Well, I have completely dropped the ball with a post for our August vacation. I managed to post about half of the vacation and then we returned home and that was the end of that. So...the rest of our vacation!!
We spent our final day in Belgium watching the last stage of the Brinkback Tour. The kids were able to see the famous Muur climb and we arrived early in order to get a good spot. :-)
We left the race as soon as Rory crossed the finish line and hightailed it to the Brussels airport where we boarded a flight for Milan. Aurelia was psyched to get to Italy! We landed late at night and just stayed at an airport hotel to save our energy. The next morning we rented a car and drove to Verona, one of my favorite towns in Italy.
Verona is a great choice for sight seeing with children as the town is quite compact and the public transportation options are vast. You can take local buses anywhere and it is super easy.
I have not been to Italy in August and I don't think we will ever make it a point of going back during that time...SO MANY TOURISTS. Yikes. We decided to just go with it and found lots of places off the tourist path.
The local tourist train is great for kids. We also saw the old arena in Verona and toured several of the famous churches.
Juliet's balcony!! As we approached the balcony a young man was up there proposing to his girlfriend. Eston and Aurelia thought this was absolutely amazing. We recently watched a film that had several scenes in Verona, so they were thrilled to see familiar streets and places.
On our last night in Verona we had a fabulous dinner at a restaurant with a gorgeous view of the town. The kids loved the hike to get to the restaurant and it was so nice to relax and watch the sunset from such a vantage point.
After Verona we hopped back in the car and began our drive to Lake Como. We made a stop in the old city of Bergamo:
Hotels in Lake Como in August are a lot of things, but cheap is not one of them. However, I was dying to visit and we managed to find a small family-run hotel that was perfect. The view from our room was spectacular:
After we checked in we immediately put on our swim stuff and headed down to the lake. All of the beautiful people in the world hang out here on on gorgeous vintage boats and it was such fun to people watch!
Our tiny hotel in Lake Como is well-known in the area for its restaurant, so we were excited to be staying there and able to partake of the food. We sat down for dinner and our server (owner's son) told us that the chef would be more than happy to bring the kids pasta with tomato sauce. Eston's jaw dropped and he replied, "But I wanted the duck!" Aurelia was pining for the homemade ravioli with goat's cheese, so our server was pleasantly surprised. Aurelia keeps calling herself a foodie as she loves trying anything and everything on anyone's plate. We were served course after course of local and fresh food and it was so nice to just climb the stairs to our room and not have to go anywhere!
The main reason for our Italian stopover was so Rory could have a meeting with his new team in Milan, so we had to sadly say goodbye to Como and head back to Milan. I drove us the scenic way through Switzerland and we stopped off in Lugano for lunch:
Well, I had intended to include more detail about our trip, but there went that idea! At least there are photos, right??
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