When In Rome…

Ok.
So, back to the places we went while Shawn’s parents were here.
After we got back from Cologne, we hung out in Luxembourg for a few days and then packed our bags again and headed off to The Eternal City.

Barbie came with us, too.  She even wore her fluffy blue skirt.

Once we collected our luggage, we took a taxi to our hotel, got settled in and then went out in search of lunch. 

Doesn’t Hannah look absolutely thrilled to be in Rome?  By this point, we were all starving.

This cheered her right up.  So good.

Ya know, it always amazes me when I see women walking around big cities in this manner of footwear.  I made a similar mistake once in Vegas.  In my defense, I was in my early 20’s but, oh, did I learn my lesson.  NEVER AGAIN.  It was also hot as blazes in Rome that day and I just cannot imagine being sweltering and walking around in high heels.  No thank you. 

Anyway, shoes and temperatures aside, here are some of the things we did and saw.

Il Colosseo.
This was my second time in Rome and I was shocked to learn that it only took the Romans eight years to build this thing.  That’s right.  EIGHT YEARS.  They were some mighty efficient folks, those Romans.

Clearly my kids were interested in everything but my camera.

Shawn explained to Hannah how there were trap doors in the floor that the gladiators used. 

The inside of The Coliseum is full of holes like this because during troubled times the Romans dug out the metal pins to make tools.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess.

The Arch of Constantine.
Way back in ye olden days, there was a fountain in front of the arch, but Constantine had it removed because apparently it got in the way of his grand entrance through the center of the arch. 
What a creep.

Shawn took the kids back to the hotel to play for a while, have lunch and take a rest while his parents and I pressed on and toured The Roman Forum, Palatine Hill and Circus Maximus.  

I’d been telling Hannah all about the Trevi Fountain and showing her pictures of it online.  We made specific plans to toss in a coin over our shoulders, which is just what you do at the Trevi Fountain.  Well, when we arrived, this is what we found. 
The entire thing was under renovation.

All was not lost, because we found the best gelato place just across the street.  I think we ate gelato twice a day while we were in Rome.

We got a family photo on Via dei Fori Imperiali, the street that leads from The Coliseum to the Piazza Venezia.  Way back, this area was full of ancient ruins, but in the 1920’s and 30’s Mussolini swept through and had a road built, demolishing ancient and Renaissance structures.  What a creep.

We walked past the ruins of Torre Argentina where Hannah found her favorite thing: cats.

And Finn found his favorite thing near the Pantheon: water.

It took us a few shots to get everyone to look at the camera.
Besides Finn doing a backbend trying to get into the fountain, my favorite part of this picture is the chick in the white dress having a leisurely conversation on her mobile.

This is the best we could do.

Later on, we found ourselves at The Vatican.  Okay, that’s not necessarily true because one doesn’t just find themselves at The Vatican and The Sistine Chapel.  The truth is that we walked for ages, knowing that we really only had time to quickly make our way through the different museums to The Sistine Chapel to see the famous ceiling painted by Michelangelo. 

I had shown Hannah pictures of what we were about to see and told her about the time that Shawn and I went to The Sistine Chapel before she was born and how I had broken the rules and taken a picture.

How cheeky of me. 

“Mom?  Are we almost to the Sixteenth Chapel?” she asked.
Let it be known that this may possibly be one of my favorite things she has ever said.

Of course, there are no pictures (Or talking. Or breathing, for that matter) inside the Sixteenth Chapel, so here we are at the entrance to the Vatican Museum.

Hannah: Hey, Mom?  We should take a picture of this one cuz it looks like Finn.

Our final stop was St. Peter’s Basilica and by this time the wind was blowing and it was starting to rain.  Let it also be known that this is my least favorite weather condition for flying because TURBULANCE. 
Anyway, we had just time for a few quick pictures outside because the line to get inside was quite long and we had a flight to catch.

This is what most pictures of both kids look like these days.  We get them both settled and then Finn takes off running.  I can’t wait to show this picture to them when they’re grown.

And that’s pretty much it for Rome.  There’s so much more to see and do, but with two kids in tow, we’re lucky we saw all that we did.  We caught our flight home, unpacked, did a few loads of laundry, packed our bags again and headed off to our third adventure with Shawn’s parents.

To Be Continued…

On Holiday (The Longest Post Ever)

It’s been quiet around my little blog lately.
That’s because we’ve been…

Of the Mediterranean, that is.

Hannah was off school for the “half term break,” so Shawn took the week off work.
At the last minute, and I do mean the absolute last minute, we found a deal on a cruise that just couldn’t be passed up.
We made our reservations on Friday morning for a cruise that set sail on Sunday. 

Because if nothing else, we are spontaneous. 

Saturday evening we drove to Brussels, stayed the night and caught a flight Sunday morning to Rome.  From there, we took a shuttle to the seaport town of Civitacecchia, Italy and hopped aboard the ship. 
A simple typo caused a bit of confusion (and hilarity) when we were looking for our shuttle transportation because they spelled my husband’s name “Shawn Face.”

(Our last name is not Face.  But it made me laugh and I called us Mr. and Mrs. Face for the rest of the week.)

Once we got the Face Family straightened out, we were on our way.

Our itinerary for the week included: Livorno/Pisa, Italy; Genoa, Italy; Villefranche/Nice, France; Toulon, France; and Barcelona, Spain.

On our first night aboard, we celebrated our sweet girl’s 5th birthday.  She wore her special “Birthday Girl” ribbon and the crew brought a cake and sang to her.

I simply cannot believe that she is 5.

The next morning, we made our first stop: Livorno, Italy.
Apparently, Hannah wasn’t as excited about the Tuscany region as her parents were.

Until we arrived and she got to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or “The Leaning Tower of Pizza,” as she called it.

Shawn told her about the gravity experiment that Galileo conducted from the top of the tower.   She wasn’t all that impressed, but more concerned that the entire thing was going to fall over.

Second stop: Genoa, Italy
Lovely little town, it was, and we took a short walking tour.  Our itinerary provided lots of amazing excursions, but we opted for the shorter, less strenuous ones which was 
a good choice for this pregnant mama and 5 year old.  We saw a lot, but also didn’t have to rush.   We could spend the mornings touring and the afternoons and evenings relaxing back on the ship.

And then.
This happened.

After setting sail from Genoa, we were approaching what the captain said would be a “violent storm,” with “hurricane-like conditions.”  
Just perfect.
“We’re going to be encountering waves and swells approximately 8 to 9 meters,” he said in an accent. 

I looked at Shawn. 
“That’s like, um, 28 foot waves,” he said.
(I didn’t even have to ask him to do the meters-to-feet conversion for me.  He knows my metric system weakness well.)

And then I may have whispered a cuss word.  And crawled under the covers and had a pregnancy-hormone-related meltdown.

So, the captain turned the ship to face directly into the storm to minimize the movement that we’d feel onboard.  For the next 20 hours we rode it out, with constant updates from the crew that we were safe and that ships were designed to handle a bit of roughness from the sea.  This also meant that we had to skip our port in Nice, France because the waters were just too choppy to dock.

Of course, none of this even phased Shawn and Hannah, who carried on with their vacation activities as if this were totally normal and part of what’s included on the itinerary.

Since it was also Halloween, they had Trick-or-Treating for the kids.  I didn’t pack a costume for Hannah because we flew on RyanAir.  If you’ve ever flown on RyanAir, you know exactly why I didn’t pack anything extra in our suitcases.  If you haven’t, here’s the deal: tickets are seriously cheap, but if you go over the ridiculously light weight limit on luggage, by even one fraction of an ounce, they charge you an outrageous fee.  And by then, well, you should have just flown on a regular airline and paid more for your ticket and gotten free peanuts and a Coke inflight. 
But whatever, Hannah didn’t mind.  She was more excited about the candy.

The next morning, we woke to this:

Blue skies and nothing more than tiny ripples in the sea.  So we ate breakfast and hopped on a motorboat to the beautiful town of Toulon in the South of France.

(When you say The South of France, you must say The South of Fraaaawnse.)
(Because pronouncing it any way other than Fraaaawnse is just all wrong.)

We walked a good distance through the harbor and promenade until we came to the Téléphérique, or cable car that would take us to the top of Mont-Faron Hill.

Once we reached the top, we hiked around a bit.

And took a family picture before taking the cable car back to the bottom.

We made it back to the harbor just in time for the very last motorboat back to the cruise ship. 
The next day we spent at sea, swimming and lounging poolside.
Our final stop was Barcelona, Spain.
We disembarked the ship and dropped our luggage off at the airport, which turned out to be a little more of an ordeal than we had planned.  Now, listen.  I took Spanish for four years in high school and four years in college and long story short - ALL EIGHT OF THOSE YEARS in las clases de español were worth it for this moment because I knew the phrase esta perdido, (it is lost) which saved us a bunch of hassle and our entire lot of luggage being, well, lost.

(She always rides in style at airports.)

Once our luggage was sorted out, we said VAMANOS and headed to our first stop - the most famous landmark in Barcelona – The Sagrada Familia.

This basilica is pretty much a mess because they’re always doing construction on it.  It’s supposed to be finished in 2026. 

Then we looked even more like tourists and took self portraits from the top of the Hop On/Hop Off Bus.  (Yes, the same one I made fun of in Luxembourg.)

We saw a few more famous Spanish sites.
Casa Milà…

 
…and Casa Batlló before returning to the airport and our unlost luggage.

It was an uneventful flight to Lux and thanks to my husband, all of our suitcases were packed and arranged in a fashion that put us at the exact maximum weight allowed by RyanAir without a fee.  We showed them.

Now we’re back in Luxembourg and have regained our land legs and returned to our regular schedule.

If I don’t say it enough -
To my husband: thank you, thank you, thank you for working so hard and giving us the opportunity to go places and see things I’d never imagined.  Thank you for sharing my love of travel and all of the little (and big) things you do to make our trips so much fun!  

Oh, and if I fail the glucose test in a few weeks, this may be why.
The dessert buffet aboard the ship helped put an end to the aversion I was having to sweets.
Apparently.