Wow, a two week vacation.\u00a0 Let me say, it wore off very quickly.\u00a0 Two days back in my cubicle dungeon and I felt like I’d never left.\u00a0 But oh, did I enjoy it while I was gone.\u00a0 I should make some effort to detail our trip I suppose, because 1) I didn’t do anything of note this past weekend to blab about, and 2) it was just a great trip.<\/p>\n
We started our great adventure in Venice.\u00a0 (That would be Italy, if there are any readers as geographically disinclined as myself.)\u00a0 Now, there were two very negative parts to this trip:\u00a0 Flying over there, and flying back.\u00a0 Miserable.\u00a0 Add in our drive time, layovers, flights, etc, and we spent a full 24 hours each direction.\u00a0 That’s two days of vacation down the drain.\u00a0 But what can ya’ do;\u00a0 Gotta get there somehow.\u00a0 So, we arrived in Venice with our friends Michael & Alaina on Sunday the 7th.\u00a0 Like, mid-afternoon-ish.\u00a0 We were all pretty beat up, but a nap would have really thrown us off so we tracked down the Martins and began our two week festival of eating, drinking, and sight-seeing.\u00a0 There were many “segments” to this trip, so we only had two days to enjoy Venice.\u00a0 Honestly, that was probably about right.\u00a0 We took a guided walking tour, took a few self-guided tours, went on the obligatory gondola ride…\u00a0 I think that effectively covered Venice.\u00a0 Worth noting, we had sunny, 70 degree weather the entire two weeks we were in Italy.\u00a0 Have you seen the news there<\/a> lately?\u00a0 Wow, we dodged that bullet.<\/p>\n After two nights in Venice, we took a train for a few hours to Cinque Terre<\/a>.\u00a0 The trains were our primary mode of travel for the trip.\u00a0 Relatively inexpensive, fast, and easy to navigate;\u00a0 with one notable exception they treated us pretty well.\u00a0 The trip to Cinque Terre was uneventful though, and we kicked off a couple of days exploring that region.\u00a0 Some of the top events here (for me anyway) were a class on pesto making, and a boat ride to view all five villages from the sea.\u00a0 Our guide on the boat trip was great, although I struggled a bit understanding him.\u00a0 He was born and raised in one of the villages, and he had all kinds of interesting history to share.\u00a0 The only downside to the villages were the crowds, which were just crazy.\u00a0 He told us the crowds we had to wade through were nothing, this was the “down time.”\u00a0 He showed us a few pictures that backed that up;\u00a0 Crazy.\u00a0 I would NOT want to be there during the summer.\u00a0 He even said he came home one time to find a group picnicking in his back yard.\u00a0 The poor guy actually got pretty upset when he got to talking about “the way it used to be,” and he was only like 30 years old.\u00a0 What can ya’ do, sounds like they’re just taking the good with the bad.\u00a0 With the tourist money comes the crowds.<\/p>\n Another train ride got us to Florence, with a brief layover in Pisa.\u00a0 At the train station in Pisa, we dropped our bags in storage and hiked a few miles through town to see the leaning tower.\u00a0 Yeah, I’m going to venture that everybody has seen the pics.\u00a0 And, honestly, it looked pretty much exactly like the pictures.\u00a0 We did enjoy checking out all the buildings around it though, it was definitely worth a stop.\u00a0 After a wonderful lunch, (there was definitely no trouble finding places to eat on this trip,) we retrieved our bags and headed on to Florence.\u00a0 In Florence we found lots of walking, and lots of sight-seeing.\u00a0 We also took a class on how to make homemade pasta there, which was straight awesome.\u00a0 First thing we did when we got home was order all the equipment we needed to make it here, which we’ve already tried with what I declare as success.\u00a0 (The obvious flaw in this scheme is, you can buy about two lifetimes worth of dried pasta for the same price…\u00a0 Eh whatever.\u00a0 It’s fun and it does taste better.)\u00a0 Florence was also the scene of the “incident,” about Friday or so I believe.\u00a0 There are two things you can be guaranteed of on a Kenagy vacation:\u00a0 Either I will get sick, or Donette will hurt herself.\u00a0 All too frequently, it’s both.\u00a0 On this trip though, it was just the latter.\u00a0 We were hiking back from dinner over the very uneven cobblestone when she took a misstep and rolled her ankle with a quite audible crack.\u00a0 Being a glass-half-full kind of guy, I looked at the bright side:\u00a0 We’d been walking 8-10 miles per day, and that effectively ended that trend.\u00a0 Nice comfortable taxis from there on out.<\/p>\n After a great couple of nights in Florence, (injuries aside,) it was on to Sienna.\u00a0 I dubbed this leg my favorite, for no particular reason.\u00a0 I just liked it.\u00a0 We had a fantastic hotel, and there was a really cool downtown area that I just found…\u00a0 “fun.”\u00a0 We also had a great dinner, at the recommendation of one of our cab drivers.\u00a0 I ate pasta and pizza the entire two weeks, but at this place I ordered an obscenely large steak.\u00a0 Actually, I split it with Martin, and it was a good thing because that hunk o’ beef had to go a solid 3 lbs.\u00a0 I tend to shy away from beef outside the US, but this was admittedly delicious.\u00a0 We also went on a full-day wine tasting tour of the Chianti region.\u00a0 Yeah, because we don’t get enough of that at home.\u00a0 We actually had a great time, the differences in their production were very interesting and the wines were fantastic.\u00a0 The only downside was, we got a tour at each place.\u00a0 The first one was engaging;\u00a0 The second was redundant, and the third was borderline annoying.\u00a0 (Thankfully the third one had just enough unique features to keep things interesting.)<\/p>\n From there, it was on to my second-favorite leg, the Amalfi Coast.\u00a0 The specific town we stayed in eludes me, so I’ll just go with “Amalfi.”\u00a0 Close enough.\u00a0 This was the area you see when you look at post cards of Italy.\u00a0 I would say similar to Cinque Terre, but even more picturesque.\u00a0 As in Cinque Terre, we chartered a boat, but this one was a little nicer and it was just the six of us.\u00a0 It was a great tour;\u00a0 They took us out to Capri for a few hours, and all the way around it, and up and down the coastline with a stop for a great lunch in a small fishing village.\u00a0 The remainder of our time in this area was spent shopping and eating at various wonderful restaurants.\u00a0 The James’ and Martins took a long hike down the “Path of the Gods<\/a>,” but we were unable to join due to a quite swollen ankle.\u00a0 We met up with them several hours later for a late lunch, and they were something of a haggard bunch.\u00a0 I ain’t gonna lie, I took no small amount of pleasure in their misery.\u00a0 I chuckled inwardly.\u00a0 Actually I laughed out loud.<\/p>\n After a very long and quite frightening van ride from Amalfi, we got back to the train station.\u00a0 After miraculously surviving the van trip, we hit the only snag of our train adventures.\u00a0 We got our tickets and found our train easily enough, but then we boarded and just sat.\u00a0 And sat, and sat.\u00a0 After some amount of time, they finally announced that there were protesters standing on the tracks, and everything was halted.\u00a0 Hmmm, interesting.\u00a0 Honestly though, nobody seemed interested at all.\u00a0 They talked, got off and smoked, got back on, talked some more.\u00a0 Finally, maybe two hours later, they announced we were on our way.\u00a0 One by one, the trains around us pulled out.\u00a0 And still we sat.\u00a0 And still, nobody really seemed interested.\u00a0 After another lengthy wait, they came on the loudspeaker and calmly relayed that our train was out of service, we should go trade in our tickets.\u00a0 Chaos.\u00a0 Complete, utter anarchy. \u00a0 We sent poor Alaina into the fray, because she was the smallest and able to navigate between the flailing arms, suitcases, babies, etc.\u00a0 There was no “exchanging tickets” as they described though…\u00a0 The people at the ticket counter would just say “Go get on this train.”\u00a0 So, we’d hustle out to that train, and they would say, “All full.”\u00a0 Geez.\u00a0 We finally got one though;\u00a0 All’s well that ends well I suppose.\u00a0 Actually it was somewhat entertaining people-watching;\u00a0 There were\u00a0 a good amount of people that just flat lost their minds, and it was something to see.\u00a0 At the end of the excitement though, we did finally end up in Rome for the last leg of our trip.\u00a0 When in Rome, as they say.\u00a0 We fought crowds, ate good food, (there were some very standout meals for me there,) and saw the sights.\u00a0 We took a guided tour of the Vatican, which was fascinating if insanely crowded.\u00a0 The lady told us they have 30,000 visitors every day… Wow.\u00a0 I have no problem believing that either.\u00a0 We pretty much shuffle-stepped the entire three hours because the crowd was shoulder to shoulder the whole time.\u00a0 Not my cup of tea.\u00a0 Solid chance I’ll never see it again though, so I made an effort to take it in.\u00a0 We also visited the coliseum, and got tickets to the hop-on-hop-off bus so we could get around to all the highlights quickly.\u00a0 It was something to see, for sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Wow, a two week vacation.\u00a0 Let me say, it wore off very quickly.\u00a0 Two days back in my cubicle dungeon and I felt like I’d never left.\u00a0 But oh, did I enjoy it while I was gone.\u00a0 I should make some effort to detail our trip I suppose, because 1) I didn’t do anything of 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