6 posts tagged “italy”

Here we are at Heathrow, waiting for our flight back to the U.S.  It was a great trip.  Yesterday we drove from the Villa in Tuscany to the Rome airport (about 3 hours).  We flew from Rome to London and stayed overnight in London to break up the trip back.

Hannah's watching Viva Pinata on the Slingbox as I'm typing this.  Here's my Heathrow tip:  T-Mobile hotspots are 1 pound cheaper per hour than BT's.  Who knew you could price shop for internet access in the airport.

That's all for now.

So no pictures, and you should be happy about that.  Day 2 of our stay was not a particularly good one for me -- as I spent most of the previous night driving the porcelin bus, as they say.  So I spent most of the day sleeping down by the pool or up in my room.  I did miss a good dinner.  But putting it all in perspective, the worst day here is better than the best day most other places, so I can't really complain.

Luckily, it only lasted for 24 hours, so today was much better. And tonight is Pizza night.  Many of our party took a pizza making lesson todayy, and tonight we'll be dining on the fruits of their labor.  Pictures will be available at a later time.

Also, we did go to Arezzo today, one of those cool Italian walled cities.  The main purpose of the trip was to find some gelato, which we accomplished.   Due to the heat of the day and the number of children in our party -- we did not stay too long -- just poked around in a few shops.

So here we are at Torre Del Tartufo -- the Villa where we are staying.  We got here yesterday, and while checking the place out, I, of course, had to check out the internet options.  It turns out that by "internet access," they meant really really really really really slow dial-up.  So this makes it impossible to post anything of real meaning from the villa.  I can make all the text posts that I want, but that misses the whole point, and will likely cause too many Seinfeld references, for example:

KRAMER: Yeah, ya know you haven't been around for a while.

MAESTRO: Oh yeah, I've been at my house in Tuscany.

KRAMER: Oh Tuscany huh? Hear that Jerry? That's in Italy.

JERRY: I hear it's ah beautiful there.

MAESTRO: Well if you're thinking of getting a place there don't bother. There's

really nothing available.

JERRY: (Surprised) Huh?

From: Seinfeldscripts.com

Anyway, I will continue to pull stuff together to post, maybe see if I can find an internet cafe or something (no promises) and post either when I get back to London (on our way back to the States) or after I get back in the good ole' U.S. of A.

Just to let everyone know, this Villa is AMAZING.  We have our own suite (three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a living room) so its perfect for the Foster City Odell Family.  If it weren't for the internet access (and lack of Diet Pepsi), there'd really be no reason to leave, ever.

An article on the front page of the San Franciso Chronicle describes the troubles people are having getting their passports these days.  Because of a change in the law that requires U.S. citizens to have a passport when traveling to Canada, Mexico, the Carribean, and Bermuda, the number of passport requests has gone up 33% over this time last year.  People are waiting in line for hours, and not getting their passports via the mail for months.

We were lucky, as previously described, we went to the Foster City office and applied there.  We paid for expedited service, and got all of the kid's passports in about 2 weeks.  I'm sure this will calm down after summer, but its amazing the problems people are having.

If you are interested in reading the story -- here's the link:
"The Nightmare of Getting There"

The cool thing (at least for me) is that the new passports the kid's got have the RFID chips in them.  I'm sure it will not really speed up processing as Kathleen and I still have the old kind.  In any case, it'll be interesting to see how they get used.  And the kids are really excited to get their passports stamped!

I remember my first international travel, and how exciting things like getting your passport stamped can be (I still think its cool when I visit a new country), I'm looking forward seeing how Aaron, Hannah, and Jason react to getting their first stamps.

In getting ready for our trip, we had to get passports for the kids.  This experience was actually sort of fun.  First, we were able to apply for the passports at our local city hall.  We made an appointment, so there was no line.  Both Kathleen and I had to be there -- we both had to sign the forms.  The process takes quite awhile, about 15 minutes per kid.  We had to use the expidited service to make sure the passports arrived on time.

Besides the regular passport fee, we had to pay a service fee to the city and a fee to expedite the passports.  All in all, a costly service.  The passports all arrived (seperately) within the 2 week period they say, so it was definately worth paying the additional fee.  The kids are really excited to have their own passports and we can't wait to get them stamped in the UK and in Italy.

We're going to Italy!  Its Kathleen's parent's 50th wedding anniversary and they've invited us along with all of Kathleen's brothers and sister and everyone's kids to Tuscany.  We're staying in a Villa.  Its unbelievably exciting.  We're going to London for a few days in advance to see some of the sites there and to get over the time change.

We're still trying to figure out what sites to see when we go to London.  We'll do Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London, but beyond that we haven't decided.  It'll be fun to see London with the kids.  I went with my family when I was a kid, and it was one of the best trips I've ever taken.  We were there two weeks -- and did a house swap with another family.  The only negative of the whole trip was when I got home, the kid who stayed in my room took apart all of my Lego models.

In any case, we've got some time before we go, but Kathleen and I have started to think about thinking about the stuff we need to do before we go.

I'm planning to spend some time at REI looking for cool travel luggage things, maybe some travel wear too.