Viva Italia (Part 1) Traveling in Europe with Kids

Hello Fellow Food Lovers,

I have been struggling with the way I wanted to report on our trip to Italy and after the first few attempts I have decided to break it up into 3 parts. This is the first one, and Part 2 & 3 will follow shortly.

July 11th, 2008 we loaded up a couple of suitcases and headed south. We had decided late on Thursday evening to 'take a break' from it all and of course the Chef was just itching to get to drinking some if Italy's finest wines. We were fortunate enough to find accommodation for a week in the lovely Piemonte region, very close to the Italian Riviera in a tiny town called Treville. We stayed at this lovely place called Villa Mimma http://www.villamimma.com/ and it was just what the doctor ordered. No telephones, no laptops just a lot of really amazing food and wine for one blissful week. The drive there was calm and uneventful. We had my new best friend with us to help navigate the way Tom Tom. This makes things considerably easier on ones life and marriage especially when your husband actually listens to the nice lady :-)

As we woke the children early Friday morning to load them into the car, they both protested by immediately falling right back to sleep for at least 2 of the four hour trip. Once we arrived, we were greeted as old friends into this lovely home. They had stocked our fridge for us with all the essentials like butter, ham, eggs, cheese all from the butcher down the street, a loaf of bread a few bottles of the local wine. They had this huge courtyard with great big old pine trees where Ron and I spent most of our time, napping, reading eating and a little drinking too. The children were with us for the most part, but as the grounds were surrounded by a huge wall and gates, we sometimes did not see them for a few hours at a time and the weird thing was, neither of us worried too much. (See photo of Jack with black eye in next blog).

Thats all for now - not very exciting I know. Here are a few photos of the villa and surrounding areas.

Signing off for today,

WiseMona