Requiem

Schmidt Family Reunion

Summer is a great time to get together and eat, and that's just what we did. The annual Schmidt family reunion was in Madison at Karen and Mel's this year. I actually went home for two days before I joined up with the clan on Saturday, but the festivities started on Friday night with cheese and wine tasting. Lesley said some of the wine was very delectable.

On Saturday after I arrived with Jody, John, Collin, and Morgan, we found our way down to State Street where there was a large art festival going on. The art was nice to look at albeit pricey, but the highlight of that endeavor was the fresh kettle corn that we bought.

Here is Lesley and I with a guest appearance from her cousin Collin. :)

Saturday evening was spent mingling at Karen and Mel’s enjoying the various appetizers and drinks, and for dinner they served lasagna and pizza on the grill which was a new experience for us. I also “participated” in lawn games such as croquet (read: even the seven year old beat me). Sunday morning involved a brunch hosted again by Karen and Mel, which again had amazing food. All in all, a very fun weekend and we will look forward to seeing the family again soon!

Here we all are!

Finally home!

I have finally returned home from my European adventure and I have had a chance to get back into the swing of things here in Minneapolis. And I finally got to see Greg!!! I missed him very much, and other than a few pricey phone calls, we made it! I know that I already posted much of the itinerary below so I won't repeat it all, but I will definitely be able to explain the highlights and show off some pictures.

To begin, the flight over to Venice wasn't too awful since I was really happy to see my mom and grandma and we had personal movie players. Basically I watched about six hours of movies which was rather enjoyable. When we finally arrived, we had quite and adventure since we attempted to take public transportation to our hotel with all six of our suitcases. We ended up traipsing through the Piazzo San Marco, up and over a million canals, getting lost, and finally having a German women help us find the right direction to go, and then another million canals to go over with our suitcases! Anyway, we finally made it there and really enjoyed our little Best Western. It was fairly small, like most European hotels, cars, and everything else, but had a great little breakfast and the strongest yet tasty Italian coffee in the morning. We really enjoyed our stay in Venice because it was very cute, but somewhat small. Our three day stay was plenty of time to take in all the sites including the Rialto Bridge and Peggy Guggenheim museum of art. Luckily, on our way out, we decided to take a water taxi to the rail station and not attempt to use the water buses. MUCH more relaxing and a nice end to our stay.

Our next stop was Rome but unfortunately we had a little delay due to a rail worker's strike in Italy. Not very uncommon, but a little challenging to maneveur since none of us spoke any Italian. Once we got all out bags on the train, we were off to Rome. We made it their somewhat late, but our hotel was somewhat near the station, so were rolled our little suitcases throw the streets and only hit a couple of waiters on the way :). Whoops! Anyway, we once again stayed in a nice little hotel with a great European breakfast. We ate lots of pizza and tried gelotto (italian ice cream). We visited the Vatican museum and the line was soooooo long (like a mile plus, I swear) but it went decently fast. Unfortunately, mom somehow got lost from us (grandma and I) but we finally were reunited and ended up going to the Trevvi fountain and shopping. We finally headed back to the hotel and looked forward to the cruise ship!

The next day we headed out for the rail station on our way to the port where we would pick up our ship. I was so happy to see it. I could not wait to just sit around and not have to haul around suitcases anymore. We ended up with a really nice room, and it was huge since it was also a handicap room. We all enjoyed it very much. Grandma and mom played bridge and mom exercised constantly and I read books and ate too much. I don't know the last time I was able to read so many books for fun and not for school. It was great.Throughout the trip, we visited all sorts of different ports and saw the ruins of Carthage and Roman baths in Tunisia (my first visit to Africa:)), the ancient yet huge city of Pompei, an interesting Picasso museum and the famous Las Ramblas in Barcelona, the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy, and these amazing caves on a island of Spain. As well, we visited Florence which had several great sites, including two amazing churches home to the tombs of Machiavelli, Galileo, the Medici family, and Michelangelo (Santa Croce and Duomo), the bridge Ponte Vecchio, and Michelangelo's David. Overall, the cruise was excellent and incredibly relaxing.

After we had to leave our wonderful ship, we once again headed to the rail station. This time we were headed out of Italy for France where we start our next adventure: driving through France to Paris. The train wasn't too awful and ended up in Nice, France. We just stayed there overnight but this is also where we picked up our car and headed out to central France. We had a very roomy yet very Americanesque car. It was sometimes hard to find parking spots since European cars are usually very small! That was one long day since the directions we recieved from AAA were awful! I ended up navigating our way using maps that mom had brought. Fortunately, there are lots of roundabouts in Europe which have a lot of direction signs. If we didn't know which way to go, we would just drive around a couple times! :) We ended up taking a little detour through this national forest and found our hotel completely on accident (this actually happened a lot in our adventure driving). In our adventure driving, we stopped in Arles where Van Gogh spent a lot of time and painted a famous picture of a cafe there so mom really wanted to see it. Our next big stop in our drive was Normandy in the very Northern part of France. We visited the beaches from WWII and the beautiful museum and cemetery commemorating the soldiers and the victory one there. It was very sad yet very amazing experience to have.

After this last visit, we were on the home stretch and off to our last stop, Paris. We actually made it through Paris only getting lost once, thank goodness because that was soooo confusing. When we got to our little condo, it was a relief and quite a site. The place was amazing! It was two stories with two beds and baths, a complete kitchen, and even a deck area with a pond full of ducks and their babies! I was in heaven! As well, since it was out in the suburbs of France, there were several nice shopping areas so we went and got groceries and explored the area. In the town Near by, there was a great little creperie where we had an amazing crepe lunch one day. Also, this was in the vicinity of EuroDisney so we visited the Disney marketplace (it was near the metro station to Paris) where there were lots of restaurants. We did end up going to Paris to see the French Open (Roland Garros as the call it there) where we saw Maria Sharapova and Christine Henin play. That was amazing as well!

Gosh I did not think I would write so much! But I think that is about it for our European Extravaganza. It was such a wonderful experience and I am just so glad I got to do it with mom and grandma. I will remember those experiences for a very long time with great pleasure!

P.S. Oh and one other thing...Greg adopted me my kitten (Tiara from the shelter) while I was away!!! We are naming her Princess Grace since I was in Monaco when he told me!