Traveling Pixels

We have safely returned home after our 7-week European adventure. Our doggies were very happy to see us! It was a wonderful trip, but unfortunately all good things must eventually end. It will be nice to sleep in our own bed for a change … we’ve only been home 3 nights in the past 10 weeks!

We spent our last night in Europe at the movies. We haven’t been to one in 2 months, and were dying to see Serenity (which was awesome).

Today, Todd spent most of the day going through his photos (on 21 CDs). He selected a few images and posted them below.
Note: please click “Next Page” (at the bottom of this page) to view them all.

We hope you enjoyed our blog.

Happy trails!

We spent 3 days wandering around Venice. We visited the usual tourist sites (i.e. St. Mark’s Basilica, Doges Palace), climbed the Campanile to view Piazza San Marco below, and took numerous boat rides on the Grand Canal. Unlike our first trip to Venice 10 years ago, we explored a lot of areas off the beaten path and noticed how deserted many places feel. Venice is currently loosing their residents … perhaps in 100 years from now only tourists will live there.

Piazza San Marco is one of the most beautiful square in Europe (or anywhere for that matter).

We were fairly lucky with dive-bombing pigeons and between the two of us only got hit once (Steph).

Every two years Venice hosts an International Art Festival. We spent a full day admiring film, paintings, sculpture, etc. from hundreds artists around the world. There are permanent buildings at the venue for each of the 20+ participating country and each building holds work from one or more artists representing that country. In addition, there two other large venues which hold the work of forty or more different artists from various countries.

We returned to Florence, after ten years, and enjoyed its art and history once again. We went to the Uffizi which houses the finest collection of Italian paintings in the world. We saw Michaelangelo’s David at the Accademia. Finally we went to the Bargello (known for its sculpture) and saw Donatello’s original version of David.

The below photo of the Duomo was taken from our hotel room. The photo above was taken from the top of the Duomo’s dome.

The painted fiberglass cows that began in America have traveled to Europe. The “packaged cow” (shown below) is the funniest one we’ve seen on any continent.

The photo below shows the back of the package (read the fine print for a good laugh).

It should come as no surprise that a high percentage of Europeans are not fond of the Bush administration and current U.S. foreign policies. During our travels we witnessed this dislike in various ways.

On Italian TV we saw a show called RockPolitik (pictured above). An actor pretending to be Bush (with a golf club) walked around the stage telling jokes to a live audience. Since the show was in Italian we primarily only caught names of people, but this was enough for us to realize that at one point he was actually comparing Bush to Hitler.

On more than one occasion locals asked us where we were from. When answering “America”, their immediate response was asking “George Bush?” in a derogatory tone. To this we would respond “sorry, we didn’t vote for him.”

All the pictures that we posted while traveling were taken with Steph’s camera. Todd went through his photographs this morning and pulled a few images from each of the areas we’ve traveled to. They are now posted different entries below.

Note: please click “Next Page” (at the bottom of this page) to view them all.

Eilean Donan Castle

Isle of Skye

Isle of Skye

Isle of Skye

Isle of Skye

Eiffel Tower

The Louvre

Sainte-Chapelle

Sainte-Chapelle

Roman Theater in Orange

Ponte du Gard

Roman Arena in Arles