Pisa and Florence... and also Venice

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is, indeed, leaning. 

A highlight of our visit to Florence was dinner one evening
with Leonardo
 a Florentine leather goods dealer.

Florence's cathedral

How presumptuous!

Delicious tiramisu

After three full days in Rome, our tour group headed north along the Italian coast, stopping in Pisa to see the Leaning Tower. The town was overflowing with tourists, but we saw the tower in spite of them.

The scenery this day consisted of the blue Mediterranean on our left, olive tree groves, and vineyards. If I hadn't believed earlier that I was in Italy, I surely would have believed it now.

Following our stop in Pisa, we headed east toward Tuscany, passing through at least twenty mountain tunnels to get to Florence.

Gondolas in Venice

 We enjoyed the beautiful architecture of Florence, and seeing Michaelangelo's David, and visiting a leather shop and a Murano glass factory, ...but an especially fond memory involves our meeting and dining with Leonardo. What a gracious and generous gentleman! He works in Florence in the leather business started by his father and which he now owns, and he makes frequent trips to California to the company (Cavallini) where Jim and Lynn's son Erik worked for several years. When Erik heard we were going to visit Florence, he insisted we meet Leonardo.

Leonardo took us to his favorite little restaurant near his shop, helped us order our meals (Note my tiramisu for dessert. Absolutely delicious!), stealthily paid for the entire dinner when the four of us weren't aware of it, and gave Lynn and me each one of his leather products before the evening ended.

It was rather sad to spend so little time with Leonardo. We're hoping he'll come to Maine with his wife and young son some time, so we can return his hospitality.

From Florence it was on to Venice.

I was nervous about visiting Venice, because I had this preconceived notion that getting around in this city of canals would be extremely difficult.

I was wrong. Water taxis are at one's serice for long "walks" (although they're expensive), and there are plenty of areas accessible by foot.

 Of course our two days in Venice had to include a gondola ride! This was relaxing and fun. Lynn, a former music teacher, was thrilled when the singer and his accompanist climbed aboard our gondola with us. Other gondola riders nearby weren't so lucky.

Lellabella Yarn Shop, Venice (Be still, my heart!(

Unfortunately I felt the need to google "yarn shops, Venice" on my iPad and dicovered Lellabella. I badly wanted to stop in for a visit, so Ken, Jim, and Lynn tolerantly followed along as I searched up and down the shops lining the canals to locate this place.

Finally we found it, but it was closed! In much if not all of Italy, shops close from around 1:00 to around 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. We got to the shop at 1:15, and we couldn't wait for it to reopen because the gondola ride awaited us.

If you look closely at the top of the photo, you'll see the reflections of Lynn and me as we look at the luscious Italian yarns so near, but yet so far.

Our personal troubadour as we take a gondola ride 

At the Rialto, Venice

The Rialto is Venice's most popular canal bridge, so we had to have our photos taken there, of course.

It was now time for the last stop of our time in Italy: Assisi. That's the subject of my next post.

Where've I been?

The Roman Colosseum

Why, I've been to Italy and Greece!

Ken and I, with our good travel buddies and close friends of 40 years, Jim and Lynn, flew to Rome on September 10.

We spent the next two weeks seeing Italy and Greece and constantly exclaiming that we couldn't believe we were really there.

Ken and I had done a Globus tour three years ago, when we went to New Zealand and Australia. It was our first guided tour, and we were a little skeptical as to how we'd like it. We'd done a lot of traveling in Europe in the past, but those trips had always been planned entirely by us, using a Fodor's or Frommer's travel guide, making B&B reservations in advance, and seeing the sights primarily on foot or by train.

Inside the Colosseum

St. Peter's Basilica

We liked the Globus trip to New Zealand and Australia, though, and felt we certainly got our money's worth. And besides, we're now in our 60's, not our 30's or 40's, and traveling is so much easier on a good, guided tour.

So we went with Globus again, and it was another excellent tour.

La Pieta

Pompeii

This was Jim and Lynn's first guided tour, however, so I was a little nervous that I might have over-pitched it to them and they'd be disappointed. They weren't.

The four of us make good travel partners. We've done several trips together: England; Ireland and Scotland; Hawaii; and shorter trips such as Nova Scotia and Martha's Vineyard.

Anyway, to get on with the trip.

Today I bring you Rome and a touch of Pompeii.

It was thrilling for me to see the Roman Colosseum and La Pieta, in particular. I took a History of Art course while in undergrad school, and Professor Hartgen really opened my eyes to the world of art. I'd hardly realized art even existed before his grueling course.

I remember reading about the ancient wonders of Rome and Athens in my art text and hoping to see them with my own eyes one day.

Now I have.

La Pieta, sculpted by Michaelangelo in the 1500's, has always intrigued me because of the ability of Michaelangelo to give weight to Christ's body. Just look at Him in Mary's lap. Can't you almost feel how heavy He is? Look at His right arm, at His armpit. Isn't that detail amazingly realistic?

To think a Michaelangelo can take a piece of marble, hand-selected by himself, and "find" these likenesses inside it is amazing. Here's a time when I'd say the word "awesome" truly applies.

Our tour guide at St. Peter's Basilica said La Pieta had been attacked by a deranged man with a hammer when the art work was on tour in America several years ago. That didn't sound quite right to me. I knew it had been attacked, and that's why it's now kept safely behind an acrylic glass panel, but I was sure it hadn't happened in America. I googled "The Pieta" for information about this the minute we got back to our hotel room, of course, and sure enough, the attack happened at St. Peter's Basilica itself, not in the US. Hmmmrph.

We took a day-trip to Pompeii during our three days in Rome. It's a three-hour drive from Rome south to Pompeii, but the first hour of the trip is spent getting outside of the city limits!

It was a hot day to be there, with no shade to be found, but it was fascinating to see the excavation of this ancient city. I had no idea it had been such a large metropolis. Pompeii and its residents were completely buried over a two-day period in AD 79 from the volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Air pockets have been found where bodies once lay but have since completely decomposed. Plaster has been poured into many of these air pockets, thus yielding the "bodies" of humans and even dogs.

We had an excellent tour of the place before heading back to Rome and leaving for Florence the next day...

I took hundreds of photos on this trip, but I'll try to limit the number I share on this blog.

"Sculpting"

For the past three years or more, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, my good friend Lynn and I meet at our town's community building to exercise.

We start the ordeal with a one-mile walk. Usually Bob, the custodian, is at the building doing some maintenance, mowing the lawn, or whatever. Bob is a true Mainer, so when Lynn and I say, "Good morning, Bob," he replies with, "Mawnin."

After our walk (outdoors unless it's raining hard or bitterly cold, in which case we walk in the building's basement, round and round, talking non-stop), we go into the building to use the exercise machines. There are six or seven old and tired machines, donated by community members who couldn't bear the thought of using them anymore, but they do the trick. Lynn and I are partial to three or four of the machines and ignore the others.

Then it's mat time. While Lynn prefers various stretches done on her back, I like to do some yoga: the sun salutation, half-shoulder stand, full-shoulder stand, etc. I've been doing these stretches almost continually for almost forty years, and they keep me limber.

Once the mat routines are behind us, the fun begins: We use this workout DVD, and I love it. I'm surprised to hear myself say I love it, because I truly hated it when we first began working out with it about six months ago. We do weights and cardio, alternating between the two, and we do two of the four segments on the DVD. Several others, mostly retired ladies, have joined our workout class, so it's fun to suffer in a group. I use 3-lb and 6-lb handweights and, the newest addition to my workout toys: a weighted 5-lb ball. That thing is brutal, but I know my arms, shoulders, heart, and lungs are getting a great workout. (I told the other ladies earlier this week that if I should ever lose my grip on that ball, I'd surely take out one or two of them in one fell swoop. Let's hope I don't lose my grip.)

Lynn and I leave the community building with sweat dripping from our brows but feeling energized. What's more and equally importantly, she and I have had a chance to get caught up on one another's life. That's probably the most motivating factor that gets us to the community building three mornings a week but hey, it's doing the trick (although I can't say I'm exactly now "sculpted," despite the exercise DVD's constant assurance that I'm getting there). And to think, this workout costs us a big, fat, ONE DOLLAR per session! Not a bad deal.

Irene's aftermath

Tropical storm Irene wasn't too hard on us here, in that no lives were lost. Several homes in Maine are still without power, however, and our home is one of them.

We do have a generator, thank heavens, so we have power off and on throughout the day. When the generator isn't providing power for us, it's providing power for our neighbors directly across the road. Ken has been working hard since noon on Sunday to keep both houses going. After we've had a few hours of electricity, Ken wheels the heavy generator across the road to our neighbors, hooks it up there, gives them a few hours of power, then wheels it back to us. I think he's getting tired of the ritual.

And here is the culprit: a downed tree at our neighbors just up the road. What gets me is this particular tree has lost a limb in a storm THREE TIMES in the past couple of years. The lost limbs always fall on our electric lines, resulting in a power outage. I think it's time that particular tree was put out of its misery.

I got my hopes up a couple of hours ago this morning when a Central Maine Power truck finally visited the site of this outage. Come to find out, it was here only to remove the downed limb. The power lines are still severed. Who knows when the lines will be replaced? Today? Tomorrow? Next week? According to news reports, there are so many power outages that some could take several days to be restored.

We lost a couple of trees in the storm. This limb broke off the tree where a pair of Baltimore orioles nested last year.

I know the damage could be much worse, of course. I've seen evidence on t.v. of washed-out bridges in western Maine and of terrible flooding in Vermont. We could have it a whole lot worse.

Bits and pieces

No particular reason for the new header photo, except that I took that picture in early July at the Ossipee Valley Fair and have been meaning to use it as a header photo. I'm still a farm girl at heart.

I decided a week ago to give Molly a major tune-up. It was long over due. So I took her outside, secured her leash over one of the pickets of our little white picket fence, and began the procedure: ear cleaning, Frontline treatment, etc. Molly knows this routine well, and the picket fence has long been our location for the procedure.

Ken helped with the ears and the Frontline, then I told him I'd give Molly a major brushing and didn't need his help. He went inside.

Just as I began brushing Molly, she began thrashing. Usually she likes to be brushed. I was confused...until I noticed the hornets trying to attack her. She thrashed, I tried to keep ahold of her leash, she darted (yanking me out of one of my sandals), and we both made for the kitchen door. We got inside the house, me with one bare foot, and Molly continued her frenzy. I couldn't blame her: she'd been stung by one of the hornets, just below her right eye. It took her quite awhile to calm down.

I told Ken there was a hornet's nest in the little flower garden in front of the picket fence. He waited awhile for things to calm down outdoors, then he did an inspection. Sure enough: a HUGE hornet's nest on the picket fence, tucked neatly under the clematis vine. Can you see it just below and to the right of the ceramic bird house in the second photo?

On a happier front, in June one morning as Ken and I watched the news, drank our coffee, and I checked my e-mail on my iPad, I opened a message from a garden center.

What especially caught my eye was the lovely trellis, selling for $150. I handed the iPad to Ken to show him the photo, and I said, "Here's something I'd like to have some day," as I pointed out the trellis to him.

Later that morning I wandered out to Ken's workshop to see what he was up to. He was busily working with strips of wood.

"What are you making?" I asked.

"That trellis you like," he replied.

"How do you know how to make it"

"Oh, I did a couple of sketches of the trellis in the photo you showed me, did a little calculating,...."

So now I have a first-class trellis, which I've wanted for a long time. I hurried to a garden center and bought a thunbergia to grow inside it and climb up it. These photos were taken long before the thunbergia had done much climbing, but it's happy in its new climbing corral and has almost reached the very top of the structure.

A day on Peaks

Last Friday a group of friends and I decided to take a trip to Peaks Island. It's a small island not far from Portland, accessible by a 15-minute ferry ride.

We couldn't have chosen better weather for our little excursion: sunshine, wispy clouds, no humidity.

The purpose of our trip was, supposedly, to visit the Fifth Maine Regiment Museum, which we did, indeed do.

But we also stopped to check out the "famous" Umbrella Cover Museum, which is "dedicated to the appreciation of the mundane in everyday life," because its door was open and its curator was welcoming.

We couldn't leave there without joining the curator in song as she played a catchy tune on her accordian. I'm serious!

From there we sought out a little general store and purchased sandwiches and chips. These we ate as we sat on benches and watched island residents and day visitors go about their business.

The Fifth Maine Museum opened promptly at noon, so we walked over to it and had an interesting tour. Along the way, though, we spotted two yard sales, so we felt duty-bound to check them out. I'm still regretting not buying a Dick and Jane reader. I'm sure it was the very edition of the reader I learned to read from, and I still remember many of its catchy sentences: See Dick. See Jane. See Spot. See Dick chase Spot. See Jane chase Dick and Spot. Why didn't I buy it? I'm wishing now, too late, that I could take one last trip through the Dick and Jane Reader and remember the fun and excitement of learning to read.

After the yard sales and the museum visit, we had a two-hour wait for our return ferry to Portland, so we decided to walk the circumference of the island. It's a four-mile trek, and the views out over the ocean, up and down the coast, and of Portland itself are spectacular.

I was especially interested in the cairns being erected at one point along the coastal road. Apparently folks passing by who have the time and the inclination can stop and build a cairn. Some of them are quite imaginative and even resemble sailing ships. My header photo is one that I took of the cairns.

We got back to the ferry terminal with a little time to spare, so we dashed into the ice cream shop and treated ourselves to a treat. I chose Gifford's Moose Tracks, which is one of my favorite Maine ice creams. I almost went with Deer Tracks but decided this was a day for Moose, not Deer. I also spotted a flavor with "lobster" in its name, but somehow "lobster" and "ice cream" do not belong together.

We were lucky to board the ferry when we did, because after we'd made our way up to the top deck to enjoy the sights on the trip back to the mainland, we heard an announcement that the ferry had reached its maximum passenger capacity and anyone not aboard would have to wait an hour for the next ferry. Phew. Close call.

We returned to Portland somewhat sunburned, definitely tired from all of the fresh salt air, but yet refreshed from our day on Peaks Island.

New friends from far away...and bubbles!

Yesterday we were invited to the home of my niece-in-law's mother (Naomi) for a barbecue and to meet Naomi's good friends from Tokyo, Yuki and her son Rintaro.

Naomi and Yuki have been friends for many years; Naomi is a psychologist and author here in the States, and Yuki, also a psychologist, has translated many of Naomi's books into Japanese.

Eight-year-old Rintaro and our almost-six-year-old great niece, Violet, have become fast friends. They greeted us in their kimonos (Violet's was a gift from Yuki and Rintaro), and Rintaro immediately handed us as gifts the two origami birds shown in my header. He made these birds himself.

It was a pleasure to get to know Yuki, a very gracious and friendly lady. Since she is a clinical psychologist, she has traveled to Sendai and surrounding areas where the earthquake and tsunami were so devastating. She said there are two distinct groups of survivors from that region: those who face what has happened and have moved to whatever accommodations they've been able to acquire and are getting on as best they can with their lives, and those who still cling to their damaged homes, refusing to believe what has been thrust upon them. She told us of visiting the home of one lady. The house appeared to be intact, that is until the lady pulled back a curtain that she had hung along one side of the house. Behind the curtain her home was little more than rubble. Yuki says the situation in the Sendai region is still extremely critical, and she spoke harshly when saying she feels the government is not doing enough to help its people.

As we adults talked about the earthquake and tsunami and the aftermath, it didn't occur to most of us in the room that young Rintaro is still very much traumatized by the earthquake that shook Tokyo and, no doubt, by the news reports out of the Sendai region. I saw Rintaro gently shake his mother's sleeve cuff. He was asking her to change the topic of conversation. Who can blame him? I'm sure there are many thousands of youngsters in Japan still troubled and frightened anew each time a new tremor is felt.

Our visit with Naomi, Yuki, and Rintaro wasn't exclusively serious, though. Ken had helped me prepare a "Super Bubbles Kit" to take along for Rintaro and Violet to play with. While I mixed the bubble solution (water, Dawn dish detergent, corn starch, baking powder, and glycerin), Ken shortened some retired broom handles and dowels, put eye screws in one end of each handle, and left it to me to thread the eyes with heavy cotton string with a washer or two on the longer string, for weight.

The Super Bubbles Kit was a hit.

It takes a bit of practice to learn how to make a large, elongated bubble, but soon everyone had mastered the art, and giant bubbles floated around Naomi's neighborhood. Violet and her dad even developed the ability to make simultaneous bubbles, which were especially impressive.

I'm glad Naomi included us in her get-together for her dear Japanese friends. We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.