Our first day in Italy was gorgeous and amazing! (That word "amazing" keeps coming up. Maybe I need to check the thesaurus for another word, but it's just so right. Anyway …) This was our first day going ashore with some of our Keller Williams compadres - JR & Linda Russell, Jack & Donna Thomas, Randy & Amy Mosier, Joe & Alyse Cloud, and their friends Adam & Nicole.
We left the port in Livorno and drove inland to Pisa to view one of the Seven Wonders of the World - The Leaning Tower of Pisa. Dubbed one of the biggest architectural mistakes in the world, it was fascinating to wander around the grounds surrounding the Tower. It was definitely an oddity and snapping the requisite photos of Chris holding the tower up (cheesy - I know, but he insisted) was amusing. But, truly it was even more fascinating to get to see the incredible detail in the other buildings on the grounds. I'm really pleased with the way the photos turned out. We couldn't have asked for a better day for picture taking!
After hanging out in Pisa for a little over an hour, we headed further into Tuscany. Our destination was the Chianti region of Tuscany. We stopped for a few minutes at a little village called Greve along the way where I had REAL hot chocolate - oh, man was it good! I got some great photos of a local Catholic church and the cobble stone streets.
From there we were headed for La Locanda di Pietracupa, a small restaurant in Poggio, for lunch. I got to experience things like wild boar tortellini and grilled rabbit (sorry, Bugs!). Lunch was a long and drawn out affair assisted heavily by multiple bottles of wine. The food was incredible, the wine was excellent, and the company was stellar. I'm not sure if we ran off all the other patrons with our boisterous conversation or if we just outlasted all of them, but by the time we were finished, we had the whole place to ourselves. Hah!
As if we needed anymore wine at this point but our next stop was at the Casa Emma vineyard & winery next door for a wine tasting. I should be able to tell you the name of the very funny gentleman who conducted the wine tasting for us (he was very good and extremely amusing), but quite honestly I can't remember. Probably not surprising, right?
The only unfortunate thing about the whole day was that our drivers didn't keep us on schedule very well. By the time we finished with the wine tasting, we were probably an hour later leaving that we should have been to get back to the ship on time. Once the drivers figured that out and that they would be driving us to Rome if indeed we did miss the ship, they put the pedal to the medal. We were probably a reasonable hour and half's drive from the port. Their motivated driving got us back to the port in closer to an hour. Yikes! Chris and I were in the last seat of 10 passenger van, and let's just say it was a bumpy ride.
It really was a relaxing day filled with friends, food, and wine-enhanced-fun! Check out the photos at: http://www.audreyreed.info/photoGalleries/Day-3-Livorno/.
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