Part One: Iceland and Milan

Ciao!

We just came home from a whirlwind trip to Italy. David was home from his mission for 3 weeks, and in that time Kara finished her finals at the high school.

I'll start a summary of our trip, hopefully without giving TOO much detail...the idea is not to put people to sleep -- snore -- but to remember the highlights! Ha.

Iceland Road Sign

End of the Rainbow art at the
Iceland airport

The good thing about a blog is that you can also just click on the pictures, and look at photos! No offense will be taken if you only look at the pictures! :) :) :)

(**SIDE NOTE: if you click on the pictures, they are BIGGER.)

Geothermal activity in Iceland

The evening of June 24, we flew away to Milan, via Iceland. It's about 5 hours from Boston to Iceland, then another 4 or something to Milan.

ICELAND. We had something like a 6- or 7-hour layover in Iceland, so we rented a car and drove around. They have lots of natural parks with waterfalls and geothermal activity.

By the waterfall. Kind of chilly but not too bad.

FUN ICELAND FACTS:
1. over half of their energy comes from geothermal activity.
2. the island country is roughly the size of Ohio.
3. beer was illegal here until 1989.

It was overcast and rained some while we were there. We walked the boardwalk trails and saw waterfalls and geysers.

Geysers

FLOWERS. There were also these great fields of tens of thousands of purple flowers -- wow! We drove by them all morning, and I dropped hints to Frank that it was so hard to photograph them in a moving car...after all our driving, and we were getting closer to the airport, Frank took pity and pulled over for me to get some flower shots. :) Winner!

Here are Iceland pics.

MILAN. We got to Milan in the dark, at 10:30 at night, then we waited for all the paperwork, etc., to rent our van. At 11:30 p.m. we didn't see much on the way to the Hotel Ascot.

I know it's just a van. But we spent SO much time in it! :)

CHURCH. In the morning we made an attempt to find the church building...we knew it was close and what street it was on, but kept driving by it back and forth...turns out it was in the BACK of a building, and the sign was kind of out of the way (?!?!), so we made it to the last half of Sacrament Meeting. We tried.

Big cathedral downtown Milan

In the afternoon, it was fun to go downtown and see the Italian architecture around, and we visited a castle.

The castle was next to a beautiful park and gardens, where we found lunch.

coconut display

FERAL CATS. This was the beginning of seeing cats around everywhere...they don't belong to anyone, they are just...around.  There was a cute kitten at the Bed & Breakfast when we stayed along the Amalfi Coast. That will come in a later post.

We spent lots of time waiting for the green "Walk" guy to show up at the intersections...

And throughout the cities in Italy, they have fountains where you can get a drink or fill up your water bottle. We waited for this cute little boy to finish, then filled our bottles.

Have a great weekend! Kari