We visited Italy last year during this same holiday and I can confidently say we're all in love with this beautiful country. The people are SO kind!! We had another truly amazing week and I hope we can visit again someday...I would love nothing more than to travel Italy for a few weeks. Someday...
We drove about 8 hours on Saturday and arrived at our hotel in time to swim for a bit and have dinner before crashing for the night.
I wish I took a picture of our rooms!! We had two rooms on this trip (which is pretty standard for our family of 6) but this time we had a "boy's room" and a "girl's room"...we were just down the hall from each other, and while the boys had a standard room with a king bed the girls and I shared a room with four twin beds lined up...it was so cute! And totally the best way to sleep with kids if you ask me...at least my kids. They're all pretty active sleepers! ha!
We bounced from the beach to the pool all day Sunday and Monday and on Tuesday we drove to Venice for the day. What a beautiful city! I had visited once before super briefly when I was 11 so I really don't remember anything, but I was so excited to visit and explore!
We had a tour scheduled and started our day at St. Mark's Basilica. For whatever reason, the crowds were quite small the day we visited so we were able to really take our time and check out the Basilica inside and outside without getting in anyone's way. You have to take note here that with four kids (two still being fairly young) we take up a lot of room and are almost always in someone's way! ha! We're working on it! : )
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| These four are so lucky to have a Dad who shows them the world |
After St. Mark's we saw the city from a water taxi and our guide pointed our e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. She was seriously so sweet. I think I've mentioned before that we have used a website called Tours by Locals when we travel and want a designated tour somewhere...we've had fantastic luck using this service because the tour guide is able to structure the tour in a way that's going to be exciting and fun for our kids...on this tour she took us to the workshop of an amazing craftsman named Roberto Comin who makes marionette puppets! He was the sweetest man and explained to the kids how he designs and makes these puppets and let them play a role in the creation of a few! And of course, he let them play with the puppetts themselves and taught them how to move them..this man was the sweetest and for sure one of the best parts or our entire trip!
As magical as the city of Venice is the behavior of all of our kids didn't *quite* match up...we had a few trying moments with one who shall not be named but by late afternoon and an early dinner plus two gelato breaks we had a happy crew!
We wrapped up our day with a gondola ride. It was perfection. SO peaceful and beautiful...Venice was just amazing.
The rest of our holiday we spent in a pretty fantastic pattern of waking up around 9:00am for breakfast, heading to the beach to play in the sand, slowly making our way to the pool for the majority of the day and finishing up with playing in the waves until around 6:30pm when we'd make our way back to our rooms to shower for dinner...sprinkle in a lot of snacks and drinks (for the kids AND the adults) and we all left the following Saturday well rested, pretty sun kissed and sad to be heading back to reality!
The end of the school year is in sight and we cannot wait!! I'm so thankful for the German school schedule of half days because I feel like we can still enjoy our summer...the kids are home by 12:00pm every day (Allie has school until 12:45pm two days a week) so for the most part their homework is finished by 2:00/2:30 and we can have a few hours of fun enjoying the sunshine and hitting up our local pool/lakefront!! We don't feel quite as cheated out of a shorter summer break, but we're all itching to get home to visit our family and friends in August!!!
