Where are we? What day is today?: The Strawn, Waybright, Hough Invasion!!!

We’re back!!! Okay, it’s really been a while this time. We’ve been getting requests for blog updates so here goes…please beware this one’s gonna be a long one!

Let’s see…we left off on our way to Paris to meet up with Scott’s family. We arrived in Paris a couple of days before they did, so we spent time seeing a few sites though we tried to hold off for most of them for when his family got there. We spent an afternoon in Versailles seeing grand palace of Louis the XIV. He really loved to spend money. The palace and surrounding gardens were quite elaborate. There were also probably about 500 pictures and sculptures of good ole Louis throughout the palace and exhibits. We think Louis really liked himself.

Not bad for a back yard

Mike, Diane, Becca, Jason, Julie, and Jeremy all arrived early on Friday the 23rd of October and we met up with them at the hotel. What an awesome reunion! It’s amazing how nice it feels to see familiar faces when you’ve been in a foreign place for so long! We visited the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre (check out Mona‘s pic), Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, Champs Elysees, and Sacre Coeur Basilica. I must say that upon first walking up to the Eiffel Tower I got teary-eyed. I was absolutely moved and amazed by how impressive a structure it truly is. Seeing it at night was absolutely gorgeous.

Julie, Jeremy, Scott, and Brooke at the Louvre

We left Paris the following evening and went to Nice in southern France. What a lovely little beach town! We hiked up some cliffs and saw great views of the ocean and mountains surrounding Nice (see pic on the right). We enjoyed brunch at a beach side restaurant, walked through the local farmer’s market and then hopped on a train to Monte Carlo (Monaco - or some people also liked to call it Morocco…haha!).

Once again, another amazing town. And the boats….or actually yachts were out of control. As were the cars. We saw several Ferari’s driving around. You can tell there is a lot of money in that town. We walked around and ventured up a cliff overlooking the city where there was a castle and the royal palace. We visited the church where Princess Grace Kelly was married and buried, had a delicious dinner and after that…we hit the casinos! Unfortunately this didn’t go quite as Scott had envisioned from the movie Casino Royale. The first casino we went into you actually had to pay 10 euros to enter to play the tables. That meant we all turned around and walked back out. Seriously, who really pays to enter a casino to play???!!! We found another casino that you didn’t have to pay to play so went in to do a little gambling. I won 11 euros on the slot machines (Wheel of Fortune)! I think Julie won about 75 euros on Roulette and Jason was the big winner and came out with 180 euros also on Roulette. Scott also played Roulette. That’s all I’m going to say about that. After that, we left ‘Morocco’ and went back to Nice.

All aboard!!! The following afternoon we all went by train to Milan, where we stayed for 3 nights. The purpose of staying in Milan was more or less to have a central location to go back to in the evenings and just do day trip excursions. That way we wouldn’t change hotels every night and have to take our luggage all over the place. Our first night in Milan we took everyone to see Il Duomo (see Milan blog from September) and have dinner. This was the night Scott ordered a horse sandwich, which actually tasted pretty good. On Tuesday morning (the 27th) we got up early and took the train to Lake Como. We found a great deal on a small ferry boat ticket Como that was good for the entire day and would take us to different little towns along the lake. You could hop on and hop off whenever you wanted. We got on the boat and hopped off and walked around a quaint little town called Cernobbio and then grabbed lunch near the water. What’s so nice about meals in general in France, Italy (really anywhere in Europe) is you can just take your time and relax. People really enjoy their meals and there’s no rush about it. We went to a few more towns along the lake and then we took the train back to Milan in the evening. Not bad for a day trip excursion.

Chernobbio on Lake Como

Becca enjoying whipped cream with her hot cocoa!

Sunset over Lake Como

We had dinner back in Milan at a great restaurant not too far from our hotel. We enjoyed some great Italian food and wine. I ended up with a very unique seafood pasta . It came out covered with a crust/dough over a big bowl and inside was the spaghetti and seafood which included mussels, clams, shrimp, and octopus (see picture). Everyone else seemed pretty happy with their meals as well…nobody went hungry!

The next day Julie and Jeremy said their goodbyes to everyone. Jeremy is currently enrolled in the Duke MBA program that includes course studies abroad and he was required to be in Dubai for the beginning of November. That also meant that Jeremy had to study quite a bit on the trip. (See pic of Jeremy at the Arc de Triomphe) Though we were sad to see them go, we were excited about their Dubai adventure and can’t wait to hear about that experience.

Mike, Diane, Becca, Jason, Scott, and I continued on and went on another day trip excursion, this time Venice. Wow! Another charming city. We were all quite impressed with the beauty of this city and it wasn‘t as dirty as we had heard it was. It truly is unique that the main means of transportation is by water taxis, boats, gondolas, etc. that venture throughout the canals. We did take a boat ride in the afternoon…we couldn’t resist. We also walked through the town and it’s small streets and brick roads make it very quaint. It was actually more like walking through a maze of streets. We enjoyed lunch, shopping, and indulging in delicious deserts and treats. We returned to Milan that afternoon and had dinner in the evening.

Our Venice boat!

On Thursday morning, we packed up our stuff for a new destination, Florence. We stayed in a beautiful hotel outside of the city, with great views of vineyards and fall foliage. That first afternoon we walked around the town, visited Il Duomo, and had dinner. Scott and I had found a café with WiFi to get on-line. As we were sitting there, a table was set up with all sorts of appetizer type foods. A really cool thing we discovered about restaurants in Italy is that many of them will offer appetizer type foods for free as long as you buy any type of drink. This place had quite a spread of food and you can go back and fill up as many plates as you want! So that was our dinner that night. On Friday we splurged and went on a Tuscany bus tour. We had the most perfect fall day for the outing. We visited the Tuscan area called Chianti and the tour included a wine and olive oil tasting at a castle, stops in 2 other Tuscan towns (Greve & Castlellano), and dinner at an Italian restaurant. Tuscany is absolutely beautiful with rolling hills and vineyards and the foliage was also amazing.

View of Chianti from the castle

Barrel of wine...glug, glug Diane!

On Saturday, our last day with the fam, Scott and I went with Mike and Diane for another day excursion to Siena. It is another Tuscany town we wanted to visit. We had lunch in the area that is the sight of where they have 2 horse races per year. The race takes place in the middle of town in a plaza (piazza) that is circular (see pic on right). The race consists of the horses doing only one lap and only 10 out 17 Tuscany areas/counties get to enter a horse. Apparently the object is to win any way that you can and there doesn’t have to be a rider on the horse at the end of the race. This can mean throwing rocks/objects at other horses/riders to injure them, pushing another rider off their horse, etc. The rule is that there really are no rules. That evening we had dinner in Florence and said farewells to Mike, Diane, Becca, and Jason. They had an early flight to catch to get to London and then on to Charlotte. We really enjoyed our time spent with everyone and look forward to seeing ya’ll during the holidays. Thank you for an awesome time!

Scott, Brooke, Jason, Becca, Julie, Jeremy, Diane, and Mike at Lake Como

Scott and I checked out of the hotel and decided to stay another 2 nights in Florence to try and plan out some more of our trip. We stayed in a hostel in the city until Tuesday (11/3). We decided we wanted to go to Greece (Becca and Jason may have had some influence on that…thanks ya’ll!) So now we are in Greece and let me say that getting here was quite an adventure. When we left from Florence, we took the train to Rome and stopped for about 4 hours and managed to visit St. Peter's Basilica, ride a tour bus, and have lunch. From Rome we took a train to Bari that took about 4 hours. Bari is the port city where we caught a huge ferry to get us to Greece. The ferry ride was only 15 hours long! We left at 8pm and arrived at 12:30pm the next day in a town called Patras. The ferry was a very cool experience. It had a lounge/cafe, restaurant, casino (slots), sleeping areas, cabins, TV’s. We were able to keep ourselves occupied and even able to get some sleep. In the morning as we were getting closer to Greece we passed by several islands so the scenery was amazing. From Patras we had to take another train to get to Athens. This train left around 3pm and arrived in Athens around 7pm. Nothing like 2 full days of travel to get to paradise! We will post more about Greece later. We aren’t really sure how long we will be here. We do know that at this point we plan to be in Europe until around the 18th/19th of November. We will go back to the US for the holidays and spend time with our family and friends.

Special birthday wishes go out to my nephew, Gavin, who turned 4 today! Happy Birthday buddy!!!

Things we’ve learned:

- Ask the price of a beer before you order one in Paris. Scott walked into a restaurant to use the restroom and was told he needed to order something. We ordered 2 regular sized beers…big mistake. The cost for those 2 beers was 18 Euros or ~$28.
- On Friday nights at the Eiffel Tower they light it up with crazy colored lights and its coordinated with music so the lights change with the beat. Quite the dance party!!!
- At the casinos in Monte Carlo, the men don’t really dress up in tuxedos to gamble like in Casino Royale.
- George Clooney has a house on Lake Como.
- Venice is actually cleaner than we thought it would be and the water is not as dirty as we had expected.
- You can easily walk faster than the tour buses in Rome.
- Extra virgin olive oil is between 0.2 and 0.8 acidity and regular virgin olive oil is 0.8-2.0 in acidity.
- Chianti wines that have a black rooster on the label means it comes from the original Chianti area of Tuscany.
- In Florence you can’t count on the city buses to run on time…boy did we spend some time waiting at the bus stop!
- It’s great to see family no matter where you are in the world! We miss ya'll already!

More pics...

PARIS