After breakfast today we were taken straight to the Vatican City. By 8.30am we were in the Vatican museum. We did not have to join the line to enter and we were joined by a local guide who did the narrating. She was able to take us to special places behind the public places that other people did not go to, like the grand spiral staircase which was not stairs at all, but a ramp that the popes in ancient times could ride their horses up. We went through the pine co...

So this morning we boarded our private boat after breakfast and made our way back to the coach for the long drive down to Rome. Tom and I are currently trying to avoid having our head colds develop into bronchitis so we slept most of the way through Tuscany and beyond. The farmhouses were very nice, but the landscape is not as neat as Belgium and Austria. We stopped at a roadhouse along the way for our driver's compulsory rest - it was very crowded, mostly with w...

Our tour group was doing a walking tour of Venice this morning. We did one of those two years ago with the Queen Elizabeth, and we are suffering a little with head colds so we decided to just take our time this morning. There was a soccer match playing just across the canal this morning and the fans really were singing for their teams. Bob thought we'd go in to St Mark's Square with them and then just hang around for four hours or so, but we assured him we'd be j...

This morning we boarded our coach and were taken with a local guide to the shooting locations for Sound of Music. It's very unusual because the movie was a hit with the English speaking world but the Austrians had never heard of it until the tourists started asking about it. Now it has been introduced into their culture. The family names do not get "von" in front of them unless they have achieved something. Von Trapp was in the navy in WWI and sunk an English v...

Also Mozart's birthplace and home to Herbert von Karajan. Austria is where coffee and croissants both started in Europe. The Turks/Ottomans/Muslims occupied the country at some time and when they left they left behind the coffee beans. The person in charge didn't like the smell of the roasting coffee beans so he banished the roasting to a particular town, which after the war was no longer in Austria but in Italy. The croissants were simply a form of bread baked i...