Italian Adventure with the Bemi!!!

Dave and I are back from Italy after a lot of traveling one week. We had sooo much fun visiting with Carrie and Joe and Carlie!!! We took over 200 pictures so I posted them on snapfish so let me know if I did not send you the link. Our trip went like this: we arrived in Venice on Sunday evening (we spent Easter on planes and in the Frankfurt Airport) and Carrie picked us up at the airport. After about a one hour drive we made it to her house. It is very beautiful with marble floors, beautiful coloring and it's very spacious. We ate some leftovers from brunch (which was great after traveling so much!). We played outside with Carlie and just enjoyed visiting. On Monday morning Dave and I woke up super early (like 3:30 AM) and went upstairs and ate pancakes then went back to bed for a few hours. Carrie and Joe took us to Lake Barcis which is about 30 minutes from there home in the mountains. It was beautiful and the water was turquoise. Here is a picture of us at the lake.




Tuesday we got up and started our car adventure to Cinque Terre. The area is on the west side of Italy and it is 5 towns (population appr. 600-900 people) built into the coastline. Along the way Carrie, Carlie and of course myself fell asleep. For me it was a coping method for not getting nauseous on the winding roads. We arrived in Monterroso and checked into the bed and breakfast. The views were breath taking. Here are a few from our patio as well as from our hike around the town (and Carlie and spaghetti).










On Wednesday, we started a one and a half hour hike from the town we were staying in to the next town. Carlie looked very cute in the backpack with Joe:) The hike was beautiful. Joe was definity a trooper for carrying Carlie the entire day! The weather was wonderful and we could not have asked for a better day. Dave and I did some "rock jumping" from about eight feet up into the cold sea. We hiked between two other towns and took the train or boat to see the others. It was a long day with a lot of walking, but it was really neat and all the towns were really cute.









Thursday we drove back. It took about eight hours with a few short stops in Verona and a small town called Soave to see a super neat castle. On Friday we took a quick tour of Aviano AFB and then Dave and I took a train to Venice. We then took a bus from the train station to our hotel, which is actually outside of Venice, and we got lost because someone told us to get off the bus early and we ended up walking a few miles with our heavy backbacks on asking Italians who spoke no English how to get to our hotel. We did finally find it, and we dropped our backpacks off and took another bus into Venice and spent about five hours walking around. We slept for a few hours then got on a shuttle at 5 AM to the airport for the long trip home.









On our way back we had to go through customs in Dallas. We had to pick up our bags, clear customs, then recheck our bags and make it to our gate in about an hour and 15 minutes from the time our plane landed until our next plane took off. We were literally running through the airport to make it. When we went to re-check our bags, they wouldn't let us because there was only about 20 minutes until our flight took off, so we ran and carried our bags on after throwing away some liquids. We did just make the flight, but that was a fun adventure in itself.

Overall, it was a whirlwind trip but we really enjoyed spending time with the Bemi and seeing a lot of beautiful sites in Italy.