Tour de Italy

We are currently in Athens. Our fellow traveling Aggies have just left :(

We had an incredible time with them and already miss them. But we are excited for the next phase of our adventure, Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. We are taking today to catch our breath and catch up on this blog!

ITALY

We cruised through this beautiful country in about 3 days! We started in Venice, the "Sinking City." We saw a Venetian glass blowing demonstration at a Murano glass shop, St. Marks Square, Realto Bridge, and of course tasted the gelato! It was so odd to not see any cars, it is truly all by boat. However even on the water you still have boat traffic, boats cutting you off, honking, people stealing parking spots, yelling, speeding, etc. Almost all theshops and stores had a boat access door in the back.

The streets were pretty cobbled stones with narrow ally ways, bright colored buildings, and bridges everywhere. Some of us checked out Frari Cathedral which was cool. We met back up with the group and went for a gondola ride. We unfortuantely were not able to meet up with our little brother, who was stationed just outside Venice at Aviano Air Force base for 3 weeks. We ended the night at an awesome pizza restaurant owned by our bus driver, Saverio's, friend. We all got our own indiviual pizza and still to this day is probably my favorite. We are also introduced to the popular drink, limoncella. Because we stayed outside of Venice and there were no bars or clubs around we turned our tour bus into a DISCO BUS! We had a dance party and the lights turned into strobe lights and it was awesome! Our tour guide, Herbie, can dance!

Moving along, the next day we drove to Florence. We had a wine tasting just outside Florence that was fun. We got a quick tour of small Florence and its four main squares. We visited the large leather market and enjoyed the sites for a few hours. We had an Italian dinner and quickly learned that in Italy it is common to have at least 4 course meals. We thought we were done after our bread, salad, and pasta but then they brought out turkey and potatoes and two courses of dessert! crazy! That night we hit up the Discoteca! The first floor was karaoke and the second floor was dancing. We discoverd some hidden singing talent on the trip!

The next day we sped off to Rome and the Vatican. There was a holiday the next day and the Vatican was going to be closed. We got a tour of the Museum, the Sistene Chapel, St. Peter's Cathedral, etc. It was cool to see the homeland of the pope. On the tour we all had individual "whisper" devices. We all had one ear piece and our guide had a mike on. We have since seen them all around Europe but we hadn't seen them before that and we all felt like secret service.

The next day we toured around Rome via metro. These metros are jammed packed. We had never seen so many people stuffed into a metro before. (ominous) We saw the incredible sites of the Colosseum, Pantheon, Trevi fountain, Spanish steps, etc. A group of us went to visit the final prison that Peter and Paul were held in. It was really powerful and made the scripture we read very real. The cell was so dark, damp, and small. We wondered how Paul was able to write his letters in there.

Did I mention that our hotel is an old convent??

It was really cool. And we all had fun pretending to think about being a monk/nun.

We took a boat ride to the island of Capri. It was beautiful there. We had a boat tour around the island and got to see the blue, green, and white grotta. Some of us went out on a little boat later and were able to swim into the blue grotta. We were in the middle of this dark cave and the water is bright blue beneath you. It was really cool. We then boated over to Sorrento and stayed the night there. It was a beautiful kind of Spanish looking town on the cliffs of the blue gulf of Naples.

The next day we drove to Pompeii. We had an amazing tour guide that took us through the buried city. She described to us a good picture of what life was like in 79 A.D. We then took an overnight boat to Greece. And after a bus ride and another boat we landed on the island of Poros where we chilled for 3 nights!

We are losing steam writing this so we can only imagine you are too. We will call it a post.

Love ya'll.