7 posts tagged “vacation”

Or as Kathleen says, "The Freshmaker!"

This is not everything yet.  I'd still like to post some video too -- but here are more pictures from our vacation in Tuscany...

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.

Ok -- so its a little hard to  think about doing too many posts from Tuscany, because who wants to be on the computer.  Anyway, tonight we celebrate my in-laws' 50th wedding anniversary.

We spent the day in Florence (Firenze), which I'll describe more when I have a high-speed connection.  It was quite the ordeal.

We head back to London tomorrow and then back to the U.S. of A on Sunday. 

Pictures coming when high speed interenet access appears.

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.

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.