Gardening

Tyler has been hard at work in the garden this spring!  We have had some beautiful flowers, including some tulips back in April and now some assorted pots along the front walk.  Tyler also planted various seeds and starts for the vegetable garden.  Out front along the driveway, we now have the beginnings of zucchini, lettuce, basil, watermelon, and tomatoes.  There is a small patch of herbs along the front walk like last year, and the strawberries are returning too.  More tomatoes are of course in the works... 26 plants are already in the ground, but there are probably another 50 (!!!) growing indoors right now, and those should go into the ground before too long.  We had peas too (thanks to our neighbor), but those have already been harvested and eaten.  Yum!!

Here are a few pics...

Garden Spring 2012

Sicily in the Springtime

At the end of April, we took a long weekend and went to Sicily for about 5 days.  May 1 is a national holiday (aka, no work), and April 26 was Lynne's 30th birthday (eek!) so we figured it was a good excuse for a short vacation.  On the 27th we packed up Skodie with our camping gear and hit the road.  We drove down to the tip of Calabria where you can take a car ferry across the straights of Messina to reach Sicily.  We then drove along the eastern coast to a campsite south of Siracusa, outside of the town of Avola.  The entire drive only took about 5 hrs, ferry and all.  Not bad!

We spent the weekend touring around some great towns like Siracusa, Noto, Modica, and Scicli.  We also went on a few hikes: one in a nature reserve south of Avola, one in the area where the ancient city of Noto used to be located, and another in a canyon outside Ispica.  We ate great food, including cannoli (Lynne's favorite) and granita (which is similar to gelato, but more ice and less cream, and it's completely different in Sicily than anywhere else we've tried it).  We also went to the beach every day and swam in the sea (which is still cold, but swim-able).

Overall, it was one of the best trips we've taken since moving to Italy. If you're looking for a spring travel destination, we recommend Sicily.  The wildflowers are gorgeous, the temperature is perfect, and tourist season hasn't really begun so crowds and prices are both low.  For us, it was paradise :)  Here are some of our photos... Enjoy!

Sicily April 2012

Trip to Paris in March

Hi again,
So we are waaaaay behind in posting things on the blog as of late. But we have done some traveling in the last few months, and we're finally getting around to posting a few pictures!

In early March, we had the wonderful opportunity to go to Paris and meet up with our friends Erin and Eric for a few days.  Tyler and I flew directly from Naples to Paris and spent a couple days wandering around the city by ourselves.  Then we met up with Erin and Eric, who let us stay with them for a few days at Erin's law firm's flat.  We honestly can't thank them enough for inviting us to join them!  We saw many of the great sites of the city, ate great food, walked a ton, and overall had a fantastic trip.  Here are just a handful of our photos.  Erin and Eric have a much nicer camera, so we left a lot of the picture taking to them.  But we still managed to get a few shots of our own.

After our trip to Paris, we both came back to Cosenza and said "so... where are we going next???" See the following post to find out what we decided on :)

Paris March 2012