• Italy 2011

    27 Jan 2013 /  Travel
    Milan
    After leaving La Riserva di Castel d’Appio our next destination was Milan for three nights. In Milan the highlights were the Milan_Cathedral, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and the Basilica di S. Ambrogio.
    Lake Como
    While staying in Milan we also took a day trip to Bellagio to tour the beautiful Lake Como area.
    Garda and Verona
    From Milan we traveled to Garda, a very popular Italian tourist resort town located on Lake Garda, for two nights. The next morning we traveled into Verona to see Verona’s highlights including the Casa di Giulietta – (The House of Juliet as in Romeo and Juliet)
    Venice

    From Garda our next destination was Venice for two nights. Since we had a car and cars are not allowed inside Venice proper we stayed outside of town in Fell, Italy and caught a local bus the next morning to travel into Venice. We took a water taxi over to Murano Island to tour the Murano Glass Museum. After touring the museum we took the water taxi back to the Venice proper and walked around and road the water taxis to the Venice highlights.

    Florence

    From Venice our next destination was Florence. We spent six nights in a lovely hotel called Hotel David, currently the number one hotel in Florence according to the ratings of TripAdvisor customers in Florence. Hotel David was just outside the central area of Florence, but located very close to several bus route stops. There’s no metro in Florence, but their bus system works quite well. With a bus map in hand we were able to get to all the Florence highlights quite easily. We toured the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze to see Michelangelo’s magnificent marble statue of the biblical hero, David, the Uffizi Gallery to view Italian Renaissance art, featuring works by Botticelli, Titian, Michelangelo and da Vinci, etc, the Basilica di San Miniato al Monte, Ponte Vecchio, Piazzale Michelangelo, Piazza della Signoria, Duomo – Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and lots more.

    Pisa
    While in the area we also took a day trip to Pisa to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa .
    Tuscany
    From Florence we traveled to Monte San Saveno for five nights to tour the lovely Tuscan countryside and visit several Tuscan wineries. We loved just driving through the beautiful Tuscan countryside stopping at some of the local wineries to sample their wines and tour their wineries. For lunch most days we’d find a local restaurant in one of the many villages we traveled through. Near our hotel we found a couple of restaurants, Ristorante Bar La Scuderia and Podere Pendolino, which could accommodate a gluten allergy and had very good food. In fact the food at Podere Pendolino was so good we had several meals there. They served a great gluten-free pizza and a mouth watering gluten-free Tiramasu.
    Tuscan Wineries
    As we traveled around the Tuscan countryside, we found we really liked the beautiful hills in the Montalcino area of Tuscany and favored the Montalcino area wines the most of the Tuscan area wine we sampled. We found many of the places Sue had seen in the movie, Letters to Juliet, including Caparzo Winery near Montalcino, which gave us a tour of their winery and  Relais Borgo Scopeto in the Chanti area of Tuscany.  One of our highlights of our visit to the Tuscan area was touring the Castello di Brolelo castle and winery in the Chanti area of Tuscany.
    Almalfi Coast
    From Tuscany we traveled to Pontecagnano, Italy for three nights to see the Amalfi coast
    Pompeii
    and the ruins of Pompeii.
    Rome
    After Pontecagnano we drove to Dream Suites, our hotel in Rome for the next six nights. Luckily it was on a Saturday when we made the trip and Joe had only a few minutes after we arrived in central Rome to make it back out of the non-resident no driving zone. We unloaded the luggage and then Joe drove to the Rome airport in Fiumicino to drop off the car we’d had for 31 days and took the train back to Rome. Our hotel was conveniently located two blocks away from a metro stop. Rome has many highlights and we spent the next five days hitting most of them.
    Vatican
    High on our list to do while in Rome included touring the Vatican grounds, museum, St Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel.
    Ancient Rome
    Another day in Rome including touring the Colosseum and the surrounding ancient grounds.
    After Rome we traveled by taxi to the Port of Civitavecchia to board the Celebrity Equinox, our home for the next ten nights while the ship traveled to ports in Italy, Greece and Turkey.

    Click on each photo to see more photos from our road trip through Italy.

  • France 2011

    15 Jul 2012 /  Travel

    From Paris we traveled to Dracy-le-Fort where we stayed for three nights at Hotel Le Dracy, while we explored the Route des Vins de Bourgogne, the burgundy wine routes. The restaurant in the hotel served outstanding meals and did a great job preparing my meals gluten-free.

    2011-04-24_Europe_P1010286

     

     

    2011-04-25_Europe_DSC_2333

    I had read an article about an award-winning chocolatier, Bernard Dufoux, near where we were traveling in France, so on our way to Saint-Remy-de-Province we detoured through the lovely countryside to La Clayette. To our surprise the town had a castle.  We enjoyed walking around the town and visiting with Bernard Dufoux, and bought several outstanding chocolate treats, all gluten-free.

    2011-04-26_Europe_P1010465

    The highlights of the Saint-Remy-de-Province area were Avignon, home of The Papal palace, and Glanum archaeological site, which features the remains of a Roman settlement, which prospered from the 6th century BC to the third century AD.

    Pope's Palace (Palais des Papes) in Avignon

    Glanum

    From Saint-Remy-de-Province we traveled the southern coast of France to our overnight destination of La Riserva di Castel d’Appio located in Ventimiglia, Italy.

    2011-04-29_Europe_DSC_2614

    Click on the photos to see additional photos of France.

  • Old travel pages resurrected (sort of)

    15 Mar 2012 /  Travel

    Before we started this blog, I had a cruise log and some picture galleries from previous travel hosted on the old Apple iTools/DotMac/MobileMe site. With the transition to iCloud this year, those servers are getting shut down in a couple months. So I republished all that content on this server. You can see them here.

  • April in Paris

    27 Apr 2011 /  Travel

    I know, it’s a cliche. But we really were in Paris in April. The weather was wonderful, the hotel was good, as was the food. We stayed at the Hotel Lenox on rue Delambre, in the 14th very close to the 6th. Between the Vavin and Edgar Quinet metro stops. We didn’t go nuts with the tourist routine, but we did go to Sacre Coure, Musee d’Orsey, the Eiffel Tower, and lots of walking around in various neighborhoods.

    Our biggest challenges were finding gluten-free meals for Sue. We ate twice at des Si et des Mets (http://www.dessietdesmets.com/), which may be the only totally gluten-free restaurant in Paris. Good food, too. Expensive, but that’s true just about everywhere in Paris these days. It was so much nicer when the Euro was close to par with the Dollar. Oh well.

    On friday, between trips to the Eiffel Tower, we ventured out to pick up our new car. Well, ours for 30 days. It’s a short-term lease, not a rental, so the registration is actually in my name. It’s a Renault Megane Berline – 2.0l, 150hp, pocket rocket. First diesel car I’ve driven, and it really does move. Very nice car. Driving it back to the hotel that afternoon, and out of Paris the next morning was, well, interesting is as good a word as any.

    We’ll add a link to the photo album for Paris once Sue gets the pictures uploaded. In the meantime, here’s one of the car…

    joe

    Renault Megane

  • Bonaire

    06 Feb 2011 /  Travel

    Beautiful water colors

    In late January, 2011 Joe and I traveled to Bonaire with 28 other people from Ocean Extreme Dive and Travel to spend a week scuba diving. It was great seeing ol’ friends and meeting new friends. Joe and I did thirteen shore dives and the rest of the time we relaxed and enjoyed being away from the states and bad weather. Because we were doing shore dives, we left our underwater camera system at home, thank goodness. Shore entries and exits were a lot rougher than I remember. :) On our last day in Bonaire we traveled around and shot a few photos of the island.

    Click on the photo to see our pictures of Bonaire.

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