Our Trip to Italy

Hello again!  Although I have been "away" from blogging for a number of months, I often find myself wondering how the friends I have made through blogging are doing so I have decided to try again to participate.  I have been reluctant to face several computer issues.  One involves the way my pictures are stored on Picasa and the other involves a lack of storage on my laptop.  It's time to sort out these issues but in the meantime I will just look back to September when our family took a trip to Italy together.  I will use pictures to tell the story and there may be several posts showing the highlights of our trip.  KLM took us via Amsterdam to Rome.  Booking as soon as there was non stop service from northern Alberta resulted in amazing return fares!  It was almost two for one and since our son and daughter were both able to take holidays in September we decided to take a family vacation.  We had a great flight over, fabulous weather, great experiences and lots of fun.

After arriving in Rome at 5 pm we had a wonderful reunion with our Canadian friends at their lovely home and early the next morning we were touring the Colosseum.  We had no time for jet lag and all of us did really well. We had a guide who made history come alive in a 3 hour tour of the Colosseum and the areas nearby.  

 Our friend has a degree in Archeology and used to be a tour guide at Ostia Antica so on the second day she guided us through the ancient seaport of Rome which was where as many as 100,000 people once lived. The ruins are well preserved and date back to the 3rd century BC.

The site is massive and just about a third of the ruins have been dug up. The cost of maintaining the site as it is now is has limited the government from further excavations and they are being left for future generations to discover and maintain. Next stop... Tuscany. See you before too long.  

Sunshine Always, Sheila

I am linking to Judith's Mosaic Monday at http://www.lavendercottagegardening.com/

Italy in the Fall

A week from today our family will be landing in Rome! It will be a special trip because we will be staying with good friends in Rome when we arrive and before we travel home. We will be travelling to our favourite hill town in Tuscany and using that as a base to travel to other places.  Then we will be catching the train again to Cinque Terre.  The weather promises to be lovely and warm.  I will share some photos of our last trip to Italy tonight and promise to share some new photos next time.

I will joining Judith at

http://www.lavendercottagegardening.com/

Ciao Ciao!

Hope that your September is filled with all that makes Autumn such a lovely season !

A Reunion !

Hello to all my blogging friends!  I must apologize for not visiting your blogs this summer. How can the days be so long and yet they speed by so quickly. It's the time of the year when there seems to be so much happening and that seems strange when the rest of the year is often so quiet.
The farmer has retired and so the possibility of travel during the summer resulted in a road trip to my hometown.  It was wonderful to spend time with our friends and family and oh so nice to spend some time with my old school friends ...amazing to think that half a century ago the second chapter of our lives was just beginning.
You can just imagine the smiles, hugs, and stories that were exchanged that afternoon.  Seeing each other made me think that although some of us hadn't seen each other since the last day of high school or perhaps sometime in university, we all seemed to be the same as we were back then.  We chose different paths in life, experienced different things and now have families but everyone loved being together once again.   Our school is much different than when we walked through the hallways but the central section is almost as it was and it was wonderful to see once more.

This photo of St Ann's Academy was taken in winter.  I should have taken one at the reunion but there just wasn't time.  We had too much catching up to do! 

Hope you are having a wonderful summer.  

These days our family is getting ready for a trip to Italy.  We are going to Rome and Tuscany.  

I'll tell you more about it next time we meet at

http://www.lavendercottagegardening.com/

for Mosaic Monday.

Spring

Spring has sprung...dandelions are decorating the lawn, the trees have green leaves now, our garden was in the ground early and my perennials are green and bushy.  A few iris have bloomed but they were dwarfs this year due to the extremely dry conditions. Our lilacs have yet to bloom and may not because of a heavy frost we had two weeks ago and there is not enough moisture to coax the garden seeds out of the ground.  Some farmers have already ploughed up the spring seeded crops and replanted in the hopes of harvesting them this fall. We need rain!  

Twenty years ago we planted spruce seedlings that were just 6 inches above the soil and I asked the farmer and our son ( both well over 6 feet tall) to pose in  front of them to show how much the trees have grown. My petunias were a Mother's day gift from my son and the lupins will be blooming before too long.  Otherwise all the perennials are waiting for rain.

My daughter was recently in Palm Springs and loves vintage shops so bought a vintage hand rolled scarf for my Mother's day gift.  It appears to be brand new and I imagine it may have rested for many years in a scarf drawer.  She also gave me a lovely new necklace from Astoria, Washington. I snapped a picture of it resting on a beautiful dresser scarf she brought back for me from Bangalore, India.  I really treasure the special things she has given me over the years.

A few weeks ago there was an evacuation of people who lived about an hour north of here because  a forest fire threatened their homes and community.  I belong to a group that makes and donates quilts to people in need and though we don't meet through the summer we had stockpiled about 60 quilts to be given away through the summer. I went with the president of our group to get these quilts and she donated 64 quilts to one of the evacuation centers.  Luckily the fire was contained and no one lost their homes. We decided to have a 4 day quilting blitz last week and we were pleased to look at the stacks of quilts we had created at the end of the blitz.  Co-operation, fun, and friendship are in evidence every day as we quilt and one day we were surprised by one quilter's brother and sister in law who arrived to make us delicious soup and biscuits for lunch. Our group will be celebrating 10 years of quilt making in the fall.  We think it's time to invite our community to our quilting party.  

Hope that the sun is shining in your part of the world and that gentle rains fall to coax your growing things in this season if new growth. Sunshine Always, Sheila