As it turns out, Tuscany is one of the most beautiful parts of the world that I've ever laid eyes on. Honestly, I have no idea why I took to it the way that I did. In any case, I think that I probably annoyed everyone else by constantly making comments about how beautiful I thought everything was.
Radda in Chianti info.
Photo links -
Verona/Florence/Lucca
Bagni di Lucca/Modena etc.
Florence
Driving in Italy.. let me rephrase that. Driving in Italy south of Bozen/Bolzano is like nothing that I've ever experienced. Road markings seem to have little or no meaning & stoplights are somewhat of an 'optional' thing. At times, we'd be sitting at a stoplight 5 or 6 cars wide and within a couple hundred yards, we'd be back in to two lanes. After a couple of days though, you kind of develop a 6th sense about where and what is happening. It's quite strange. Definitely not Germany any longer.
Verona... the world seems to think that Verona & Venice are the greatest things since sliced bread. Verona was o.k. and Venice was... an old city that's currently decaying at a mad rate. Florence (Italians call it Firenze) is one of my favorite Italian cities. It's only surpassed by
Lucca, a smalled walled city west of Florence on the way to Piza. What an amazingly beautiful city! Lucca sits just at the base of the mountains in a valley. It's quite hard to describe what I found so cool about it, but I know that Kera really liked it as well. I also bought a new pair of specs in Lucca as well.
What else? Oh, you'll see a number of photos from a small town called Bagni di Lucca. My mother, who never asks for anything, asked me to see if we could go there to check out the area. She loves the figurines from a company called Fontanini and they're made in this region. We found the factory and went in to what we thought was a store but was, in fact, the rep. showroom. The lady was very nice and let us take a few photos before we left.
On Teri & Tony's last night we hit the 6 Day track races. Here's the link -
6 Day Races
Other things... I've been sending out resumes to some of the various language schools here in town and have heard nothing in return. I've also been doing a fair amount of work for Vincenzo, the Baron that owns Castello di Roncade (where we stayed with Nikki & Aaron). Last Sunday I worked the wine fair all day and then Kera came to help in the early evening. It was quite an exercise of the Deutsch skills as well as a learning experience.
This past week, I've been helping Vincenzo do deliveries and generally meeting the local customers. Not sure what or if anything will come of it, but it keeps me out of the bars and whorehouses (so to speak)!
We both got new glasses in the last week. Kera's are really cool, but I have no pics of them, yet. Mine... well, here they are.
With all the spare time, I've been riding & running a fair amount. Saturday morning, we went to spin class with our favorite trainer. An hour of hard work that left us pretty much spent. It definitely makes getting through winter riding o.k. Sunday & today I went for a run.
