italy: the best of the rest

I have been a bad blogger- edited all my italy pics as soon as i got home but has taken me forever to post them cause WE MOVED! We are still in the city, about a mile from our old place but it's so nice to have a little more space- our old place was a 2 bedroom plus a den and this place has 4 big bedrooms- one of which will be a big new office for me- yahoo! Griffey is also loving it over here cause we now have a big deck and a huge yard, and since we switched el lines from the brown to the red Pete's commute to the loop is cut in half! So far it's a win win- well, except for all the unpacking we still need to do... and the place is a bit of a fixer-upper (we have forest green formica counter tops in the kitchen-eeeek) but after a little work we are sure it will be awesome! I will post pics when I get it a little more cleaned up in here...


Okay- on to the rest of the italy pics....After Venice and Florence we rented a car for the last week of our trip and our first stop was Cinque Terre on the the Italian Riviera- a gorgeous spot where you hike between 5 villages tucked into the steep hillside overlooking the Mediterranean. We had some perfect weather for the hike but the next day tons of rain so we took the car up the coast to Genoa- exploring the port town and the boyhood home of Christopher Columbus. Then it was on to Siena (with a pit- stop at the leaning tower in Pisa). We enjoyed exploring Siena early in the mornings and later in the evenings to avoid the tour busses and mid- day we took off on day trips to charming Tuscan towns and the wineries of Chianti. Our next stop was Spoleto, one of my favorite towns cause it was off the beaten path- no tourists, no English spoken, just us and the locals. We hiked along Roman Aquaducts, explored castles and day tripped to Assisi from here before heading back by Rome, to Ostia Antica, where we spent the day exploring the well preserved ruins of ancient rome. So after 16 days, 7 hotels, and countless bowls of pasta, we were ready to head back home- but what an amazing trip!