Italy in a nutshell

I promised to tell y'all about our vacation in Italy. I already told you that we went to the Caldonazzo lake. That's one of the warmest mountain lakes in the Dolomites (Italian part of the Alps), with an average water temperature of 25 degrees. Oh, sorry, 77, for all you Fahrenheiters... Divide by 5, times 9 plus 32..So good swimming is guaranteed, and it turned out to be true.We booked a room in a nice hotel, about 50m from the lake. (Roughly 50 yards...) All we had to do was cross a railway crossing and then we were at the "beach". But since the mountain lakes don't have sandy bottoms, the beaches are made out of grass. Pretty comfy and it doesn't get your towel all sandy.


We didn't do very much, which was perfectly fine with both of us. In the day time we went swimming, visited 2 beautiful cities: Trento (I'm in front of the Castelvecchio, or Old Castle in the picture) and Verona, where we were caught in a huge thunder storm and ended up in front of the Louis Vuiton store, where they sold crocheted (Is that the past tense of "to crochet"?) broches for €35 ($44) I guess I could have gotten rich if I had thought of that first. And when it rained one day we drove through the mountains to have lunch at the hotel where we always stay when we go skiing. That was only 2 hours away so a nice rainy-day outing.And at night we enjoyed the hotel's four course dinners (yes, really! But that's typical in Italy.) First they serve soup, then the "first course", which is a pasta with a simple sauce without vegetables, after which follows the "second course", a meat or fish dish with a warm veggie, and then of course a dessert. You can imagine we were pretty stuffed after dinner, so we would take a walk by the lake and have a capuccino somewhere. And when we got back to the hotel we would play games. Lots of Sequence, Settlers of Catan (has that caught on in the USA yet? It's very popular over here. I think it's a game that the Jarboes would really enjoy) and Triominos. And I happened to beat my Maarten most of the time, ha!We also read lots of books and slept. It was so nice!!!
Isn't this a nice picture? It's taken in Verona, at 11 AM! You would think it would be a night time pic, but it got so dark because of the thunder storm that the street lights came on!