The Italy Trip Recap

I feel obligated to post a recap of our travels while living abroad mostly out of an obligation to my future self who will be annoyed (maybe?) if I just stopped documenting our time here. So here you go future Caroline, here's what you did in Italy in August of 2017:

We flew in to Milan which several people had told us was not a city we needed to bother spending much time in so we didn't. We were only there for the night as we took an evening flight. For the trip we decided NOT to bring carseats or rent a car and instead take the trains which we heard can be late and expensive, but overall we had a really positive experience with them (and it was more affordable than renting a car, paying for gas, and having to deal with the nightmare of trying to find parking everywhere we went). Our first train ride was from Milan out to Vicenza where we linked up with an Army friend of Miles who is stationed there. We were only in Vicenza for a couple days and that included a day trip out to Venice. Venice was beautiful, but crowded and hot. That probably was the theme of an August trip though - beautiful, crowded, and hot. I can definitely see why people find Venice to be so endearing.

Poor kids, having to go to Venice on a hot day. What a rough life.

I took very few pictures from our time in Vicenza, but here are two from a lovely run I went on before we left. This is Monte Berico and the Basilica that overlooks the city of Vicenza.

We took the train to Rome next where we spent the majority of the trip. We did all the touristy things - the Colosseum, Roman Ruins, Pantheon (our AirBnB was a stone's throw away from the Pantheon!), Vatican City, Spanish Steps, we even went out to the coast for a beach day which was a nice break from the tourist things (though those were wonderful).

From Rome we took the train to Florence where we spent the last few days of our trip. I'm so glad we ended the trip here as it wasn't nearly as busy or grand as Rome, but felt more like a peaceful, relaxed city. 

This was probably the best meal of the trip, possibly ever!

While all of the trips we have taken since moving abroad have been special in their own way, Italy was definitely a surreal one. I wouldn't recommend going in August, but it just meant we had to eat gelato at least once every day! 

BOB Strollers - the real MVP

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Spreekt u Engels? Our Time in the Netherlands

Miles had an internship this summer working at Europol for about seven weeks. The headquarters is in The Hague, Netherlands so he left for that late June before Finn was out of school. Once school ended the kids and I joined him for the remainder of the internship which was a little over two weeks.

We were really fortunate to link up with the spouses of some of the people Miles was working with who also had kids which made for lots of great playdates and fun outings throughout our time there. We went to Madurodam, which is sorta like an amusement park - it has to scale miniatures of Holland attractions, but it actually is a war memorial for a George Maduro who was a Dutch resistance fighter and died at Dachau Concentration Camp. His family wanted to create something in his memory to showcase the beauty of Holland that he died fighting for. They wanted it to be happy and uplifting and it really is! We made it to the beach a few times (the North Sea is cold!), to a petting zoo, parks and playgrounds, etc. Miles and I got a date night in on a restaurant tram which was really neat and we got a day trip to Amsterdam to tour the Anne Frank House (we swapped kid watching to have Amsterdam be a kid free trip which was to right call given how busy and crazy it was!). I love how pedestrian and cyclist friendly the Netherlands is - the cars are SO cautious and aware. It felt like a really safe city to run in and not speaking Dutch was NEVER an issue as everyone speaks English! Dutch does seem like a funny hybrid of German and English though so there was a lot that made sense just based off phonetics. 

If it weren't for this internship we might not have made it to the Netherlands during our time abroad, but I'm so glad that we did and got to send a good amount of time there.

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