Rome...Finally!

I have been completely unmotivated to get my Rome pictures up, but here are a few.

This, of course, is the Colosseum. It was amazing. We did a tour of the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. On this day, Holly & I started our day at our hotel (of course - LOL!) and headed straight for the Colosseum. It took us 10 hours of walking Rome to get back to our hotel.

Trevia Fountain
Dinner the night of our 10 hour walk. Yes, we ate at McDonalds. We were so exhausted and homesick that McDonalds was a welcome site!
Here I am back at our hotel. For some odd reason I decide to pose with my dear friend, Pepsi. After 10 hours of walking in a foreign country, you do strange things. I was pretty desperate for this Pepsi, I paid 6 Euro for this..which equals about $8.
Here was dinner the first night. We were pretty traumatized and just went to a small market. A great dinner of rolls, Funky Chips, nasty jelly, chocolate and mineral water (that we thought was regular water..that was a surprise)
Here is one of my favorite statues from the Vatican Museum. You don't see many statues of a mother and child so I fell in love with this one.

While I was in Rome, I did not particularly like it or understand it. Now, I am so thankful that I had the opportunity to go there and would gladly go again. Being in Rome was initially hard, it was the first time that Holly & I were truly on our own. We had been away from our kids for a week and deeply missed them. Despite the emotional issues we faced in Rome, we learned a lot of history, spent hours roaming the city and never once got lost. We saw paintings by Leonardo De Vinci, sculptures by Michael Angelo, the Sistine Chapel, Pantheon, the list goes on and on. It truly was amazing!

Random

It has been a crazy month and we are finally on the tail end of it. Now that I have been home for about 3 weeks I have had a lot of time to reflect and think of my trip. I did not think that I would ever consider myself the traveling type but now that I have experienced it, I love it. I hope to go again in the near (within 2 years) future.

It was a blessing to experience the things I experienced and to see how other cultures live. I learned that there is a lot out there to see and do and I am not content to just "be" here anymore.

Here I am in Rome (you can see one of me in Luxemberg at a castle in the top right corner):

It was also an eyeopener to me to watch a military family in action. I don't think any of us here realize what the men and women (and their families) in our armed forces do everyday to make sure we have our freedom. Tim came home the day before we left and we had 24 fun filled hours with him, including being able to watch their family re-unite.


I finally made it home on 9/28 after being delayed 22 hours. I came home to both of Dan's brothers staying at our home for their vacation. We had a great time. Brian stayed a week and Paul stayed for two weeks. Kelley, their sister was able to come and stay one night and we had a great time. The weeks were full of bowling, eating out, movies, shooting guns, shopping and a ton of fun.

Saturday we were able to go to the zoo with just our family. What an amazing trip that was! We had such a great time! The weather was perfect. Probably the last great weekend of the year and we had a perfect day.

I promise to upload more pictures of my trip soon. I have been so busy trying to get back into life.

Rome

I know I promised pictures of Rome..and, it will happen, but we have switched out our computers and not everything has been put on the new one yet..including, my pictures of Rome. So, as soon as I can....I will upload them and show you a few.

In the meantime, we have been crazy busy over here. Dan's brother's have been here for a visit and we have had a great time. Brian went home today and Paul goes home on Thursday. It's been a real blessing for these guys to get together. Their sister Kelley came for a visit on Wednesday and we had all of them together which was awesome. We got some great pictures of that too..I'll post those soon too!

Germany

We're home! It was a whirlwind two weeks and I have 600 photos to go through to figure out which ones are the best to post here. It was a great trip, we had so much fun over there. I'm going try to go in order of our trip and right now I am only going to post the first few days.

Here is a castle called Vianden. It's emmense!!!!!!!!!!!! Isn't it beautiful? It's so bizarre how you drive around the countryside in Germany looking for these huge castles, you can be so close to them and they are hidden so well. Unexpectedly, you turn a corner and bam..there it is!

Ian and I are getting ready to tour Berg Eltz. I enjoyed the times that Ian wanted on my back. This was the first castle that we were able to take a tour of and go inside. This castle is still owned by the original family and the family still lives in part of it. Can you even imagine that? I think this castle is my favorite. It looks like a fairy tale.

Here is a portion of a cute little town called Bernkastel-Kues. I loved this town. It was surrounded by vineyards and a lot of the houses had grape vines growing over their front doors. I can not tell you how tempted I was to just wander over to someones house and pull off a cluster of grapes. The town had this beautiful scent to it and we believe that it actually smells like freshly made grape juice. During our visit there a German band marched through town. This was definately my favorite town.

Notice the grapes! Looks tempting huh?

Here are some castle ruins above the town. It's called Castle Landshut. There is actually a restaurant inside this castle.

The view of the town Bernkastle from the castle.

I was going to go in order of our trip but this happened on the last night and I thought I would share. Yes, we met one of the Vergori's "little" friends. You can't really tell, but this one is 3 inches. There was a lot of screaming happening that night. Oh, and yes..that is a Tim Vergori hand. He came home the last day of our trip and we go to experience the homecoming. But, that's for another post! :)

My next post will be Rome! Stay tuned.