Roma!

I see why they call the A-Z blog challenge a challenge. It's because it's challenging. I've used a lot of words this month and while normally my blog is about nothing and everything all at the same time this month it has essentially been about one thing-travel.

If you read here you know what I consider my real happy place and its not Disney. Sorry Disney! I love Disney but Italy is my true happy place and I don't think the A-Z challenge would be complete without including her in at least one post.

R is for Roma

I try to keep these posts about a single visit, mostly for my own benefit. This way, all the photos from a particular trip are together in one spot.

We first visited Rome during our February school break back in 2005. We stayed in a little hotel within walking distance from the Vatican and we ate fabulous meals and saw incredible sights.

We spent one day wandering around the ruins of the Forum, visiting the Victor Emmanuel monument, and of course the Colosseum.

The Colosseum is staggering. We had not intended to get in on a tour but as we approached we saw a very long queue and an English speaking tour was just leaving so we opted to bypass the line and join the tour.

It was short and sweet and interesting and then you were left to explore on your own which is our preferred method of 'sightseeing'.

Some pretty gruesome stuff happened in this place.

The area around the Coliseum is full of wonderful things to see and explore. I hadn't heard much about the Victor Emmanuel monument before our trip but it is absolutely stunning-

...and you get a great view of the Piazza Venetia from the top steps-

As you wander thru the Forum and really all over this lovely city one thing seems apparent.

Everyone and their brother must have carried around chisels back in the day.

The amount of carved 'stuff' is unbelievable and someone in our group may have uttered the phrase 'Look! It's ruined!" once or a hundred times as we explored Rome.

They also might have cracked themselves up every.single.time.

Is this the smallest car ever?

One afternoon we walked up to the top of the circular Castel Sant 'Angelo. I didn't have a good photo of the exterior but found a free shot online so you can see what I mean by 'circular'...

We walked around and around and around. Through the years Sant 'Angelo has been an imperial tomb, a papal citadel, and a medieval prison. It was also windy but the views of the Vatican were not too shabby-

There are gorgeous fountains and squares and churches all around this city.

We wandered into the Pantheon which was built as a temple to the gods of Rome in 126 AD.

The Romans were gifted when it came to architecture and design...think about the tools they had to work with, or rather didn't have...

Of course no trip to Rome would be complete without a trip to the Vatican. We spent most of a day exploring the Vatican and the Vatican museums.

We had booked a tour ahead of time and I highly highly recommend that if you're visiting Rome. I do believe the queue to get inside the Sistine Chapel is the longest queue I've seen anywhere in my travels. We skipped right on by with our tour guide.

This picture was not taken on our February trip. The Sistine chapel is packed with people and I found it a little bit hard to see things the way I like to see things. Hubs had a private tour of the museum on another trip to Rome and their little group was the only game in town. I know...sometimes it stinks to be him. They were allowed inside after hours and could look to their hearts content. He was able to take some fabulous photos without all the crowds around.

St. Peter's is just beautiful.

The Swiss guard are there for protection...

If you read here you know how I feel about beautiful old churches and you know when I talk about them I always remind you that you need to read Pillars of the Earth and then you need to go see some up close and personal.

The statues on top of St. Peter's are of the twelve disciples...

and there are so many beautiful things to see in the Vatican museum-

Are you following this post because I know it's rambling. It's hard to capture the city of Rome in a, ahem, 'short' blog post.

We hung out on the Spanish steps one afternoon...

We needed to recover from the nearby shopping.

The high end stores are here and the prices make you swoon.

As does the merchandise.

Such great style in this city.

There is so much to see and do in Rome and I haven't even begun to talk about the food and the wine and the people that I love so much. We did visit the famous fountain Trevi...

...tossing coins into the fountain is supposed to guarantee you'll return to Rome one day.

We can surely hope.

At Home in the Wednesday Hodgepodge-Vol 23

Welcome to another edition of the Wednesday Hodgepodge.

We're just rolling right along aren't we?

If you've stopped in today from the A-Z challenge you'll find the letter of the day in question #8. Feel free to join the Hodgepodge too...today or any Wednesday.

1. What are your plans for Easter day/weekend?

The weekend will begin for me on Thursday evening when we collect daughters1 and 2 from the airport. We will kick off the weekend with dinner eaten all together. Daughter2 has made her usual request for chicken divan so more than likely that's what will be on the menu Thursday night. If the rain stays away we'll do something outdoors Friday and Saturday but if the predicted rain arrives we'll hang out and watch movies, play pool and maybe go see Soul Surfer which is on my list.

Sunday we'll go to church and then have a big lunch...baked ham (per daughter2's request) with pineapple stuffing, deviled eggs, and roasted asparagus, followed by something yummy for dessert. Both my girls love to cook and bake so we'll spend some time together in the kitchen for sure.

I still put together Easter baskets for my girls because I enjoy that and I look forward to setting those at their places at the kitchen table just as I have done every Easter for the past twenty three years. On Sunday evening we'll take daughter1 to the train so she can get to her brand new city to begin her brand new job bright and early Monday morning. Daughter2 will go back to uni Monday afternoon. I am so looking forward to having both chicks in the nest for a nice long weekend.

2. Besides Jesus, what one person from the Bible would you most like to meet and why?

Just one? I'm not sure I can pick just one. I'm going with one from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament...hey, it's my question, right?

Daniel and Peter.

3. What is one modern day convenience you didn't have as a child that was easy to live without?

Well, in a sense they were all easy to live without because isn't it true that you don't know what you don't know? My first thought is the cell phone. Phones were a whole 'nother animal when I was growing up. No caller id, no call waiting, no mobile devices, no texting, no internet on the phone and for that matter no internet period. The phone in our kitchen had a long chord that was always getting tangled up and I remember stretching that chord around the corner into the next room to talk to my friends.

When my hubs started his first job he was a sales rep and would have to stop at pay phones throughout the day to make calls. He eventually got a mobile phone and it was huge. It came in a suitcase. I'm thankful for cell phones now but I think they've added to our sense of impatience about everything. Before cell phones we weren't available 24/7. If you called someone and they weren't home the phone just rang and rang and you'd say, oh well, I'll try again later. Unless it was a matter of life and death you would not track them down and interrupt whatever it was they were doing. If they were on the line talking to someone else you got a busy signal. You kept calling back until the line was free. I can appreciate the convenience of a cell phone but growing up my mom never sat across from my dad in a restaurant or on vacation while he talked on the phone. Just sayin'

Well now, it seems that turned into a little rant. Sorry.

4. Are you more right brained or left brained? If you're not sure what that means there is an interesting little quiz here.

According to the quiz I'm 59% left brain and 41% right brained. I am pretty much in the middle. Does this mean I'm using both sides of my brain to their fullest or that I'm not using either side of my brain to capacity? Hmmm. I will say this-based on my answers I don't understand why they're saying numerical formulas and technological explanations are my favored form of expression. I would say the opposite is true. I tried a quiz on another site with questions very different from the first and I still came up with left brain dominance. Maybe technology is my friend after all.

5. What is one thing you intended to do today but didn't?

Go to the gym (Tuesday)...car troubles. Silly silly car troubles. And people coming and people going and trucks blocking and the dog restless...did I tell you we've begun work on a patio? We've begun work on a patio.

6. Cadbury Creme Eggs or Reeses Peanut Butter?

I love them both but if I must choose I'm going with Reeses. Daughter2 is a big fan of the Cadbury Creme Eggs and I saw this cute recipe online and think it would be fun to try when she's home.

7. Who was your favorite cartoon character when you were a child?

Quick Draw McGraw and his deputy Baba Looey. Quick Draw was a horse dressed as a sheriff and his sidekick Baba Looey was a Mexican burro who spoke English with a Mexican accent. Probably very un-pc now but it was innocent entertainment in the 1960's.

I loved all the Looney Toons characters too and my favorite was Foghorn Leghorn. My husband might possibly do a most excellent impression. Scooby Doo, Astro Boy, and The Jetsons were other favorites. And here it is the future and we're not flying around in our own personal spaceships are we? How disappointing.

8. Insert your own random thought here.

Once again I'm using this space as my A-Z blog challenge post. We are nearing the end of the alphabet and I'm looking forward to getting back to blogging about everyday life. I am happy though, to have so many of our travels now documented and saved to my blog.

Several people said they were curious as to what I'd blog about for some of the 'tricky' letters. I guess Q qualifies as a tricky letter but for me this one is easy.

Q is for Quilon

In the UK it is common for houses to have names and Quilon was ours. The house had a number too but you could address a letter to me at 'Quilon' and as long as you had the post code (zip code) written correctly the letter would reach me.

I loved this house.It oozed charm from the moment you stepped thru the front door. The front door that incidentally had no handle. Oh if you live in the UK you know what I mean. Even the 'sidewalk' was pretty.

The front room had gorgeous wood on the walls which I'd love to replicate here somewhere.

This was the view from the eating area in our kitchen...

I loved to get up in the morning and open up the French doors and admire the garden. I guess I have blabbed often enough about how much I loved my garden. That lawn was made for croquet don't you think?

You are not alone in that thought.

Every Thursday night for four years we had Young Life kids and leaders in our house.

They loved the garden too and many a game of futbol, football, frisbee, and tag were played on this lawn. The only thing they ever broke was a ceramic planter sitting inside my kitchen window. Yes, inside. A football may have been thrown just a little bit too enthusiastically.

And only twice did someone fall in the pond.

Lavender.

How can you not love a lavender garden?

The dining room was sunny and faced the front of the house.

We used our dining room a lot.

I love a pretty dining room.

The bedrooms were tiny and between the four of them there was only one legitimate closet. We used armoires and we lived with a lot less clothes. It's possible. My girls complained every so often about the wallpaper and the chintz but they loved this house every bit as much as the hubs and I did.

We had a big laundry room which was unusual and a big pantry, also unusual. We spent most of our time in the sitting room which had a cozy fireplace that was almost always roaring, sometimes even as late as July, and pretty French doors facing out into the garden.

I told you I loved this garden, didn't I?

When we moved to the UK we became renters. I hadn't been a renter since 1986 and I wondered if the house would feel like my own. The owners were a wonderful family with two daughters identical in age to our daughters.

They were transferred to another part of England but they loved this house and they wanted their tenants to love it too.

And we did.

'A house is a home when it shelters the body and comforts the soul.'

Phillip Moffitt

Questions for the Hodgepodge and the City of Lights

If you're here looking for this week's Wednesday Hodgepodge questions you'll find them at the bottom of this post.

But don't you want to hear about Paris first?

P is for Paris

Just typing that makes me happy. Oh I know people go on and on about something they call the 'attitude' you run into in Paris but the city, she is tres belle! I have been to Paris a few times which might sound a little snooty but I promise, it's not. Think of it like this-when you live in London you're just a quick two hour train ride from The City of Lights. Kind of like where I live now in North Jersey. I could hop on a train and be in Washington D.C. in a couple of hours. Incidentally, did you know the design of D.C. was the creation of a French born architect who was heavily influenced by the city of Paris? I'm afraid the similarity ends there for me.

The very first time we ventured out of the UK following our move was for a trip to Paris aboard the Eurostar. It happened to be Thanksgiving weekend and we ate fish on the train which the girls felt was very wrong but c'est la vie. It was chilly in the city in November but I'm convinced there is no bad time to see Paris.

We did the typical touristy things on that first trip which included the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and Notre Dame. Oh and we ate our fair share of crepes and Croque Monsieur too.

We spent a few hours one afternoon in Montmartre and the girls had their portraits drawn.

Those portraits hang in my upstairs hall and are a happy reminder of what felt like a huge adventure to us at the time.

Notre Dame is spectacular.

You climb what feels like a thousand steps to get the best views-

Of course Mr. Rule Breaker had to tap the bell.

Fyi...that's a no-no.

When my sister and niece came to visit us in the UK my niece really wanted to go to Paris. Hubs and I were discussing the possibility one evening and I was saying how a week isn't really even enough time to see London, let alone make a day trip to Paris. Hubs said, 'Yes, but how often in your life do you get to go to Paris?" Daughter2 piped up and proclaimed, 'Well, if we go with the relatives it will be my third time this year."

There are days I miss ex-pat life.

Daughter2 was on the school swim team and they had meets in Paris. She still talks about the coach making them run up the Eiffel Tower steps as part of their training. I'd post some of her pics but daughter2 loves to travel the world and take dozens of pictures of her friends up close and personal. They might be in Paris, they might be in Cairo, they might be on a Greyhound bus...you can't tell from the pictures. People are the 'thing' she wants to remember.

I have lots of Paris snaps but I'm only sharing a few and only from that first trip. That trip marked a moment in time where we circled the wagons and united firmly and completely as a family of four. Life still felt a little strange on the other side of the pond but on a cold and gray Thanksgiving weekend in the city of Paris we were given a glimpse of the opportunity that lay before us.

We saw something else too...we saw that we would need each other to successfully and happily navigate these new waters. If you have teenagers you might recognize how big that thought is. Teenagers are typically entering a stage of pulling away, not drawing near. Every city has a personality all its own and Paris is no different. And of course beauty is different things to different people but to me, Paris will always be beautiful. It was here that we stopped looking back and started looking forward.

And now, back to reality...here are the questions for this week's Hodgepodge.

See you back here tomorrow (Wednesday) to link answers~

1. What are your plans for Easter Day/weekend?

2. Besides Jesus, what one person from The Bible would you most like to meet and why?

3. What is one modern day convenience you didn't have as a child that was easy to live without?

4. Are you more right brained or left brained? If you don't know what that means there is an interesting little quiz here.

5. What is something you intended to do today but didn't? Why?

6. Cadbury Creme Eggs or Reeses peanut butter?

7. Who was your favorite cartoon character when you were a child?

8. Insert your own random thought here.