Seven days of summer

We just experienced seven days of sunshine here in England.  I feel a petty and ridiculous need to document it, but there it is.  Our summer sunshine finally came.  It lasted for seven days.  Then it started raining.  Again.

I think something must happen to a person's brain when they're required to live through three and a half months of crappy, wet weather that encroaches into the middle of summer.  It's no secret that it rains in England; you can sense it in the British mindset-- keep calm, carry on, stiff upper lip and all that.  But this year, even the locals are weary.  When we heard the jet stream shifted and there was the barest glimmer of hope that England might actually see some sunshine, the locals hesitated.  They only spoke about it in whispers, as if mentioning the possibility aloud would jinx it.

I can't blame them.  England had floods and tornadoes and Texas-sized hailstorms this year.  I kid you not.  Hail the size of baseballs fell on Leicester, a city that has me stumbling over the pronunciation like a true American.  We had hail at our place too.  Not rip-the-roof-and-siding-off-your-house-and-crack-the-birds-out-of-the-trees hail, like the kind that destroyed our house in Texas eight years ago.  Leicester got that kind.  But still, our hail was big enough to shred the carport roof.

If truth be told, that was my last straw with this England summer and the impetus to pack bags and head to Italy.  England saw rain the entire week we were gone, and the weather was just as miserable when we returned.   It was oddly validating, that weather.  But remarkably, a week later the sun came out.  We went from mid-60s to mid-80s, and there was nary a cloud in the sky.  It felt unprecedented.  All that complaining and whining and pouting was for naught.  Summer came, and I actually felt guilty for running off to Italy.  I felt guilty for my impatience with England while everyone in the US was enduring sweltering heat.  I felt guilty for my indulgence.

Well, seven days of sunshine does not a summer make.  While the clear skies held out just in time for the Olympic opening ceremony, the weather turned chill yesterday.  The dark clouds rolled in, and the sky opened up.  Surely  it was all that drumming at the ceremony.  If anything was going to beg for more rain, why not that?

Now that my Italian-holiday guilt has passed, damped down even further by today's intermittent downpours, I'm ready to share a few more pictures of our week in Italy to bring my tally of sunshiny summer days to a whopping grand total of 14.  After leaving the medieval, hilltop village we boarded two trains and stepped off the tracks in a very special place.

Venice, the city of light.

It was also a city in the possession of immense power and influence during the late middle ages to the renaissance, so it was a bit of a homeschooling field trip to boot.  But I'm not going to feign that my intentions were purely educational-- it's Venice!  It has been on my list of places to visit for as long as I can remember.

Perhaps it was a combination of the sun and the wine and the reflective quality of the water, but it left me speechless.  I'm not even going to try to capture it in words.  And the pictures hardly do it justice.

Venice by day.

Venice by night.

We saw the sights... including the Piazzale San Marco.

We saw the gondolas... and then had a little ride.

 It even rained once, and hard, for about fifteen minutes.

But even that wasn't terrible.  We hid out under an alcove and waited for it to stop.  And then the kids splashed happily in the Venetian puddles.  Without wellies.  A week without wellies felt celebratory, indeed.

Accidentally showing up in the middle of the Venetian Festa del Redentore means that Venice comes with fireworks.  Completely unplanned.  Incredibly amazing.  Fortuitous and resplendent.

It made up for the terrible English weather and then some.

Destination: sunshine!

You know the weather is bad when you wake up in the middle of July and need to put on your jacket to cut the chill before you stumble into the kitchen and make the coffee.  And while you’re making said coffee, you realize that you can’t remember the last time you didn’t need to wear a jacket and shoes in the house all day.  And try as you might, you just can’t remember the last day it wasn’t raining.

I have never experienced a summer quite like the one we’ve been having in England.  Growing up in the desert, I've lived through countless ones where it was so hot I thought I’d die —the kind that necessitate swimming pools, tank tops, and a truckload of popsicles.  It was never exactly fun when the temperatures sat between 105 and 115 F for weeks on end, but heat was just part of the summer recipe.  We expected it.

But this cold and the endless rain?  Our England summer is an imposter that I'm completely incapable of dealing with.  It’s more like fall, as if we skipped a season entirely; it just feels wrong.  Summers are for playing outside and relaxing, letting our minds sleep a little in the hot sun so they can rejuvenate themselves.  The sunshine and warmth brings such a balance, not only to the seasonal cycle, but to the spirit.  Honestly, I have never felt so out of balance in my life.

We decided if the summer sunshine wasn’t going to come to us, we had to go find it… So we loaded up our backpacks and hopped on a plane to the nearest sunny place we could think of: Italy.

I am pleased to report that the Italian weather did not disappoint.

Our first stop was to visit one of Einstein's colleagues near Lago Maggiore, an Italian lake near the border of Switzerland.  He lives with his family in a medieval village overlooking the lake.  It was built in the late 10th century as a kind of fortress village on a high rocky outcrop-- a sheer granite cliff surrounded by forest.  It boasts just a handful of privately-owned homes and a magnificent old church with well-preserved frescoes from the late middle ages to the renaissance.

It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?  That’s what I thought, too… but of course there was a catch.  This village is really hard to get to.  We had to take a long bus ride from the airport, then we were picked up by car and taken to buy groceries (because there isn’t a market anywhere near the village) before being dropped off on the main road.  From there we had to hike on foot, up a winding, craggy hill carrying both our luggage and groceries.

The hike itself is all of perhaps 20 minutes, and fairly steep at times, with railing keeping you from sliding off into the abyss of the ravine.  We were advised not to bring anything with wheels, so we stuffed half of what we'd normally take on holiday into backpacks.  It was definitely an exercise in learning to pack light and purchase only the groceries you will absolutely need.

The village is so secluded, that passing by on the main road below, you would miss it if you blinked.  From the main road, with my camera zoomed in, it looks something like this:

As we got closer, I started to really get a sense of the place.  It was like nothing I had ever imagined, not even in my wildest dreams.

 

Once inside the village, we were treated to other views, including the old church, dedicated to San Gottardo.  If I'm remembering correctly, it was built in the 1300s and then later expanded to hold about 70 parishioners in the village's heyday.  Both the outside and inside are covered with frescoes which were covered in mortar or plaster when the plague hit the village in the 1600s.  The frescoes were long forgotten, and they weren't discovered again until the 1930s, when the church fell into such disarray that the plaster began falling off.  The church has since been restored, and it is such a wonder to behold-- both inside and out!

 

 

Though not comparable to the beauty of the church, the rest of the small village held its own kind of charm.  There were only perhaps three skinny streets, or passageways, in the entire village.  They were stone-tossed and old as old.

 

Inside was a different story.  Some of the houses boasted modern conveniences-- flush toilets, sinks, stoves or hot plates-- while others looked vacant and in various stages of disrepair.  The most remarkable part of the house we stayed in was perhaps the old servants' kitchen and the view from the uppermost floor.

 

Because it’s only reachable by foot, and the path is not for the feint of heart, you can imagine how safe this village felt.  The kids ran barefoot in a wild pack-- sneaking around corners and having water fights, playing chess at midday in the shade of the church, and scaling the rickety ladder into the belfry.  How many children can fit in belfry at the same time?  All eleven of them, apparently.

All of the kids spoke German, and the girls were delighted to speak with them and so thankful that mom has been encouraging them to keep up with German lessons.  It certainly paid off.  We even picked up a few words of Italian while we were there, thanks to some remedial lessons from a gregarious, trilingual five-year-old.

In the late afternoon we made our way down the hill to the lake, and the children had so much fun splashing around in the cool water and canoeing with their new friends.  They played until the sun set, and then we put our shoes on and hiked back up the hill to cook dinner.

We packed so much into such a short time and enjoyed ourselves immensely.  It was absolutely breath-taking and amazing— the village, the views, the church, living in a medieval house, the lake, the Italian weather… all of it.  Our short visit there was exactly what we needed— sunshine, new friendships, easy conversations, and beautiful views.  I left feeling completely rejuvenated, and as expected, we cannot wait to go back!

Viva Italia: Day 4 - Ancient Rome

When you drive into Rome, the first thing you notice are the umbrella pines. And the bug guts on the windshield. :( But mostly, it's the pines.

And then the sun... it's different in Rome, if you can believe that. It was radiant and spraying everywhere. It felt like a sign... as if we had finally arrived somehow. I let myself imagine that the sun always looks so radiant in Rome. The haze of pollution had nothing to do with it, I'm sure. Ahem.



We were a little naive to think we could just drive to Rome. It's a major metropolitan city. Sure, we had driven in other major cities in the past, cities where we had been advised not to-- New York City, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin. We had just driven around Florence a couple days before, so why would driving in Rome be such a big deal? I mean, it's just driving, right?

Wrong. To drive in Rome you need to have a death wish. And you need to know where you're going. We were sort of lacking in both departments. We barely made it alive to our bungalo, and that only involved driving in the large loop that went around Rome. The crazy drivers in N. Italy have nothing on the ones in Rome. It was completely nuts!! That, and Wrong-way Rhonda, our GPS, was practically no help whatsoever. Apparently she has never been to Rome either.

The first thing we did was make it to our bungalo, which in reality turned out to be a mobile home, only a ten minute walk from the Mediterranean Sea. It was so nice to not have to set up the tent and start a campfire! The first thing I managed to do was walk into a tree and give myself a bloody nose. Can you imagine?! I had only reached into the car to grab out our travel books, and when I turned around-- WHAM! I had forgotten exactly how close we had parked to that tree.

After we all stopped laughing, and of course I stopped bleeding, we made dinner and combed through the travel books in attempt to plan our day-- our excursion in Rome had been reduced to one single day--- and there was way too much to see. I kept reminding myself that because Rome had not been built in a day, it therefore could not be seen in a day. But of course we had to try anyway.

First item on the agenda, after navigating the series of buses and trams to get into the city: meeting an old, dear friend of mine near the Colosseum. Meeting her necessitated walking around the Colosseum. Our eyes were gaping at the sights! And I was grinning a mile wide-- we're in ROME! We're actually in ROME!! It was unbelievable, and it looked like this:









Even the ground was pretty. It seemed like everywhere I looked my brain registered form drawings... ones we had done, or ones we could do in the future. This one we did a variation on last year as fish scales in the story of Atlantis:



It was then that we met up with my dear friend P and her beau. She and I met during our senior year of high school when we were both hired to work the concession stand at a movie theater. We became fast friends and stayed close through college-- we were even roomies at one point. We both moved away, and the last time I saw her was at my wedding. She made a beautiful bridesmaid. When I heard she was going to be in Rome the same week we would be in Italy, we just had to meet up!!

After a brief respite from the heat, and boy was it HOT, we headed back out to explore the Roman ruins. We walked back around the other side of the Colosseum, and I couldn't stop snapping pictures. It was truly incredible!





There was a mad throng of tourists, and although we bought tickets, the line to get into the Colosseum was hours long. Since P had already been a day prior, we decided to skip the waiting and spend time visiting while we meandered around the Roman Forum, also included on our entrance ticket, just up the hill. It was fantastic!! There was so much to see everywhere we looked.





Yes, there was even wedding pictures being taken here in Ancient Rome. It struck me as kind of strange... and yet I couldn't help myself from snapping a picture. I kept thinking how dirty her dress was going to get (am I a mom or what?!!), but I bet they got some lovely pictures.

From the Roman Forum we had this breathtaking view of the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine. I couldn't choose which ones to show you-- I think together they really give a good feel for how immense and impressive these structures actually are.









And walking around just inside the entrance to the forum:





Archaeology in progress:









Above, carving detail inside another arch. Below... the green door with purple columns that had us all enchanted. It's the Temple of Romulus, and it boasts the oldest functioning lock.







Looking back over the forum:










It was truly something to behold all of this! But with only one day in Rome, time was a-wasting. We headed off in search of lunch, shade, and cold drinks.... it was good to rest our legs after such an action packed few days... and so much more of Rome left to see that afternoon!

Next installments: modern Ancient Rome and the Vatican....