Everybody who was anybody in Italy in the Middle Ages seems to have been in Florence at the beginning of the Renaissance. Every time you turn a corner you can sense two thousand years of footsteps and imagine what it might have been like to live here as history unfolded around you. I loved the […]
I remember reading Dan Brown’s Inferno, and trying to imagine the sights of Florence as he’s saving the world again. The Boboli Gardens, Palazzo Vecchio, the Gates of Paradise on the Baptistry of the Cathedral of Florence — it’s all here, and it is beautiful. Florence — just the name of the city looms […]
Another day, another train – this trip a series of four regional trains that will take us to the town of Rosignano, where Sara lives. Sara stayed with us three years ago, when she came to America (which seems to be the preferred way to call the United States) as a Rotary Exchange student. She […]
Our second day with Monika was really one of the best days we have had on our trip so far. Of course she knew all the little out-of-the-way places that we would have never found on our own, which made our day with her even more special. I can’t really even remember which towns we […]
Being from a small Iowa town, I don’t think I will ever get used to the way life goes on in a big city. So with some relief, we relegate Munich, Vienna, and Venice with all her island children to memory and head west to visit my friend Monika in the small mountain town of […]
I will never, ever complain again about the teenager at the Taco John’s drive through who gives me my soda in a glass filled to the brim with ice. I try to tell myself that ice is better for me than soda…getting my 64 ounces a day. But still. It’s hard enough to go to […]
Faced with the fact that my traveling companions hate walking, we decided to skip walking around Venice for a second day in favor of taking a boat to the islands of Murano and Burano. We bought a day pass for the public transportation system (which turned out to be an excellent idea) and headed for […]
It’s a strange feeling to cross a border in Europe. When you drive from state to state in America (roughly the same distance covered), nothing changes. You have to watch carefully for the “Welcome to Nebraska!” sign to even know you have actually crossed the border. We took a Flixbus on a nine-hour drive from […]
I have always tried my best to avoid reading any kind of history of war. It was nothing I wanted to know about, and I am ashamed to admit that for most of my life I was never certain whether Hitler was World War I or II. But in Europe I see history everywhere, in […]
Traveling can get expensive — first the planes, then the trains, then the busses and hotels…what we don’t usually take time to consider is entrance fees to all the stuff you want to see. All three of us wanted to see the zoo, all three of us wanted to visit Schonbrunn Palace, but we decided […]
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