Italy - Part I

So here it is. Finally. We're going to take it nice and slow and in pieces, ok?

First here I am holding Leah after many many hours of flying. I often say that my mother is the baby crazy one, but I pretty much threw my bag on mom's shoulder and snatched her out of Nikki's hands when I saw her :) (Don't worry, Mom IS in fact baby crazy, but she's baby crazy in a nice helpful way instead of a standing around in the airport doing nothing kind of way).
So we got into town, and I have no recollection of what we did. But we must've ended up on base that day (oh, right I forgot, we had to take the safety class to get our international drivers licenses valid on base. I mean, we didn't ACTUALLY take the class (Nikki's sneaky like that), but maybe we should've. More on that (a lot) later.)

So this is Mom entertaining Leah (in that helpful baby crazy way) outside one of the buildings on base.

Then the next day we went to Ca' Madresca for a wine tasting. It was SOOO much fun and very informative. First of all, the wine was super tasty and the owner (Adrian, I think) was extremely educational. We got to taste 4 or 5 wines and we even got to pour some wine from one of the really huge tanks to see the difference in a wine that wasn't fully aged yet. He explained how the colors affected the taste of the wine, as well as where the grapes were grown (on the hill or in the valley). It was awesome. As were the appetizers (we got to taste homemade salami). So we tasted wine, shopped for a while, then Mom went and entertained Leah outside for a while, then we played on the barrels, took some pictures and went home before Leah melted down (with 6 or 7 bottles of wine and a bottle of pistachio liquer). I will reiterate this in many posts, but that kid was really a trooper most of the time. I'm pretty sure we made it into the car this time and Mom had to stay in the back and keep her awake (we were only 15 minutes or so from home) so she'd get a good nap in when she got home. I remember only one major meltdown and that was after driving on the Autostrade for hours in idiotic traffic, so I kind of felt like melting down too.

I ADORE this picture. She's like "ewww, why are you kissing me?!"

I like this picture too - Mom (Nana from here on out) has her drink and Leah has hers.

And this is actually that morning when we decided to dress up the doll, er, I mean Leah, in the super cute dress that Aunt Bettie made for her. WITH bonnet.

So as you can imagine, Aunt Chrissi (I think of myself in the third person whenever I'm around nieces and the nephew) did not actually forget about birds while she was in Europe. In fact, I think Nikki was...well, impressed is maybe not the right word but...impressed with my one-track mind. So I harassed her enough that we got up early one morning and went down to the spring at Polcenigo. I'm not going to go into any of the birds on any of these posts and instead do one big bird post at the end.

So this is picturesque, right?

Kind of hazy, neat rocks, a sign in Italian, a goose.

Ah, right.

The goose. Funny thing about the goose - he was REALLY territorial. So of course he didn't want to let us near the spring at all. He kept honking and flapping his wings. Sounds terrifying doesn't it? We thought about trying to scare him into the water, but in this picture is essentially where he wanted to be goshdarnit. Eventually 2 men (British and Italian I think) came along and one of them tried to shoo him away and that Goose was having none of it. He was seriously aggressive. He scared the guy away (at which point the other friend starting making chicken noises and gestures at him and laughing hysterically - it was entertaining). I'm really not doing this story justice - it was really kind of ridiculous. But whatever - the spring was gorgeous as was Polcenigo (um, I think, there were a lot of towns that started with a P and I couldn't keep them all straight). We walked up and down the river a bit and then we went home for naptime.

The spring was at the end of this walkway (we followed the geese...slowly, all the way down it).

A restaurant.

So that's the end of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 is Venice and Burano.