An elderly woman in one of the many museums we visited said that if we wandered around we would see many beautiful things. Well, we've wandered around and we have seen many things. Some were humerous, like the Irishman in the cafe off to find cheaper ice creams for his young sons. Then he told us it was his wife's birthday and she had gone shopping for the day. The shops in Florence are filled with exquisite shoes and clothes cut to show the female figure at its best - and he was worried about the price of ice creams! We've [View Full Entry]

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Our three month sojurn has come to an end with this our last day in Rome. We have done all the normal tourist agenda; the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Forum, and the Spanish Steps. Sitting in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican it ocurred to me that Michelangelo preferred the male form. Young boys in fact. The lady in red sitting next to me, having heard me comment on this fact, told me that he was gay and that he rarely painted females and when he did they looked more like men with balloons than women. To illustrate her point she [View Full Entry]

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What can we say about Florence that hasn't already been said, and by all the famous writers and poets who have visited? David is spectacular and so is the scenery. K's main disappointment is the amount of scaffolding covering a fair number of the monuments. He says if Italy can afford to spend millions on restoration work, then they should be able to afford toilet seats. My only disappointment is that, because of K's hectic schedule I don't have time to try on any of the beautiful clothes in the numerous stores. One evening we attended a free choral concert in [View Full Entry]

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In Carrera we toured two marble mines, one open pit and one below ground, with an old mining museum and a couple of shops that sold marble fashioned into beautiful objects including two pedestals I would have loved to take home with me. The price was very reasonable if only we didn't have to pay for shipping and duty! The marble from these mines has influenced construction and culture of the region since Roman times. Many of the cathedrals and monuments are built with the white-grey marble, including the statue of David that we hope to see in Florence. We drove [View Full Entry]

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On Wednesday morning we watched Parmigiano Reggiano being made, a process that has gone on daily since 1200. The cheesemaker combines untreated milk from the morning milking with partly skimmed milk delivered the evening before in large copper vats. After adding whey from the previous day along with a natural enzyme, the milk curdles. It is cooked for a few minutes while the cheese solids seperate from the liquid and fall to the bottom of the vat. The cheese is lifted from the vat and placed in forms for a couple of days before being immersed in a saturated sea-salt solution [View Full Entry]

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We had been in Italy less than three hours before we ran foul of the ticket inspector for not validating our train tickets. Having asked specifically for tickets for a particular train and whether seats were assigned etc., it never occurred to us that they had to be validated in a small yellow machine tucked away in the corner of the station, and our salesman, who spoke good English, did not offer this information. The ticket inspector fined us 5 Euros each and, when we complained, pointed out that the maximum fine is 50 Euros, muttering about L'Anglais as he wrote [View Full Entry]

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From Trogir we sailed through the mostly uninhabited Kornati Islands visiting Kakan, Zut, and Iz on our way back to Zadar. The weather was mixed but we did manage to play with the blister for a few hours and keep the engine hours to a minimum. The water is warming by mid-June (23 degrees C) and swimming off the back of the boat and sunbathing au naturel is common in Crotia. Croatia is crazy about soccer and, in addition to eliminating England in the preliminary rounds to Euro 2008, they now are top of their pool. HD big screen tv's are [View Full Entry]

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Our foul weather gear came in handy on Friday when we sailed from Vis to Brac with 15-25 knt winds being generated by swirling thunderheads and the associated rainstorms. Brac is the source of fine white limestone used by the Romans to build Diocletian's palace in Split and can be found in the White House. We stayed in the little port of Pucisca next to the limestone quarry which still produces high quality stone and is the home of a school for stone-masons. There are some interesting limestone structures including intricate streetlamps. Over the weekend the storms have dissipated and the [View Full Entry]

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On Sunday June 1st after a couple of nights in Dubrovnik and with our new crew aboard, we started our sail northwest back to Zadar. The winds which has been consistently SE for the past 2 weeks also had a change of direction to northwesterlies. Sailing for another two weeks with the wind on the bow seemed our monotonous fate, however today the wind resumed its southeasterly flow and we employed our blister for the first time to good effect passing all the Austrians who had non. The blister, the equivalent of a cruising spinnaker that attaches to the forestay, is [View Full Entry]

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We arrived mid-afternoon in the Dubrovnik Marina after a pleasant close-hauled sail against 10-15 knt winds and a brief picture-taking stop outside the harbour of the old town. The ACI marina is 2 miles up the river Dubrovacka in the grounds of an old mansion with formal gardens and ponds. The marinas in Croatia have some of the best facilities we have used and since we were here last, two years ago, ACI have added new washrooms and showers at the end of the Ecker dock. Ecker yachting have an office here so we are able to clean the boat and [View Full Entry]

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