Restituiti dalle Vacanze

I have to confess that I've not really been around the last couple of weeks. Actually, we've been touring Northern Italy.  Of course, I took far too many pictures to show you, but fortunately I broke down and paid Google money for more picture storage space.  I figured that $5.95 was a reasonable price for a year of something I enjoy so very much. 

We chose to defy EasyJet (who wanted to charge us £38 to check a piece of luggage) by taking only a carry on bag each.  You are allowed ONE carry on bag (a purse counts as a bag) for free.  It can be no larger than 54x45x25 cm (roughly 21x18x10 inches), and of course there are all the restrictions about liquids and sharp objects that made it an interesting challenge to pack, but we did it!  I found the first couple of days of lugging my backpack around quite hard, but after that I seemed to get noticeably stronger.  That was amazing, but possibly in part due to learning more about the best way to carry a backpack.

We only made flight reservations to and from, and the first night's hotel in, Nice.  Thereafter we bought train tickets as  needed, found tourist information offices to locate sleeping accommodation and wandered the streets for shops and restaurants when we were hungry.  Although we had a list of cities we wanted to visit, we were free to stay, leave or skip where ever it seemed a good idea and so we made it up as we went along.  We chose Northern Italy mainly for the warm weather and the food; we got both in ample supply!  Bill and I agree, it was one of our best European holidays ever.  

So, tomorrow, I'm going to show you how nice Nice is --  (blame that on Bill, it's his very favourite saying) -- at least the very small part of it we visited before setting off to Italy.