Bicycles and Raluca

Today in Lucca we talked Don into riding a 4 person bicycle.  What fun....I was in charge of driving....just what I like.  The bicycles all have bell's that you can ring when someone is getting in your way.  Sooooo you know how much I love being "child like".  So I was ringing at everyone.  Very fun.  We laughed the whole way.  Then Raluca, Rachel's friend, met us for lunch and walking through the streets of Lucca.  Raluca is wonderful.  She is Romanian by birth, but now lives and works in Florence.   We all went to lunch at a wonderful place in the amphateater.  Don and I shared a wonderful lasgna bolagnese that was out of this world.  The pasta was so thin and the sauce so light. I will have to try my hand at it when I get home.  Then we went to the Palazzo Pfanner.  Beautiful palace with wonderful gardens.  Now we hurry home to shower and change and off to dinner we go with Linda to Anna's and Fiorenzo's home again for dinner.  Rachel and Raluca will share a meal before she has to head for home.  Florence is a one hour drive from Lucca.  I hope to meet her again someday.  She was a delight and I enjoyed the little time we spent together. It only makes me want to spend more time with her. 

The party has arrived!!!!!

The party has arrived!!!!
Finally our travelers from the west arrive and so does the party. You can’t believe the stamina of these two. After 24 hours of pure travel, very little sleep and pie-eyed looks from both of them. After a quick shower they are fresh as a daisy and ready to take on Italy. I prepared some meats, cheese, olives and bread for the hungry travelers, to try to wash away all the ugly airline food they had to endure while on their travels. We dine via our veranda off the upstairs kitchen. That helped, but of course the wine was the first to come out and as I thought 4 bottles, 2 red and 2 white was not enough for this party crew. So off we go down our 79 steps to the “alimentari” which means small grocery store. More wine and something sweet for Don. Back up the 79 stairs and now it is time to prepare a bit of dinner for the weary travelers. Pasta, a simple salad and bread and of course the wine was the meal of the evening. Rachel made a wonderfully simple dressing with only Italian olive oil, vinegar, and a peach I had bought at market. Just a dash of salt and dinner is served. Wonderful! We talked, and laughed about all our travel adventures we had to traverse in order to get to this spot and got down to the business of living Italian for a while. Which by the way, that is something Don and I come to the very same notion, that as soon as we stepped a toe back into Italy, we didn’t feel any longer that it had been 2 years since we had last been in Italy. It felt like maybe a month or two. But certainly not 2 years. It felt familiar. That was the word we both used. And that is a very good feeling.
Today I want to rent bicycles and ride the wall of Lucca. Only 3 euros and we can see all of the historic wall of Lucca. Don seems to be in a bit of trouble though. Seems he thought that he could concoct some story that the bicycles rented for 50 euros, so that would dissuade me from wanting to bicycle the wall. But Anna came to the rescue, finding out from the shop owner that indeed it was only 3 euros. So after my tail of woe to the girls about my lying husband and the bicycle. They are on my side and we plan to pedal Lucca today.

Also, Rachel’s friend from last trip, Raylucca, is planning a day trip to Lucca. It will be great to meet her finally. Our hope is to get everyone together for dinner somewhere. But the day has yet to tell us what it will be. For all the planning in the world all you can do is enjoy all you can and deal with the rest. I plan to do just that. Ciao per ora. (bye for now)

Wonderful Lucca

We arrive in Lucca check into our bed and breakfast and first things first....call Anna.  Wonderful Italian friend that she is, Fiorenzo prepares a wonderful home cooked meal.  First course a wonderful pasta tortallini, second course a wonderful salad, peppered and olive oiled tomatoes and pork chops.  Wonderful!!!  And for dessert.....3 different kinds of ice cream or gilato.  We had a wonderful evening and even was able to speak to my mom via skype.  Anna and Fioenzo laughed as my mom took the computer around the room to show us our kids...hahahahah.  It was wonderful.
Monday Anna and Fiorenzo took us to Pisa....wonderful sights and and by the pictures you can see we are always having fun.  Ciao per ora....A domani.  (bye for now....till tomorrow)

OMG!!!!!!!!!!

Ok followers this is a story only people of the airline world would believe.  It starts out with a hurricane somewhere to the east.  How could that possible effect our plans to travel to London 2 days from now.  Well as any airline employee can tell you or someone in politics, everything has a ripple effect to everything else in this world. So as hurricane Irene runs it's course hitting ALL of the east coast as it dots along. Everyone there starts to run west....anywhere to get away from her wrath.  And if they are going to Europe then maybe they must rebook their reservations.  And maybe the next best connector to Europe is good ol DFW.  And that my friends is just what happened.  So here I am at work Friday morning take a look at our flights the next day and WHATTTT....our lovely flight is now oversold......aaaaahhhh so is the next day....aaaaahhh so is the next day. OMG!!!!! I look at every place in Europe

....Paris, Frankfurt, even Madrid. We are sunk. But then a ray of hope. I look at this evenings flight and wow. There are seats, not a lot but a ray of hope. But I have to work in the morning. So I kick it into overdrive and start calling everyone I know to get off Saturday. After a couple of hours of hard calling I get the first piece of good luck and get the day off. Call Don, get him on red alert. And the race begins. We had started packing so that was great but still....................... so much to do. All the while looking at our flight seeing what had happened to all those other flights was slowly happening to ours. It filling up! Now it is oversold. But the ray of hope is still there. Weather! As any airline person will tell you, weather can do one of two things. May the possible impossible or make the impossible possible. This story is to long already but after broken seats and delayed departures we didn't get out on the flight I thought we would get out on but we did get out on the very last flight of the night and the most unbelievable part of it all was in the final moments, we actually got business class and even together. Now that is amazing!

So now we are here in London in our unbelievably over priced hotel. Showered and scrubbed and soon to get our over priced dinner, sleep the sleep of the dead in our over priced bed. Tomorrow they say our Britsh Airway's flight looks pretty good. We should get on. Stay tuned for the next adventure to Pisa tomorrow I hope. Ciao per ora..A domani. (bye for now...till tomorrow)

The days ahead

Ok so we are just a couple of days away from Italy 2011.  Here is the break down. 
This time we will be going primarily to Cinque Terra, staying in the village of Vernazza  and then to Venice, one week in each. But of course non revenue travel can kick your butt so we start a couple of days early in order to make sure we can make our reservation, but in doing so we find that we have new wants. Those wants show up as our friends from our last Italy trip in the form of Anna and Fiorenzo. Anna tells me about a month or so a go that they will get married the last week in September. So now we would like to get to Lucca for a couple of days of fun with them. So at this writing we will be traveling on Saturday the 27^th of August from DFW to London's Heathrow and then we will see if British airways can get us to Pisa on Sunday the 28^th or must we stay with the brits for a night and take the 29^th BA flight out.  All of this will soon be known to all and be in our history.....but for now.....nobody knows. As we find out from everything from the internet to friends in "the know"  London's Heathrow is a madhouse, and the fact that we are trying to make an hour and 20 min connection between AA's terminal 3 to BA's terminal 5............"are you crazy....there is no way!"  That is the concensis.....sad really....but such is life.  Soooo what can one do but leave a day early just in case.  Now let's be clear here....our reservations in Vernazza are on Wednesday, we gave ourselves 2 extra days to get there for those reservations.  But as I said the "wants" won over the thought of "you can still make your reservations in Vernazza".  All we could hear was," but we will miss the fun in Lucca".  So it is all BA's fault.  If they had more than one flight out a day, or if they had had the good sense to make it an hour or so later in the day....please really....what were they thinking, we wouldn't be in this mess right now. So because of the insensitive planning on their part we have to leave another day early................HOW RUDE!

And by the way, for any of you that didn't hear the wonderful story of Anna and Fioenzo.  They are a wonderful Italian couple that live in Lucca Italy.  We met on our last trip to Italy.  In my continued quest for all things fun, I decided to learn as much of the Italian language as I could before our trip.  As you all know I have been mangleing our language for years so why not another language, why not Italian.  So on my quest for all things Italian I found a wonderful website called Livemocha.com   This is a wondeful free site for learning any language, and in that learning spree I found Anna.  She helped me with Italian and I with her English, however I must say she helped me much more than I could ever help her with English....she knows it very well.  But they opened their hearts and home to us.  We had dinner out and at their home, they took us on a wonderful trip to Rome and soooo very much, much more.  I can't believe what a wonderful adventure this relationship has been and continues to be.  As a side note, my mom took on the task of making the wedding gift for my wonderful Italian friends.  With very short notice I was hoping that my mom could make them a couch quilt.  Not only did she make a fantastic couch quilt she even stiched an Italian message of good wishes for them on the quilt.  I got it in the mail in record time and just talked with Anna and they were even on time.  They recieved the quilt the very day the US mail said they would.....Go America!  Anna was so thrilled.  She couldn't believe that my mom could do this for them.  But they don't know my mom.  One day I hope they do meet and they will know what everyone knows.

11-days till Italy and we gotta do some planning

So where else better to do some hot and heavy planning for our trip to Italy......Nonna Tata's in Fort Worth Texas.  The best REAL Italian food in North Texas.  This place is the bomb......really reminds you of Italy, and the food.  Donnatella is the chef, owner and gotta love it, she is from Italy.  Teeny tiny place, only cash and bring your own wine and glasses.  Love that too!  That way I get the wine that I love.  And that we did, but this was big planning too as you can see by the second pic.  Donnatella was kind enough to let us put my homemade lemoncello in their freezer til after din din and then "cin cin"!  Since she was so kind to allow that, we gave the kitchen folk a bit of a taste test.  Donnatella was very kind to come to our table and give us a thank you and job well done on the making of this fabo Italian lemon concoction. 
So now we are ready for the adventure.......the count down begins....10....9....8....yahhhhh can't wait!

Lucca 2009

So this was 2009 in Lucca with great food and wine and more wine.  I can hardly wait till we get there, check out that pizza!!!!!!  We just gotta find this place again.  I bet we do and I will get the name of the place this time.

Soon we are off to Italy!

In just a little over two weeks we will be off to the wilds of Italy for fun, wine, food and more wine.....and more wine.  Rachel, Linda, Don and I will hopefully see my friend Anna and Fiorenzo in Lucca before we go to our first stop, Vernazza in beautiful Cinque Terre.  There we will stay with Gulianno in his bed and breakfast for one week.  Rachel stayed there on her last trip and loved it.  Then we will be off via train to Venice for the next week of fun.  Sooooo let the count down begin.  I will give ya a little update on all as we go along.  By the way, Linda just emailed and got us tickets to the Venice opera to see "La Traviata"!!!!!! Can you believe it.....Yaaaahhhh baby....ciao!