Thyroid Storm

Our last day of the trip is officially here and it's kind of bittersweet. With everything that has been going on in the past few days, I'm more than ready to head home. I can't wait to take a nice hot shower, relax in my own bed, and wash all of the dirty smelly clothes that are sitting in my suitcase. We wake up at 9:00am and are ready to catch the shuttle back to the airport. Fortunately, we were able to check in and get through security without a hitch. Charles de Gaulle Airport is looking pretty nice right about now. We had a little over an hour left before our flight was going to start boarding, so we needed to find some breakfast. We were hungry and thirsty. Unfortunately, the airport was sooo nice ... read more

Our last few days of vacation were coming to an end, and it was starting to get a little sad. With 2 full days left on our trip, we took a 2 1/2 hour train ride down to Naples and then boarded the Circumvesuviana train down to Pompei. I was pretty excited about seeing the ruins even before I got there, but I wasn't fully prepared for how amazing it would be. When we arrived to Pompei, there were acres and acres of excavated ruins, you could spend up to 8 hours or even more in here! It was getting hot and I have a limited attention span as is, but we ended up spending about 4 hours there. And we even hit most of the 70 highlighted spots. After all of the walking around in ... read more

The alarm went off at 6:00am, and we were still pretty tired. We forced ourselves to get up though b/c not having to wait in line to see the Vatican would be worth it. Out the door by 6:45, grabbed our usual breakfast at Bar Fondi, and then caught the metro to St. Peter's Square. It was so incredible to be standing in St. Peter's Square and staring at St. Peter's Basilia. It was unfortunate that the pope had left for the states as we were coming here. But I could still picture him in the square saying mass and having the whole area lined with crowds of people. It was pretty early in the morning, so not a whole lot of sunlight adding to our pictures. I spent quite a bit of time in the ... read more

We were out the door by 8:30am with our very very heavy luggage. By this point I was lugging around all of the glass that I had bought in Venice (gondolas, jewelry, wine stoppers, etc) and three bottles of lemoncielo. I was going to have my work cut out for me to get to the train station. It was a pretty strenuous journey trying to navigate the construction and gravel roads, and it even started to rain as we got closer to the train station. I actually welcomed the rain because I was having severe hot flashes and appreciated being able to cool off. While waiting for the train to Rome, I rewarded myself with McD breakfast...sausage egg and cheese muffin, hashbrown, and real American coffee! Now I was feeling happy and got my second wind ... read more

We woke up at around 9:00am, picked up a few things from the supermarket, and then caught the train to Pisa. It was about a one hour train ride and then another 20 minute walk to the city center. I guess we kind of expected the leaning tower to be right there once we got off the train station, but we ended up having to walk a ways to get to it. Finally we were staring at the Leaning Tower...it was pretty leany alright. It was part of a larger complex that included another duomo, baptistry, and museums. The weather was very temperamental, rain alternating with sun. We walked around the square for a little bit and did some souvenir shopping before deciding whether or not to pay the 15 euros to hike up the tower. ... read more