Day 3 - Rome to Cinque Terre, Italy Last night's espresso was NOT a good idea. I woke up really early and worked on my blog/pictures until the rest of the family (and the sun) awoke.Jim and I walked over to the train station while the kids slept a little longer and picked up our tickets for later in the day. We had breakfast together, then Jim went off to see some more of the city while I packed up and checked schedules for trains for later. We all got going wit...

Day 1 - Rome, Italy I watched the sun rise as we pulled into Venice and docked this morning. Shortly afterward, three more big cruise ships pulled into the dock too. I liked the name of one of them - Costa Fortuna… We found Sally and Pat in the Lido for breakfast just like every morning - after the first couple of days we didn't coordinate breakfast time, but ended up showing up at almost exactly the same time anyway. They were scheduled to disembark about ha...

Day 14 - Last Day - Onboard the ship We occupied ourselves with doing what we liked all day.Jim read in the sun a little, I did a lot of picture sorting (we had a "best-of" picture show at the end of the day). The boys ran around the ship, watching a movie and playing video games at Club HAL (they finally made it through all the levels of the Star Wars game). Sally and I stopped in for High Tea, and went to a lecture on olive oil (no tasting though ).W...

Impressions of Venice: Sally - Impressed by everything being done by water - trash barges, firetruck barges, suitcase barges, ambulance boats, police boats, dirt/construction boats…And the opera house "La Fenice" - magnifico Pat - the HEAT. It really was HOT - as in, sit-in-the-shade-and-drip hot. Jim - The alleyways -some narrow, some wide, always meandering, the plazas… and that water is the means of transport for everything - everyone is eithe...

Day 1 - In Transit Three days just isn't much time to regroup, and repack, especially when you've been on island time for the past week and a half. We managed to get ourselves ready in spite of having half a day less than we thought - I had written on the calendar a noonish departure, but when I checked in for the flight, I realized we left at 6am (meaning a 4am cab ride to the airport). The kids are really good airplane travelers (early conditioning has paid o...