Happy Easter Part 2

We had a quiet, rainy day today and used it for housekeeping. The bathroom is hung with wet laundry, but we have the added benefit of a wonderful European towel warmer that is currently being used instead as a drying rack for undies. Why waste all those watts of electricity on a towel that we won't need until tomorrow when it could be drying the clothes that we need to pack tomorrow?

In addition to washing clothes, we checked in with the kids via text, e-mail, etc. We made plans to meet Caitie around noon tomorrow at the Milan airport. We spoke to my Mom who is celebrating her 76th birthday today. Happy Birthday, Mom! We did our best to find decent food to eat, although in all of Italy we had probably the worst meals possible. Easter is a family day, our hotel is deserted and the food was not very good. At lunch time we caught the interhotel shuttle between our hotel and its sister, the Crowne Plaza. They have a restaurant, we have only a snack bar. For the first half of our lunch we were the only diners in the dark restaurant, sitting alongside the garden windows looking out at the wet patio as the rain poured down. Lunch was a choice of four meals; beef, fish, chicken or lamb. Mike had Braised Beef in gravy with potatoes while I had Poached chicken with potatoes. For dinner, we had "boca Dias" or sandwich of the day (which is the same every day- a roll with a single slice of ham and a single slice of cheese heated up and served in a paper bag). Meals will be better starting tomorrow when we hit the road, and we are working off the reserves from the cruise so today's meals hardly mattered to us.

You will notice that with the luxury of free internet I made significant progress on the blog today. Not only the entries you see, but the photos! They must be downloaded from the camera to the computer harddrive, then uploaded from there to Picaso, where they are then uploaded to the blog. It is a time consuming procress that is just not cost effective when using the expensive internet on the ship. So, if you look to the right you can see the photos we took on the trip so far. As soon as I remember how to add captions I will label them so you know what you are looking at. I also added a subscription feed for those of you who want to have our new blog entries appear on your i google page, yahoo page, etc.

We are off tomorrow to Switzerland. Weather is drizzly and 50 in Interlaken, which is our target, but we have to cross a mountain range to get there and we have no idea how to use our free internet to look up the conditions of the roads! We will keep in touch.

Love to you all,

Deanne