Verona!

On Saturday, we all hopped on a bus with Verona on our agenda; after a two hour drive, we finally arrived in the magical city, fondly referred to as "The City In Love".  (See picture below)

Our first stop was the world's largest functional Colosseum, which is indeed quite large and interesting!  They frequently have concerts there and events; Coldplay even performed there a little while ago, so Sam has told us ninety million times.  We lunched there and wandered around to take pictures in the vastness of old stone and archways.

After leaving the Colosseum, we headed to Juliet's house - it wasn't as cool as I thought it was be, which was a bummer.  I think I made it a lot more romantic in my head than it was in reality.  There was, however, one thing that I couldn't leave without doing...

Even if Juliet's was a teensy bit disappointing, there was a plus side - we found this turquoise horse and I posed with it!

Fondly petting the horse goodbye, we set off for the Bell Tower to climb the 368 steps to the top.  I told Ttea that after the practice of those steps, we'd be in shape for the Eiffel Tower ;)  This is what the tower looks like from the ground.

Splitting off from the group, Ttea and I waltzed across the bridge into a different part of Verona and paused on the bridge to snap this lovely picture!

Off in the distance, we saw what looked like a mansion and thought that we should attempt to get there.  It was rather far off, but Sam had taught us the day before that for missions work, we needed a vision and faith.  We had both, so we set off to find a street that would lead upwards towards the enormous house.  We got five sixths of the way there, or three quarters, or whatever you want to call it...and then Ttea and I were distracted by a side path.   By a stone wall.  And then I saw this plant that looked like an oversized pineapple top and it still mystifies me..(any ideas, Dad?)

After seeing such a cool stone wall with a path next to it, we followed it because it seemed country-ish and we agreed that the country was more to our liking than going to explore some house that was probably owned by a bunch of snobby people with dogs that like to eat single young Americans for lunch.  This is what the wall and path looked like:

Tempting, right??

Waltzing down the avenue of green, I couldn't resist clambering up the stone wall to check out the view from above the city.  This is me, on a wall.

And this is the view from said wall:

Farther on, we saw a sign and realized we were in a park and the best thing about this park was that we were the only tourists and every other person was a local!  It was so nice and calm and relaxing.  We climbed into some stone garrison-like things and I climbed a fence or two, just because I could; then we saw a grove of trees and it took me a second to realize that the ground was covered with....

OLIVES!!!!


We were in an olive grove!!!!  It was the coolest thing ever because all I kept thinking was, "JESUS MIGHT HAVE WALKED HERE!", which He probably didn't - but it was still crazy cool.  After running around and basking in the gloriousness of such a sunny day, Ttea and I climbed this wall which doesn't look that daunting, but it was a lot taller than we were!

Once we had accomplished that incredible feat, we ended up in a new olive grove that was probably private but it was wonderful and we just sat there, overlooking the city, and enjoying the rest of the day.

I could show you all of the pictures here, but I'll just attach a link that will take you to my photo album and you can look through the rest of them if you like :)


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