanted to see Venice, so I just waited to see what the day held in store for us. We had a full tour bus, with our guide Eddy who did speak English but very heavily accented, and there was one other American couple on the tour with more Australians than any other country. So we head into the Italian countryside, passing through several ... read more