We left Rome via train yesterday and arrived in the Umbrian hill town of Orvieto – where we picked up our rental car and spent a few hours wandering the streets of the old city, situated on top of a butte with amazing views, beautiful little streets and a maze of underground Etruscan tunnels. We then drove to Bagnoregio, parked the car and made our way across a narrow bridge to the medieval town of Civita, known in the area as “The Dead City”, since in addition to being the victim of slow erosion, it has a full-time population of around a dozen (and falling). We spent the night here, enjoyed the quiet, the view and the stars, and this morning made our way northwards to Siena – with a few stops along the way (including Bolsena, where we saw a cooking show being taped along the shores of a lake, and Radicofani, where we walked around a 1,000-year-old hill-top castle). We’re in Siena for the next 4 days – more on that later this week!

My posts have been getting longer, so I’m going to try and keep this one short. Last Thursday we made our way, via trains and buses, to the Italian Riviera. We stayed in La Serra, a tiny village perched on a mountainside above Lerici, in the Goelfo dei Poeti (Gulf of Poets). This is an area, though only 30 km south of the Cinque Terre, that does not see a lot of American tourists – which was great for us (and made for some heavy use of our phrase book). La Serra was celebrating the “Sagre du Lumaga” – a food festival celebrating the lumaga (snails). We ate dinner every night with the locals in the village square. We even tried some snail (albeit in a pasta dish…)! We’ve been swimming everyday on tucked away beaches, hiked 6.5 hours along the mountainside and coast, and took a day trip (via boat) to the Cinque Terre – where we heard more (‘merican) English spoken in one hour than we’ve heard in the past 4 days. The villages are beautiful, but it made us very happy to have found La Serra. We’re sorry to be leaving, but we’re excited for our next stop – Rome!

We said goodbye to Provence on Friday – after spending much too short of a time perusing Lourmarin’s Friday market – and spent another long day on the road, driving to the Swiss Alps. We’re staying with Josh’s step-father’s aunt at her chalet in the mountaintop village of Gspon. The village can only be reached by two-hour hike or a tiny cable car! It’s an absolutely amazing place – people have been living up here for hundreds of years, tending their cattle and sheep as they graze for the summer, but it’s still very isolated (thankfully, they do now have Internet…). We’ve been lucky with the weather, blue skies and warm temperatures for the past two days. The area here is indescribably beautiful. Hopefully our photos will do some justice to what we’ve seen. We set a record yesterday, filling an entire 8 GB memory card with photos in only 5 hours- on a hike up and across the mountain, following the ‘waterways’ that provide the mountaintop villages and grazing fields with fresh glacier water. We passed a very remote grazing field where a farmer was tending his cows, all of which have big bells around their necks so they can be found when the inevitable thick fog sets in – what a sound! Today we hiked 6 hours in the other direction, ending above the treeline on a peak overlooking an Alpine lake with views of the Matterhorn. We’ve got rain in the forecast for the next two days, but it might be just as well – I think we’re both pretty overloaded with what we’ve seen over the past few days!

A lot of photos this time!

We spent Sunday in the car with Josh’s mother and step-father, traveling down to Provence together – a ten-hour drive. Rain in Germany led to beautiful sunshine in southern France. We’re staying at Josh’s aunt and uncle’s wonderful apartment in the town of Lourmarin – a tightly clustered little hamlet that rises out of the dry Luberon landscape. Monday we explored the area – Albert Camus’ gravesite (he’s buried in Lourmarin), 18 holes of rather poorly constructed mini-golf, wine tasting at a lovely local winery, Chateau Constantin-Chevalier, and a picnic dinner aside the town’s 500-year-old castle, Chateau de Lourmarin. Today we drove to Avignon, by way of an amazing string of small hillside towns clinging to foothills of the Alps. We strolled through the former seat of the Vatican for some great sightseeing, but had lunch across the river to avoid the throngs of tourists. In the early evening we drove to Pont du Gard, the Roman aqueduct and largest Roman ruin after the Colosseum in Rome, with a brief stop before hand for some more wine tasting (this will happen as often as possible) at the hard to find, but well worth it, winery of Domaine de Valseniere. It’s been cloudless and beautiful, the cicadas sing to us all day and all of us are wondering how expensive local real estate is…
Tomorrow we head to the ocean, we’ll write another post(card) at the end of the week!

Yesterday we made our way to the coastal Belgian town of Koksijde, where some old friends from Germany have a vacation apartment they kindly let us use. The apartment is right on the beach, totally great! Koksijde is hosting the Flanders Lady’s Trophy tennis tournament, so we spent some time watching a few games – played right in the town square. We strolled along the beach, flew a kite, had some frites (with mayo, of course) and relaxed. Today we took the train to Bruges (or Brugge if you’re from around here) for a (rainy) day trip. After some sight seeing and a great tour of the town’s only brewery, Haalve Maan – complete with complimentary glass of beer – the rain made us call it a day. We may have been a bit rained out in the Low Countries, but we’ve enjoyed this part of the trip; tomorrow it’s on to Cologne!