Italy is beautiful even in the pouring rain. And in the fog, and in drizzle and under cloud cover. We didn’t manage to meet up with Bethany, alas, alas, but we had a great five days of fun exploring in a whirlwind of foccacia, walking, rainclouds and tourist traps. The sun came out the last 2 days and lit things up with a stunning vengeance. O! Bella Italia!
My phone died the second day and our travel charger didn’t work at all so we were without phones for most of the week and without internet access for all of it. I twitched a bit for a few days, but then (apart from feeling guilty that I couldn’t contact Bethany), strangely, grew to enjoy the silence. I wrote blog posts in my head, and talked to some of you incessantly in my head, and uploaded photos only to Headbook.
Mostly, however, I enjoyed a vacation with my family which found us on the road, on the train, on the coast, in the mountains, enjoying every minute of it, from Rapallo’s quiet harbor to Genoa’s aquarium and labyrinthine old town to the sparkling jewelry shops of the Ponte Vecchio and the glory of the Florentine Duomo, to the sun-washed beauty of the Cinque Terre and the quirky marvel of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the immense gravity and surprising peacefulness of the Piazza dei Miracoli. We didn’t see half the things we meant to, but we saw as much as we possibly could and then some.
But after we landed in Copenhagen late this afternoon, and retrieved our luggage and took the train across the sound to Sweden and came up from the platform into the setting sun and the crisp, chilly, FRESH air, all I could think was, after 3 pretty-much-solid weeks of traveling: There’s no place like home.