Italy, the land that I love!

Ok, so once again you thought I gave up on my blog but really I am just trying to weed out any casual readers by only writing 3 times a year.  It is not that I am to busy at work to write it is more a lack of motivation and feeling overwhelmed by how far behind I have gotten.  Heaven forbid I skip any weekend of my life, I feel compelled to keep everything in chronological order and when so much fun stuff is happening it is hard to stay current.  For that reason I will try to do some quick summaries of my life from May through Sept.  Most of these adventures take place with John so I should say "our" lives.

So we left off in Paris...  John and I took a 5 Am flight from Paris to Venice and since dinner doesn't end until midnight we were totally worn out when we arrived in Venice.  I was convinced John would love Venice, how can you not like a "floating" city.  I even planned for us to take the longer boat ride, instead of the bus, in to the city center so he could get the full effect.  What does he do to show his appreciation, he sleeps the whole boat ride.  I tried not to be annoyed but seriously.  So when he would wake himself up I would mention how he missed tons of impressive stuff, not totally true, but my guilt tactic for his sleeping offense.  We had a great room in Venice, tiny but right on the square.  Once we checked in John committed his second large offense, suggesting we take a nap.  I know he had only slept a couple of hours in days but we have 24 hours in Venice, come on.  He really gave me no choice and since I had been to Venice before I didn't have a strong desire to go sight-seeing on my own again, so we napped.  I only allowed a short nap before we mazed our way through the Venice streets.  The key to Venice is to never plan on finding anything, just assume you will wander around aimlessly the whole time and stumble upon cool things by chance.  John did pick out 2 places to eat ahead of time and so we broke rule one and set out to find them.  Despite our best efforts we got totally lost but we did accidentally find the places we were looking for.  I need to emphasis this was mainly by accident.  It was a wonderful accident though because we had some great food.  That night in Venice I had one of my favorite meals of the whole trip.  We ordered so much food we should have been ashamed.  The highlights were a beef carpaccio and an eggplant dish that were to die for!!! 
As always we got back late from dinner and needed to leave Venice early so we could get our rental car, head thru Bologna and be in Cinque Terre by 5, otherwise we lost our hotel reservation.  We also decided that there is no way we would sleep in so why bother setting an alarm.  Big mistake.  We planned to be in our rental car by 9, instead that is when we woke up.  Woops.  To get to the airport where our rental car was involved about 2 hours of running and shuffling around, I don't think there was one airport we didn't run in the whole trip.  Keep in mind we now had about 6 hours to make a 5 hour trip to our next destination and we planned to have lunch in Bologna.  We were delirious because we should have realized no Italian lunch could be done in under an hour.  But little did I know one of the highlights of the trip, the rental car/stick shift driving, was about to take off and make things really interesting.