Parentheticals

On Tuesday we picked walnuts and played around the castle with the other kids that were there. The kids specifically requested this. In the evening we cracked the nuts and then made a big pot of mashed potatoes for dinner. On Wednesday we went to Florence. We walked to the Duomo, and then we went to a casual restaurant for lunch, and had some cool modern Italian food: sage meatballs, bruschetta with a poached egg, tomato soup, foccacia. It was very good. Then we went to a Leonardo da Vinci museum with large machines we could manipulate and blocks for creating your own inventions. It was very cool and we stayed for hours. After that we went back to the center of the town, and we hired a horse carriage to take us around Florence. The kids loved riding around the town. It was one of their favorite parts of the entire trip. After the ride was over, we went to ride on the carousel, and then we left Forence to go back to the castle so that we could pack. On Thursday we drove to Bolog...

Wednesday we tried to go to the arms and armor museum in Monteriggioni, but they were filming a war movie there, and so we had to walk half way around the city to the other gate (it has a wall with two gates, one on either end). In the end, they wouldn't let us get to the town square, so we had to just leave without seeing the weapons and armor. We saw a bunch of small lizards all over the place (rea counted 11 of them), and we picked some horrible olives while we were there as well. Most of the time in the city was spent at a weird place that we were not sure of the purpose of. It was a raised platform with a hedge all around it except for an entry ramp, and on the top it looked like it had a watering trough. Perhaps it was for washing clothing? After going home disappointed and having lunch, we decided to go to the Bagni San Filippo, which is a natural hot spring that was not too far from the tenuta. We had a fun time in the hot water, but did not take too many pictures becau...

Last Tuesday we left for our trip to Italy. We woke up the kids at 3:30, and the plane left at 7:30. We were on various planes all day, and we arrived in Italy at 11 am the next day. The kids (aside from Gideon) binged watched movies all day long, and practically everyone on the entire plane commented on how well behaved they were. Sleeping on the plane was hard, but what can you do? It is a small price to pay. After landing we got a car (which took an hour at least). The car that we got was an 8 seater van with a huge trunk, which we named the "Behemoth". We had planned on getting a smaller car, but that was all they had apparently. Timmy is sure Behemoth means "A small mammoth". After we got the car, we went to a train museum and saw some trains and planes. We only really went there because we needed to find a bathroom, but we made the most of it when we were there. Timmy and the other kids loved the whole museum a lot, especially the trains that you could c...