Our trip to Tuscany

What an awesome week we had in Tuscany. Every day was filled with a new adventure. We got lost a lot, ate a lot of gelato, enjoyed A LOT of sunshine, smiled a lot and Drove A LOT!
IT's by far my favorite trip. We found the people to be very nice and when they knew we didn't speak Italian, they kept on a talkin. We just smiled and nodded back. We began to flounder a bit trying to communicate. Some of the words sound like Spanish so we'd try to throw out anything we thought was similar to get our point across.
The countryside was absolutely beautiful. Rolling hills full of olive trees, flowers in bloom and did I say we got to see the sun??? Here are some of the highlights of the trip.




A view over looking Florence


Scooters rule the streest in Italy. They zoom in and out of traffic, it's crazy.
A street performer was standing like a manequin outside the Uffizi Gallery. When the girls threw a coin into his basket, he came to life. Back to the gallery, you can't take pictures inside but we did brave the 90 minute line to get in just to see some of the most famous Italian artwork including Michaleangelo, Leonardo, and Boticelli just to name a few. It was awesome to see many of the pieces I've seen in books. We spent about 90 minutes inside as it was closing time.


One day we visited some of the Tuscan hill towns. I wanted to visit Volterra because it had been made popular in the Twilight books. This town is famous for its alabaster production.

Ooooops, this picture is out of place but I am not going to mess with what I've already written. This is a famous bridge in Florence. It's called the Ponte Vecchio. It's lined with shops selling a lot of jewlery.

Back to Volterra, this is a picture that looks out over some of the houses. After visiting the website wikipedia, we noticed the picture Mike took was similar to what is on the website. The sky was quite hazy during our visit. It would've been fun to get some clear shots, maybe we'll have to go back?

Lauryn had been enjoying flower sniffing...can you tell?

The entrance into the city area
Another Hill town is San Gimagnano which has been made famous for its medival architecture especially its towers. It has 14 remaining of the 60+ it used to have.

Fun walkways like this were in every city we visited.


The countryside was beautiful
The following pictures are out of chronological order. We spent one day hiking the Cinque Terre .
The water enjoyment was at the end of our hike....
The water was FREEZING! Our kids and a couple others were the only ones in the water. There were lots of sunbathers, not many in the water.

The Cinque Terre is a rugged region along the coast of the Italian Riviera. Cinque Terre means 5 lands. Each of these towns is connected by hiking trails. You can spend the day hiking from town to town or take a train that connects you to each town. It takes roughly 5 hours to do the entire hike. We chose to walk from town 1-2 then took the train to town 4 where we hiked to the 5th town. We had been warned that the hike was a 90 minute "tretcherous" path. I think I sorta forgot that Rick Steves (travel guro) had said it was the hardest of the walks, not the best for kids. Oh well, right? I didn't think it would be too hard, plus I wanted to work for the final reward which was reaching the beach. Let me set the scene for each of the hikes. The ocean is to your left, you hike through fields of flowers, lemon trees, olive trees, and other vegitation. Some parts you enter peoples gates and walk through their property. It truly is a remarkable trail. By hiking, I'm not talking scaling rocks and such. This hike was more walking along narrow curves, stepping up and down on flat rocks. It was hard because there were a LOT of these steps to go down. I was hot, we didn't have a lot of water and in the end, I wish I would've taken the train. But, we didn't and have a story to tell! The leg muscles were very sore the next day. Ouch!
This picture was fun because of the little cat sleeping in the basket.

The sunset was beautiful


If we would've played in the water every day without any other activity, the kids would've been happy.


This is taken in Pescia. We stayed in Aramo which is a suberb of Pescia. The river flows through the town.

I love this picture of Dallin. He's concentrating hard on skipping his rock.


Both of them are skipping rocks.
This is marble in Carrara. We took a side trip to visit the mines to see where Michaelangelo got his marble from. We were able to take a tour inside. It was amazing to see how much marble was in the mountains. It also made seeing the marble inside the museums that much more interesting. We knew where it had come from!


This is the piazza (plaza) in Pescia. It looks very similar to others we saw.

Enjoying gelato...

Maybe Dallin's face was dirty because he bit the bottom of the cone?

Pisa




This is a picture taken from our bedroom window. There were a lot of castles around the countryside.
This is the walkway that leads up to our door. It's at the top of the stairs. We didn't know that we were staying in the castle. The kids had a lot of fun running


If you click on the picture, you can see a towel hanging out a window. That's one of the windows of where we stayed.
Beginning our journey, we got stuck in major traffic in Switzerland. It wasn't such a bad thing, the kids got out and ran around the autobahn. It was quite a site to see everyone out and about. The view was gorgeous too.