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I got a call yesterday from my friend meg passing on some great news - she and paul got engaged over Thanksgiving weekend!
I'm so happy for you guys! I know you'll be great together, and I wish you all the happiness in the world.
I'm so excited about your wedding!
May you always have walls for the winds, a roof for the rain, tea beside the fire, laughter to cheer you, those you love near you, and all your heart may desire.
-girlie
So, we've finally made it back from our Thanksgiving Italy trip. We had a wonderful time, and have like 1300 photos or something ridiculous to go through... so it may be a little while before I start gettting these up online.
Getting home was a bit of an ordeal, though... we were supposed to be home on Saturday afternoon, but we ended up only making it as far as our connection in Paris before all incoming and outgoing flights were cancelled due to snow and bad weather. Of course, Air France being what it is, we were on the plane sitting at the gate for four hours before they finally cancelled, then we stood in a line for three hours to get a hotel voucher, then we stood in line for a half hour to get a shuttle to the hotel, then we came back the next morning at 7:15 and stood in lines for three hours before getting on the plane, which didn't leave until about three hours after it was supposed to.
At least we got a hotel - the country inn and suites at the airport! (and food - which we took pictures of.)
Anyway, we didn't end up actually getting back to Austin until almost 8 last night, by which point I was feeling well and truly wretched. I apologize to anyone we spoke with on the phone last night, because both of us were so out of it and crazy that I'm sure we didn't make much sense. (Thanks for taking care of the cats, proops - they look great and healthy!)
I'm staying home from work today - I definitely caught something awesome on the plane yesterday, so I thought it would be best to try to get some rest and maybe do a little laundry. I don't appear to be running a fever, though, just achy and ouchie and throat pain, so maybe I'll be ok by tomorrow if I hydrate well.
OK, that was fascinating. I'm going to lay back down now, since my head's started spinning again. Whippee!
-girlie
So, I haven't been able to put up another honeymoon post because *someone* keeps taking his laptop to work. Waah, I need my computer to type things with! Waah! (Oh, hi, husbear! Didn't see you there.)
So, we leave for Florence the day after tomorrow. I'm not nearly as freaked out as I usually get before big long-distance travel of this sort... but I'm not sure if that's because it's my fourth time overseas (but who's counting?) or if it's because the trip is so short. We've pretty much got everything ready - I finally got my boots situation taken care of, though I wasn't able to get the red boots I've been lusting after. Apparently, I have little stick calves on which I precariously balance my giant butt. (yes, I went shopping for pants yesterday, so I'm a little fragile.)
I've gotten out all of the luggage and packing cubes and envelopes and tickets and passports and moneybelts and books and coats that we'll be needing, so that's good, but we still need to get our clothes all sorted and packed. I'm leaving work early tomorrow, just in case anything comes up.
I hope to have one last picture-filled post up before we go, since I'm sure we'll come back from Florence full of pictures. If this doesn't happen, my bad.
I think the trip will be pretty productive; we have an appointment set up with the school and with one housing agency, and we have inquiries in to two more that we'll hopefully hear back from before we go. Also, the husbear's mama plays bridge with a guy who has a sister who lives just outside of Florence with her family, so we'll be meeting her, her son, and her son's girlfriend for dinner on Sunday. It will be nice to maybe meet a few people who live there.
The plan, right now, is that we'll get in on Sunday, drop our bags at the hotel, and go to the Accademia to see David. When we go on trips like this, we like to immediately go do something that really highlights the fact that we're in a new place, so this should be great.
Now, I just hope the hotel has our reservations....
I've been trying to find a way to fit in this picture of me enjoying a lovely croissant the morning before we left Positano for Amalfi, but haven't been able to. So, I think I'll just throw it in right here.
Now you want a tasty breakfast pastry, right?
Well, it looks like I am going to completely miss my stated goal of finishing blogging our honeymoon before we jet off to Florence. It's a good thing I'm not getting graded on this, yes?
On an unrelated note, we went to Cool River Cafe last night because we got a random certificate in our mail for $25 off food. (Huh! I didn't know it was a chain! Well, that certainly explains a lot.) Our conclusion? Eh. They did have a really nice wine list; we got a reasonably priced viognier/chenin blanc from these guys, which went well with our giant deep dish spinach/artichoke dip, seared tuna (me) with wasabi/jicama slaw and mango sticky rice, and salad with pecans, blue cheese, and pears (husbear). Maybe we didn't give them a fair chance, since we didn't get any steaks, but the food was just ok. The place was huge, though! We went over into the bar after we ate, thinking we might get an after-dinner drink, but the place had a coverband singing "brick house", "car wash" along with many other 70s specialties, booty-dancing 30somethings, and an oddly Disney vibe, so we left.
They did make the Husbear a great negroni, though.
Anyway, back to the honeymoon.
Tuesday, I woke up with my calves just aching - those stairs were really coming back to bite me. I tried to hobble around for a little while, but it just wasn't working for me. We decided to get a later start, hoping I would be able to walk.
We ended up leaving in the late morning for Herculaneum. Husbear figured that this would mean less walking than Pompeii, since it's supposed to be a smaller site, plus we both agreed that just laying there probably wouldn't help my calves any.
Getting to Herculaneum entailed a bus to Sorrento, and then the circumvesuviana train to Ercolano Scavi. Ercolano's the modern town, parts of which sit right on top of Herculaneum. (Scavi = ruins.)
We walked to the top of the town and waited for the bus.
I took a few pictures of us to while away the time while we waited.
It didn't take too long to get there. (maybe an hour?) When we arrived, we found a little pizza place for a late lunch, and I got a pizza with marinara sauce and anchovies. Stupidly, no pictures. I still remember that smell, though.
Ercolano was pretty nondescript; not a lot of history evident in the walk from the station to the ruins. Lots of graffiti, though.
Please forgive me for my nonexistent notes - I'm not sure which buildings we're standing in front of...
Anyway, here's the gate to get into the ruins.
This was the first glimpse we had of the site, after paying at the gate.
You can see modern Ercolano in the distance. It's pretty amazing how well-preserved a lot of the site was, after almost 2000 years; even from this distance, you can see little bits of the frescoes and murals on the walls of the buildings.
We paid for the audio tour, which we figured would help us to know what we were looking at. (shoulda written it down!)
(That's the audio tour around my neck, and I'm not sure what these columns are, dangit!)
Some areas of the site had been really nicely restored, like this building (follow the link.)
There were some funny off-color mosaics in the ladies' baths; many of the same kind of things we saw in the restricted room in the Archaeological Museum in Naples.
Someone (or a group of someones) really spent a lot of time on that mosaic! The pattern covered the floor of a very large room.
You could really easily see a lot about the day-to-day lives of the Romans on the streets of Herculaneum. There were wagon ruts in the roads. We saw the remains of several food stands, and I made Husbear pose at one of them.
Apparently, the citizens of Herculaneum often ate lunch away from home, and would stop at these vendors. Those are very large pots bricked into the counter, from which lunch would be dished up. Interesting.
There were some really great statues around the grounds, especially in the ruins of the great houses. We especially liked this one of Hercules, which doesn't really aggrandize him so much as make a lot of fun of him, unlike most of the statues you see. (The original's in Naples.)
All told, we were at the site for about 4 hours... If Herculaneum's really so much smaller than Pompeii, I can't imagine how long it would take to go through that town! As it was, we didn't listen to good chunks of the audio tour. Pompeii must be enormous.
We headed back to Positano via train/bus. My calves were actually feeling a little better, which was a good thing, because after we got back and picked up some things for dinner, it was once again time to climb these.
This was the last strech of stairs on the way back to our little house. By Tuesday, we actually were starting to get a little more acclimated to them, in that we didn't have to collapse each time we walked into the house.
Husbear made a really great dinner, which we ate on our porch.
Mozzarella wrapped in lemon leaves, olives, pasta with tomatoes and mushrooms, bread, and a bottle of local wine... and that view of the Mediterranean. (Unfortunately, it's kind of hard to take pictures of the view when it's dark. They should fix that.)
That's it for me, until next time...
girlie
EVERYONE! YEAH, YOU TOO!
Now that I have your attention, let me tell you to tune in tonight to watch my cousin, TamTam, (here's her fan club, which you should all totally join) on Freddie (checkyourlocallistings). I haven't seen the show before, but I'm going to put that behind me and watch tonight.
WOOOO!
Look what I found in our door this afternoon! Ewwwww!
OK, first off, congratulations to Megan on the occasion of her passing the bar! WOOOOO! Go get 'em, legally of course!
I've just realized that we're only a little over two weeks from our trip to Florence, so I better get all these honeymoon pictures uploaded before we've got more travel to blog. I know, I know, the heart just bleeds for me.
We were pretty tired after all the travel involved in getting to Positano (planes, trains, ferries, and our poor lil leggies), so we set aside our first day as a rest day. It was definitely time to put our stuff down and figure out where the hell we were.
We got our clothes-shopping out of the way early. (No, not really... though apparently, at one time, Positano was really considered hot stuff in the world of fashion. ?!)
After this exhausting shopping excursion, it was definitely time to grab some wine and go down to the beach...
We considered renting a car during our stay, but decided against it. Though this car actually might have been able to make it up the narrow stairs.
The next day, totally happy and rested, we headed off to Amalfi... (here's a picture of us on the boat).
I liked Amalfi a lot, actually. It was a beautiful town, in a way that was actually different from Positano. Much more gently sloping, for one thing! We really couldn't see much of Amalfi's proud maritime history, though there were some lovely statues and buildings that showed there must have, at one time, been an awful lot of money 'round there.
The Duomo was stunning. It was really easy to see the influence the Moors had on the area.
And this interesting fountain out front was not to be missed. (Our guidebook called this graceful lady the "squirty-titted nymph". Not that I'd ever be rude enough to call her that. Especially not on the internets. Anyway, here's a closeup, for those of you who want one...)
The bottom part of the town, where the buses and boats discharged all of us day-trippers, was really crowded. In fact, by the time we fought our way up to the Duomo, I was feeling kinda overwhelmed by the slow-moving crowds, thinking "Man, did every tourist on the Amalfi Coast HAVE to come here today?"
I shouldn't have been so worried. We only had to get like a half-mile away from the beach, up the Via Genova, for everything to completely clear out. I was stunned at the difference such a short distance made, and the sights we saw just a little ways off the main drag were really, really cool.
First, we dropped in on the paper museum, which offered tours of the old paper-making facilities. Amalfi has been making paper for papal decrees for a really long time - 1500 years?
The tour was GREAT.
There were only two other people on the tour with us. We got to see papermaking equipment from the 1500s and an actual relic of the industrial revolution, which the terrifically animated guide was kind enough to turn on for us. It had been working since the 1780s! The machine he's standing on there was for pulping old white clothes with water. Their paper is actually made from cloth, not wood pulp, so apparently it lasts a lot longer. (Here's a picture of the guide making a new sheet of paper.) He showed us one of the last production sheets made by the factory, which was about 30 years old, and it was in really good shape. We bought some computer paper, which we've been meaning to use to print out wedding pics. (What? It was only like 18 months ago!)
We headed a little further up the main road, through the Valle dei Mulini (valley of the (paper) mills), until we began to run out of town. Then, we bought a bottle of wine, sat in the woods, and waited for our next stop to open. (This was the view we had.)
I like this picture of me... it's up in the forest, overlooking the valley.
Anyway, we headed back down the hill to our next destination... a limoncello factory!
This place was so, so neat. It didn't seem like they had had any out-of-town visitors for quite a while. I felt kind of bad interrupting, since everyone in there was bottling liqueurs for sale in the tourist shops down further in town, but this really nice gentleman took us under his wing. He walked us around the shop, pulling down open bottles of liqueur and proudly showing them to us, and gave us little sippy cups of each one. We played a game of charades to figure out what everything was, which was great. For instance, for the laurel liqueur, he said "Romans" and mimed a hat, then pumped his fist into the air in a victorious gesture. Ah, the universal language! (I really should learn some Italian!)
I'm pretty sure these are (l to r) mandarin liqueur, crema de limone, laurel (bay leaf) liqueur, a local citron liqueur, and a mixed fruit liqueur. (That word looks strange. Did I spell it right?) They were all so, so good. We left with light heads and lighter pockets. Totally wonderful.
We really liked Amalfi! It was a different kind of town then Positano, which was neat to see. There were still way too many photogenic scenes to put up here, though.
I don't know if I'd stay there, but it was certainly a nice place to go for a day. Of course, I'm sure it's totally different at night, when everyone leaves...
