5QF and FITBF

1. Who wakes up in the morning with the kids, you or hubby?  Nine times out of ten, I do.  Make that 19 times out of 20.
2. Do you watch the World Series even if your team isn't in it?  I don’t have “a team” and I couldn’t care less about football or baseball or whatever the World Series is.
3. What is the best compliment you have received?  That I am a good parent.
4. Do/did you dress up to take your kids trick or treating?  Yes, I have, and I will in the future, but this year we’re skipping Halloween and saving the money on costumes they’ll wear for one night.  Besides, we’re in Ireland during all of the Halloween festivities on base.
5. Do you have a favorite bible verse? What is it and why?  “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”  I’ve just always liked it and I think it’s interesting that you can take it 2 ways – 1 being that if you follow God he will grant your wishes and 2 being that if you follow God he will give your heart desires.

 

1.  My favorite feeling in all the world is being cherished.

2.  My favorite smell is my husband or a horse barn, and no, the two don’t smell anything alike.  My horse always smelled good.  He smelled just like a horse should and I even had people tell me that he had a good horse smell.  Kind of odd, but true.

3. My favorite taste is chocolate.  I love chocolate..

4. The most beautiful thing I've ever seen was Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia.

5. The best sound ever is my kiddos laughs or my husband getting home from work.  That’s the best part of my day.

6. A smell that reminds me of my childhood is my mom’s cooking.  She’s a good cook.

7. My favorite of all the senses is sight for sure.

 

For all of my regular readers, I’m sorry I’m SO backed up with blogging.  I’m really falling way behind and it’s kind of stressful to me since I’ve never been behind in my blog before this summer and now I’m constantly behind.  Hopefully one of these days I’ll catch up, but learning how to edit photos just made my blogging process about 15 times longer.  Here’s a picture from our recent trip to Salzburg, Austria in the meantime.  (And I’m writing this from Ireland, so soon I’ll be blogging about our travels over here too!  This is a beautiful country!  Tomorrow we’re headed to the Cliffs of Moher!)

Ravello, Italy

On Sunday, we decided to head to Ravello instead of going up to Pompeii, like we’d originally planned.  I kind of wish we’d go to Pompeii instead of Ravello, since there really wasn’t much to “see” in Ravello.  The views were beautiful, as most of the Amalfi Coast is, but I think I would have rather seen Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius.

Positano is still my favorite town on the Amalfi Coast.  I just love it, hence all the photos I took of it!

Again, driving in southern is nuts.  This is an example of the driving conditions most times, and sometimes things were even tighter than this.  I’m glad Mark was driving.

It took a LONG time to get to Ravello from where we were staying – like a good hour and a half or so.   The views made it interesting though.

We drove through the town of Amalfi, but we didn’t stop.  I would have liked to stop and check it out but we didn’t have time on the way there and the kids were zonked out for a much needed nap on the way back.  Maybe next time!

Ravello is way up on a hill along the coast, which is what make the views so neat, but the day we were there it was pretty darn hazy.  It was still pretty though.

Abbie is lots of fun to take pictures of.

We had lunch at a pretty expensive place that was overlooking the coast (I think they were all expensive so we didn’t have much choice), and then walked around the little town for a bit.

And then we stopped for some gelato.  Ben had his second taste and again, he really wasn’t too sure about it, but Mark and his mom got a kick out of giving it to him.  Abbie prefers to wear her ice cream, as opposed to just eating it.  It’s more fun that way.

After the gelato, Mark’s family left and we decided to go check out the villa as long as we’d driven all the way up there.

Villa Rufolo was owned by the prestigious Rufolo family in the early 13th century, but they eventually lost all of their power.  I don’t know all of the history behind it, but it was neat to see and the views from the villa were beautiful.

Abbie entertained everyone by climbing in this little doghouse type hut.  She’s pretty darn brave.  There were quite a few people laughing and taking pictures of her.

After all the exploring of the villa and gardens, Abbie cashed in her chips.  Ben did too, but I didn’t get a picture of him.  I don’t know how she can sleep like this, but she can and did.

And one more picture of Amalfi.  Some day I would really like to go back there.  Maybe on another cruise??

Positano

We left Rome on Thursday to head down to the Amalfi Coast.  We had some amazing view of Mt. Vesuvius on the drive down.

Our GPS software is from 2008, so apparently a lot has changed in European roads in the past 4 years.  So our GPS took us straight through downtown Meta, and it was crazy.  It is very much true that the further south you get in Italy, the more crazy the drivers are.  And the very narrow, very windy roads don’t help much either.  There were scooters EVERYWHERE, and the scooters in Italy apparently aren’t required to follow any normal road rules.  They go pretty much anywhere they want without much regard for anything or anyone else.  And we were SHOCKED to see entire families on one single scooter.  No joke!  The dad would be driving, usually with the older kid standing in front of him between his legs, and the mom would be on the back either with a kid in between them or holding one off the side.  It was insane.  Oh, and the parents would have helmets on, but the kids wouldn’t.  You can get ticketed in Italy for not having your DOGS behind a barrier in the back, or being tied in the back seat somehow, but I guess it’s completely acceptable to have a family of 4 on a tiny scooter.  This country never ceases to amaze me.

Sunset over Meta, Italy

We had most of Friday to ourselves since Mark’s family wasn’t going to join us until that evening, so we decided to head to Positano, since I’d heard from a few friends that it was pretty.

The villa we rented

We stayed in Piano di Sorrento, which was in between Sorrento and Positano, right along the scenic coastal way.  The views along this road did not disappoint at all.  It was gorgeous, but it was also fairly narrow and REALLY windy.  If you get car sick at all, this probably isn’t the road for you.

We drove our new(ish) SUV on this trip, mainly because all our junk wouldn’t fit into our sedan, but it was a little bit nerve wracking having that thing on these narrow roads.  There were MANY times that we had to pull in the mirrors because we only had inches of clearance on either side of the car.  And there were buses on these roads too.  You couldn’t pay me to drive a bus through these towns.  I honestly don’t know how they made it sometimes. 

Positano was my favorite of the places we saw on the Amalfi Coast.  We wanted to find some place to eat breakfast so we parked the car and then realized we still had a LONG way to walk to get to the touristy area of the town.  However, we did find a tiny grocery store, so we grabbed a few things to eat and drink and then headed back up the hill a park to eat our breakfast.  I wish I had taken a picture inside the grocery store.  It was basically one tiny room, maybe a little bit bigger than our living room, but they had a little bit of everything.  And they had mini child-sized carts to use.  It was cute.

We got back in the car after breakfast to head further in to the town.  We found a parking garage closer to the touristy area so we parked there and walked the rest of the way down to the beach.  The views of the town from the beach were gorgeous.

We wandered around the little beach for a little bit.  Abbie and Mark looked at the water, and I took a picture of Ben to prove he was there also.  We sat by the beach and let Abbie run around and play in the sand and we talked to a nice lady from Brooklyn for a while.  She gave us her business card and told us to call her if we ever came to NYC to visit.

Ben was not a big fan of the sand, but he loved watch Abbie run around like crazy.

We had lunch right by the water after Abbie’s playtime.  Again the views were gorgeous and the food wasn’t too bad either.

After lunch we headed back to the apartment for naps and to wait for Mark’s family to arrive.  Ben didn’t quite make it back to the car before he fell asleep.