Italian Extravaganza

Hi y'all!!

So, we are back from our honeymoon, and I have to say it could not have been any more amazing.  Everything was so spectacular and smooth.  I absolutely could not ask to change anything at all.  The weather was beautiful, the travel was easy, and the company was (as always) the best around.  

Of course, baby also had a blast.  Baby was totally enthralled by its first trip to Italy and behaved marvelously.  The only time baby acted up at all was to make mama's feet more painful and swollen at the end of each day than mama could have ever imagined in her wildest dreams.  However, mama was also doing A LOT of walking.

                             
We were having so much fun and stayed so busy that I did not even get around to posting all my ready-made posts while we were away.  That is okay, we can save those for another day.  And, as for my delay in posting our Italian pics, we arrived home to a thunderstorm that knocked out our electricity from 11:30 Wednesday night until 9:00 Thursday night.  So, in addition to not allowing me to tackle the mountains of laundry in spread over every room in my house, I could not post an update.  Then, yesterday, on top of the fact that I spent all morning being poked and prodded with all kinds of pregnancy exams, the internet was slow all day.  But, we are back in the game now.

I have a more detailed post about what we saw and did in Italia coming up, but today I thought I would just give y'all a general idea of how we spent our 9 days away.

This was a budget vacation (and, I must say, I think that we did a fabulous job on that) and we took no planes.  There is an additional reason we took no planes.  Rather, we traveled by ferry and train (and bus, and vaporetto, and taxi, and gondola.)  Both the ferries and the trains were fantastic, and we really enjoyed our actual travel time.  So, we spent a fair amount of time looking somewhat along these lines...

Sometimes, if we played outside on the ferry and it was especially windy, we would look like this...

We also saw a lot of beautiful sights.

  

And we did our fair share of this....

As the official tour guide operator, I often looked a lot like this:

         (My trusty book and map were never very far away)

Sometimes, at the end of a long day of playing, we could be a bit delirious.

 Sometimes, we just needed a place to stop and rest for a while.

Other times, we were just plain beat.

All in all, it was a fantastic, fabulous, and fun, fun, fun, fun!!!!  I cannot wait to share more later!