Week 3 of Italy

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 Bologna and dropped Mike off at the airport so that he could fly to Germany and attend Spiel Messe on Friday. Mike's flight was delayed by an hour, then they gave him a mayo/cheese sandwich on carrot bread as an apology for the delay.

When Mike landed in Germany, he tried to get a train to the place that he was planning on staying, but he ended up going toward a town by the same name instead, and finally decided that a taxi was necessary to get there that night.

The old lady that owned the place was helpful, and gave Mike directions to get the right trains to make it to Essen the next day. Mike got some German bread products for dinner (a bakery was the only store open he could find), and then went to bed.

On Friday Mike went at 5:30 AM to Spiel Messe to pitch his games to publishers. He pitched games to 7 publishers, gave three games out, promised rulebooks, printed copies, and print and play files to all of the rest (except for one publisher that didn't want any of Mike's games at all).

With the pitches ranging from 20 minutes to an hour, 7 pitches took most of the day (Mike scheduled them in 30 minute intervals, and often had half hour breaks between them, so he was booked from 9:30 AM to 5:00 PM pitching with only two hour long breaks).

Mike expects to hear back from the 6 publishers that were interested in his games over the next year, and perhaps will have some good news when he does. With any luck, Mike will have another game or two published in the next five years or so.

He had a fun time at the convention. He talked with an internet friend (which he has never met in person), and also had some currywurst. He enjoyed seeing all of the publishers and games, and he picked up three small games, and some parts for prototyping.

After the convention, Mike went home (he had to hitchhike for a bit because one bus was not running at all because it was not the right day of the week) and made it home about 9:30 PM. He had a crazy Turkish sandwich for dinner, and then went to bed at about 10:00 PM.

On Saturday Mike bought some more German breads, and then took a plane (which was also late) back to Venice, and met the rest of the family in the Piazzale Roma.

Meanwhile, On Thursday Alison and the kids drove about two and a half hours from Bologna to Venice. Mike very carefully downloaded directions for Alison and went over them so she was very confident of the route. Unfortunately, we forgot to double check that Google actually got the correct destination. This has been a common problem in Italy, with Google deciding that based on what we typed we want an entirely different city than we were looking for. It happened again going to our apartment in Venice.

Our lovely directions took us right to a door of a house that was in entirely the wrong city. After a lot of driving in circles, walking up and down the street, and searching on the phone, Alison got the correct directions and we drove another 45 minutes to the correct city.

Once we got their, our careful parking plans didn't work, so we drove around in circles for another half hour before we found a paid parking lot a fifteen minute walk from our car. Alison packed a bag of essentials, put Gideon on her back, put Sara and Timmy on wrist leashes, and finally made it to the apartment. We had just enough time to make a snack of popcorn before Grandma and Grandpa arrived. They stayed with the kids while Alison walked back to the car, repacked some clothes and toys into two bags, and walked them back to the apartment.

Then we all took the train into Venice. We found men selling lighted little rubber-band powered whirligigs in the main square, which looked so cool going up into the sky that we bought some for the kids. Rea and Sara eventually even mastered using them and had fun. Timmy and Gideon ended up just throwing theirs and running to pick them up. They were fun enough to make the kids forget that they were hungry for fifteen minutes, which was quite an achievement.

We wandered until we found a pizza place and had some pizza for dinner. It was excellent. Venetian pizza is much better than Tuscan pizza: crispy, non-soggy crust! Alison and the kids really enjoyed French Fry Pizza.


Then we headed back to the apartment to sleep. The next morning, we had to head into Venice early because there was a public transit strike and the train only ran in the morning. We made it to Venice but couldn't figure out how to get to the Friday morning fish market at Rialto, which Grandpa really wanted to do early. We ended up taking a water taxi, which was very cool. Sara decided that she was scared of boats. We got croissants as a pastry shop that were excellent, then fruit at the market. We looked at all the fish (Timmy loved it; the girls, not so much) but didn't buy any.

We wandered around looking for a souvenir shop that we never found, but the kids found a slanted brick wall they could climb and played for a while. We stopped for lunch; Alison got a Carnival salad with lettuce, olives, eggs, cheese, corn, and hot dog chunks, Rea had a tomato cheese sandwich, and the other kids had hamburgers (which come without buns in Venice) and fries.

Grandpa took us to a very cool bookstore with stacks of old books to look through. Out in the courtyard, water damaged books had been made into a staircase that the kids loved scrambling up and down. All the kids bought masks except Gideon, who was asleep. Eventually we got tired and just sat and waited until the buses started running again so that we could go home.We stopped at the supermarket and got some things to eat, and got takeout pizza for dinner.


Saturday we went back to Venice and caught the vaporetto to Murano. It was wonderful! We loved walking through the streets looking at the glass in the windows, and we found a fun playground with a bathroom. We had lunch at a pizza and sandwich shop, and then Mike's plane landed, so we started heading back to the Piazzale Roma to meet him. There was a marathon going on which messed up the buses again, but we managed to make it back eventually and were very happy to be all together again.

We spent the evening walking the streets (and boating around the canals) of Venice, had pizza, calamari, and gelato, and then we bought Mike and Alison's masks, and then went home for the night.

On Sunday we all went to church, and then walked down to a park near our house, and played in the rain. We decided our kids needed a bit of a break, so while Grandma and Grandpa did some more Venice we finished reading Knight's Castle and let the kids play in the apartment.

Eventually, the grandparents came back and said their goodbyes (they are going home tomorrow morning early in the morning), and then we went to bed.