A wedding in Italy

When I last left you we had traveled to the south east of Italy for a wedding.
The whole point of the trip was the wedding right?

Soverato is a bit like Old Orchard Beach, its a tourist town. Its actually a bit smaller than OOB and I'd say its a tourist town for Italian tourists, not the kind of spot I'd expect North Americans in. English was uncommon which I think is one of the scary and fun things when traveling. We got lots of opportunities to pantomime and gesture. I also quite like not being exactly sure what will happen next. What is this thing that I'm being served? What will it taste like?

The wedding was on the beach, well at the beach. It started to sprinkle just as we arrived so they opted for "plan B" which was under cover although they did get pictures on the beach.

You can see the two photographers here, they were madmen. I've worked at a few weddings and I've never seen photographers like these guys, they were literally everywhere. Kurt tells me they have thousands of pictures.

I had asked Kurt about the dress code for the wedding and he bemoaned that Victoria was making him wear pants. Everybody was pretty casual which was fun. A few months later they had a ceremony in Massachusetts and we all dressed up more, unfortunately that day was stinking hot.

Angie and I thought that this room full of food was dinner and had a couple plates worth, it turns out that this was actually the appetizers...

This is the dinner menu for those who can read Italian.

And for those who cannot.

 I had more octopus in 3 days than I've had in the rest of my life put together.

Proof that Angie ate octopus.

Not everyone was so adventurous. Johanna got special chicken tenders.

The fish was amazing!

 After dinner the appetizer room had been converted to the desert room.

Amazing right?

There were the normal speeches and such but of course I had to get in. Angie and I started dating in 1996 (gads that seems so long ago) and I think the first family gathering I attended would have been Easter '97. Kurt and Johanna would have been quite young.
Angie and I used to always bring toys for Kurt and Johanna at Christmas. We stopped doing it at some point and I think some of the joy went out of Christmas. So while we were out wandering around I picked up some Kinder Joy eggs. I actually wanted Kinder surprise eggs but couldn't find any, they're illegal in the US...

I presented the eggs to Kurt, Victoria and Johanna and apparently a lot of people thought I was a high point for the night. It proves you don't have to spend a lot of money, or really think things through to make people happy.

Next time: Sorrento and the Charming Accommodation!

Travel to a wedding

So I mentioned we'd gone to Italy, the purpose of the trip was a wedding, Angie's cousin Kurt marrying Victoria. Victoria's family is from Soverato which is kind of in the instep of the boot, so southern Italy.


Google says its 632km or 392 miles from Rome to Soverato, we opted to fly to Lamezia and then take the train about 2 hours to Soverato. On the train we met Josh and Nicole who had taken the train all the way from Rome which is about 7 hours total. I realize now that flying was a screw up. They left their hotel at about the same time we did and just chilled on a train. We had to take the train from Rome to the airport and then fight our way through the airport. Get a cab from the airport to the train station and get on the train. So learn from us, just take the train, it takes the same amount of time overall.

This train ride was one for the books, I wish I had pictures. The train was 1950s or '60s era, diesel and had 2 gears. Seriously, you could feel when the train shifted gears. I sat across from an old guy, I'd guess he was in his late '70s but he could have been older. He fell asleep and started leaning forward. Angie and I were sure that at any moment I was going to have this old guy in my lap. Interesting ride. The scenery was amazing though, Italy is exactly as beautiful as you've been led to believe.

Strangely I don't have any pictures at all from our first night in Soverato. It was kind of an odd time. Kurt is 10 years younger than Angie, his parents are around 20 years older than us. So we were of left without anybody our age to hang around with. Everybody was really nice but you could tell there was a generational divide.

Anyway the hotel was lovely, if slightly unprepared to deal with a hoard of Americans. My biggest issue was coffee. The coffee in Italy is good but its espresso or cappuccino which is espresso with foam. I was having a hard time getting the volume of coffee I was used to. I'm adaptable and lack of coffee isn't the end of the world but...

I wish I had taken more pictures. I thought I had, I think I've lost some. I can't find pictures of us dipping our toes in the Mediterranean for instance.

The food was amazing, these pictures are from the rehearsal dinner, that table never got empty, thats just all they had out at once. I took the close up shot to show Angie's grandmother that weiners wrapped in crescent rolls happen in Europe too.

Last night I spent a bunch of time uploading more pictures, seriously, more than 100. I'm going to go back and re-edit my last post with the pictures of Castle Sant'Angelo, if you're interested go check that out.

Next: A Wedding in Italy!

Yoiks, Rome...

Its been awhile. I knew it had been awhile but didn't realize exactly how long it had been. Looking back I see 2019 wasn't a good year for blogging, lets try harder in 2020.

Anyway when we last left off it was May, so lets look back...

At the end of May we went to Italy. This was Angie's first trip to Europe and the first time in 25 years for me, also my first trip to Southern Europe and my first European adventure as an adult.

We flew into Rome and spent one night there. I got us a room at Hotel Indigo on points as its part of the Holiday Inn chain. The hotel was lovely and our first Italian meal was in the hotel restaurant. This is normally something I don't do as hotel restaurants usually aren't great however this one was terrific and has a lovely rooftop view.

Then off to adventure! Rome is a very difficult city at first, any city takes me about a day to get used to and of course thats the difficulty with only spending the one night, in retrospect we should have done at least 2 but probably 4.

We had 2 goals for day 0, the Pantheon and Trevi Fountain. The amazing thing about Rome is that you can't hardly go anywhere without finding some piece of ancient history. I'm told this is why its so hard to build subways there, they dig a little, then call in the historians to examine what they found.

Anyway our hotel room came with a "handy phone" which I wish I'd thought to take a picture of, actually its just a cheap cell phone but it had service. Since I'm a bit of a cheapskate I'd opted not to get a European SIM for my phone so we had no service. We also had no map so the handy phone was super helpful.

The first thing we really found was more food, there are pastry shops everywhere...

Theres also coffee everywhere but only espresso. Toward the end of the trip we stayed in a hotel that had "American coffee" which was (no joke) a Mr. Coffee machine. Interestingly coffee (well, espresso or cappuccino) is always 1€ everywhere we went. I appreciated the standardization. ;)

Anyway the Pantheon was a fairly short walk away, the Handy Phone came in very handy, we probably wouldn't have found it otherwise, or we'd have had to get one of the tourist maps everybody else had.

The Pantheon is an old Roman temple that was converted into a church. Its pretty amazing to find because its hemmed in by the rest of the city. There is a large courtyard in front but the sides are nestled against the street with fairly tall buildings on either side. Its a great first thing to visit because its free and you can just wander in. The crowd was busy but not huge.

The skylight has no glass, the floor has holes in it to let water out...

Some more walking got us to Trevi.

Trevi was busy but as it was fairly late in the afternoon we could get in pretty easily. Going in May is an advantage, it wasn't too hot and while it was busy I'm sure it gets worse in the high season. I know we took more pictures but I can't find them. We did throw coins into the fountain which is supposed to ensure that you'll return.

I was wiped at this point, we'd left home at 3pm the previous day, I don't sleep well on planes and we'd been walking for 3 or 4 hours. We headed back to the hotel stopping to get some pizza which was sold by weight...

After sleeping like the dead we had a few hours to kill before flying south. We wandered around and found ourselves at Castel Sant'Angelo which is pretty amazing as a historical site but also interesting as a dog park. Apparently the citizens of this part of Rome bring their puppers here to run around. It was a pretty great way to start a travel day.

The castle was  the tomb of the emperor Hadrian but later a bunch of other emperors were also interred there. It was later converted into the castle. This picture is taken from "Pons Aelius", the Aelian Bridge. Its watched over by statues of 10 angels. Its only a short walk east from Vatican City and was also called "bridge of Saint Peter".

 Michael the Archangel watches over the whole place.

The bridge is over the Tiber. There must be some kind of open air market on weekends, they were just setting it up when we were there.