Meg's Musings

Italy!

At this point we left Germany for Italy and our spiteful little GPS unit sent us over the Italian Alps, known as the Dolomites. This was not fun. David was sick. The roads were extremely narrow, twisty, steep and noticably without guardrails. I prayed a lot. That little side trip added a extra several hours to our journey. Ick.

Add to that that the hotel was not in Padua, but somewhere closer to Vicenza and the GPS refused to acknowledge that we were in Italy, that there were three roads all named the same thing (though it was actually not on any of them) and the police didn't know where it was and David's nose was a constant stream of snot and his throat a cacophony of coughing, it was not a fun time in the trip. Finally a guy on a motorcycle (incidentally a transplanted African who spoke French, German and Swahili and Italian but not English--I was embarrased by my Spanish and smattering of Swahili. The sicko in the seat beside me was more helpful with his German) took us to a corner we'd been past four or five times and pointed us down a street we'd been down several times and told us to drive until we were tired (um...) and we'd see it in the next town. Which we did. Lo an behold, far, far from where the directions said it was, it appeared, gleaming in the night. And my poor sweet honey finally got to go to bed at 5am.

Even though he was still sick the next day, we went into Venice for the day and made the best unplanned stop of the trip: a formal villa & gardens open to the public. It was gorgeous-- the sort of thing you see in a movie. Wide white gravel boulevards, formal fountains, bordered buy sculpture, a hedge maze, and wild, overgrown areas with gazebos and grottos and sculpture in abundance.




Look for three ruined sculptures in the pic above.

posted by Me @ 09:53