Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Some of my trip photos are now uploaded into Flickr. Click on "My Finished Objects" in the sidebar if you would like to view them. I took something like 300 photos so I selected just a portion of them as representative of the trip (hey, I don't want to put anyone to sleep).

OK--Here's the big confession--I didn't buy one knitting-related item on the whole trip! We were intending to go to a yarn shop in Munich, but then this happened:

Snow! The day we got to Munich, it was absolutely gorgeous--sunny, warm. We even had a barbecue. Then the next two days were rainy and dreary. The day after that it snowed, so we decided that a road trip to Tuscany was in order...and the knitting shop visit was abandoned. Yay Tuscany! This part of the trip was absolutely amazing--the weather was sunny with temps in the 60's and everything was green and flowering. Tuscany is one of those places that everyone raves about (which usually makes me suspicious that it's overrated), but Tuscany lived up to its billing. It was truly one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. Much wine, prosciutto, and cheese were consumed.

After Tuscany, we had a train misadventure trying to reach Milan. Learn from our mistake and do not ever buy Italian train tickets from the automatic ticketing machine.

Milan is a very large city, so most of the attractions were shopping, museums, and the like. Being the lowbrows that we are, we instead spent our time crawling from bar to bar for happy hour. Milan bars have the best happy hour--you buy a drink and they have out a big spread of food, all for free. All kinds of pasta and rice dishes, marinated veggies, cheese, bread, etc. At one bar, we watched the big match between AC Milan and Barcelona. Found that soccer (or should I say football) is actually not all that bad to watch. Here is my attempt at a surreptitious photo of some Barcelona fans invading the metro--they were running around and chanting songs which kept making me laugh! We also took a day trip up to Lake Como which was gorgeous, although a bit busy due to the Easter holiday. We took a ferry to the town of Bellagio, which is pictured here: After Italy, we took a train through the Alps to Basel, Switzerland, where my sister lives. We went to an great museum called the Fondation Beyeler, which had a big Matisse exhibit plus lots of other modern artwork by Miro, Monet, Giacometti, Degas, and (my favorite) Klee. Our last big adventure was hiking through the Black Forest. We did about a five mile walk between two small towns, St. Maargen and St. Peter. The Black Forest is much smaller and more fragmented by farmlands than the woods here, but it was very enjoyable and pretty nonetheless, especially because the trees are very large compared to Maine scrubby trees. Below is a picture of the wanderweg through the forest: Then on Saturday it was time to fly home. Had a rather exciting landing due to the high winds in New York, but we survived. I was also amused by the differences between the sparklingly clean, well-run Swiss airport where we boarded and dingy, crazy JFK where we arrived. Ah, America! ;)

Hope you enjoyed this little photographic tour!

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2 Comments:

At April 28, 2006 8:05 AM, Blogger Casa Pearl said...

Wow, it looks like you got quite the variety in on your trip - the photos are lovely. A nice change from Maine scenery! :-)

 
At April 28, 2006 1:42 PM, Blogger Mary, Mary... said...

Great pix. Had a similar experience with ticket machines in Japan. Tuscany--what a treat. Sounds and looks like a real vaction. Bonne rentree!

 

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