I love love love pretty much anything mid-century.
Let’s face it. I pretty much wish I was born in 1934 like my grandparents so I could have lived through mid-century America.
I have been waiting my whole life (not an exaggeration) for mid-century style to come back.
I got a new soundtrack on CD the other day — Promises, Promises — and I really love the album design. It’s a musical based on the 1960s movie The Apartment, and so has a delicious mid-century feel.
love love

Add that to … I have been thinking …

Sunday Sunday!
Our last day on the cruise …
Once again, the other girls were out until 5a or so, while I went to bed at a reasonable Midnight the night before.
Which means when I woke up, got showered, left, ate breakfast and was out on the pool deck by 9:30a – I was pretty much the only one there …..

Except for the families with little kids. Which, by the way, why on earth would you bring a 6 year old on a party cruise? No idea.
So, Sunday morning was lovely and …

Saturday of our cruise was “in port” in Ensenada, Mexico.
Since many of our fellow cruisers were off the ship, breakfast/pool deck/etc was delightfully un-crowded.
We all got up, ate, and took our sweet time about it …

Getting off the ship, there is a little building *right* away to buy junk souvenirs. Shot glasses, magnets, sun glasses, etc. There’s also a shuttle to take you into town if you don’t want to walk …

The shuttle dropped us off in this dingy run down parking lot/alley … just a couple blocks away from …

Why are “vacations” always so exhausting???
A couple weeks ago, I went on a 3-day cruise with Kaitlin, a bunch of her friends and cousins to celebrate Kaitlin’s bachelorette-ness…
FYI: For those of you who have never been on a cruise, this is NOT what most cruises are like. Every other cruise, no matter the cruise line, has a much older clientele, stops at ports and serves as an actual vacation. Not a 3-day-party-on-a-ship. I made Heather and Nichole both promise they’d go on a *real* cruise someday …

The Lido deck (deck …

In roughly chronological order …

The digital images to come ….

So, you may have heard, but I follow a lot of blogs.
I use Google reader to keep track and organize them, and today – as we have FINALLY ended our series on Italy posts – I thought I’d share some of the travel-related blogs that I follow …
In no particular order ….
Amy’s current picks for travel blogs to follow
(much of the text is taken from their ‘about’ section)

On Montague ….. If you were to visit me in my real home, I’d sit you on the couch, make you a cappuccino, …

I fully support those tourists who fly into a city with no plans, just wanting to see where life takes them and who they meet.
HOWEVER!
While it might be an *experience* to get scammed while on vacation in a foreign city, you can still learn what some common crimes and tourist scams are before you go.
Stolen Passport
Our second morning in Rome, we had a bit of a difficult time checking out because Danilo (the hotel proprietor) was busy helping another couple who had just had one of their passports stolen.
On their …

When you are in Rome, if you don’t mind not having the amenities of a typical mainstream hotel, you should think about staying at this bed and breakfast in the Trastevere district (across the river from the ancient center of Rome).
Hotel Danilo is a little bed and breakfast housed in 2 separate (across-the-hall-from-each-other) apartment units in the same building.
Our room was across-the-hall from the main unit, at the end of the apartment unit. It has 3 twin beds in it (but they pushed 2 together for our king size bed). …

Continuing our night walk through Rome on our last night in the city …
From the Pantheon, we continued through the narrow streets … looking for the Trevi Fountain.
You can hear it before you see it. ….  You can hear you’re getting close to a crowd of some kind, and … is that water I hear?
Then you turn the corner and see ….

From Rick Steves:

The Trevi Fountain shows how Rome took full advantage of the abundance of water brought into the city by its great aqueducts. This watery Baroque avalanche was …

After our LONG afternoon in the Vatican city, Andrew and I just had one more evening to live it up in Rome before heading home early early Saturday morning.
So heart-breaking. I really love Rome ….
Rick Steves has a ‘Night Walk’ across Rome in his guidebook that we *kind of* followed …
It was nice to have that guidance of where everything was in relation to everything else and have the path basically set up, but we didn’t really do *everything* on the walk …
But, we left the Vatican city and walked …

Part 2. Because this place is so.darn.big.

looking up into the dome.

In the image below … if you look carefully, in the middle of the circular part there is a bird with wings outstretched.
From Rick Steves:

Bernini’s dove window shines above the smaller front altar, used for everyday services. The Holy Spirit, in the form of a six-foot high dove, pours sunlight onto the faithful through the alabaster window, turning into artificial rays of gold and reflecting off swirling gold clouds, angels, and winged babies. During a service, real sunlight passes through …

Again : awe-inspiring.
I know I keep saying that.
But, for reals y’all
We walked around the corner from the Sistine Chapel and stopped for a bit in the atrium. No tour guides were allowed inside the church, so Jimmy stopped basically just outside the door to prepare us for what we were about to see … and then we said goodbye (sad)!
But, then we still had the whole of St. Peter’s Basilica to explore. AND we were getting to skip the WHOLE big line out in St. Peter’s Square.
St. Peter’s Basilica is …

The Sistine Chapel was …. sigh. Just fantastic.
Seriously.
We watched Angels and Demons recently … and all I could think about afterward was “I can’t believe I’ve been there”
One of the stories – as told to us by Jimmy, our incredibly adorable Angel Tours guide – is that in the early early 1900s there was a little boy who wanted to be an artist. He had heard about the Sistine Chapel and lived his whole life waiting to see it. Learning about Michelangelo’s amazing work is what helped spur this …

There’s something about the weather this week that really brings that whole experience back to me.
I was visiting one of my FAVORITE people. Just me and Miranda for several days.
I was traveling to Europe for the first time. Heck, I was traveling outside of North America for the first time!

You guys, I miss it.
I really loved England. Especially England in the spring. People-watching in St. James Park and bike riding in Moreton-in-Marsh.
My springtime weather activities this year involving carrying lots and lots of heavy things up stairs to our new …