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Venice to Turkey 03

Day 03 Chiaverano, Italy

We get a very comfortable nights sleep and wake refreshed before going upstairs to their apartment. It is now Day 03 of our adventure! We have coffee, fruits and pastries with Scott and Manuela. It’s raining steadily. We head out anyway and tour the neighboring town of Ivrea and the surrounding areas. This is a very beautiful part of Italy, very lush and green! Scot & Manuela take us to a Grappa Distillery and we tour and taste! Grappa is a liqueur made by fermenting the left over must from making grape wine!

Then we tour around Ivrea for a bit, checking out the town.

We stop for lunch at CellaGrande for a lunch and wine tasting. Erbaluce grapes fermented several ways are featured. Plain fermentation, in oak and on skins, underwater for consistency of temperature and pressure. We choose to do a tasting menu of White and Red wine also. Dessert wine is pictured. Our waiter is Ricardo. Ricardo is very pleasant and knowledgeable.

Made a second wine tasting at Pozzo and taste some more very good wines!

Then we proceeded on to an overlook with park and gardens and took a stroll. Our cameras appreciated that! After which we visited the church above Scott and Manuela’s house. The skies after the morning rains were very photogenic!

Now it’s back to the house to relax for the evening.

Venice to Turkey 01

Day 01, 02 & 03, Travel Days!

Our good friend Tony takes us to the airport for an overnight flight. We’re starting out here at LAX, on the largest airliner I’ve ever been in my life! There are two full tiers of people. Two sets of staircases to access the upper tier, one in the front of the plane and one in back! There are also two jetways attached to the plane! It is also our first time on Lufthansa Airlines. A lot of firsts already.

We get settled in our seats and await takeoff which is one of the smoothest ever! Then we are handed menus on the plane! When the food comes, it has metal utensils and acrylic drinking glasses! Well, you can’t have everything!

10.5 hours in the air for the first leg to Munchen (Munich), Germany. I take a sleeping pill and manage several hours sleep. When I awake, breakfast of eggs and spinach are served. Landing in Munich to change from Lufthansa to Dolomiti Air is uneventful. We first have to go through immigration control and convince the guards that we will promise to leave and go home in a month! We ride a bus and load the plane on the tarmac.

It is now Day 02. The one hour flight goes by fast and we land in Turin, Italy. We retrieve our luggage and our friend Scott is there to pick us up. He is driving a tiny rental car and it’s cramped but not uncomfortable. Less than an hour later we are stopping at a local winery where Scott knows the proprietor and our wine tasting has begun. We get to Scott and Manuela’s house at the base of a church and we see why they drive such a tiny car. The roads are tight and the corners are many! We have arrived in Chiaverano, Italy, about an hour north of Turin!

Scott and Manuela take us to a favorite restaurant where we indulge in seafood and pasta. Back at their house, we taste grappa and other aperitifs before turning in for the night. They have allotted an entire apartment on the downstairs level to us!

Florida, Day 18

The trip home…

Fun clouds looking down from 12-15,000 feet as we com into LAX. Then a fun shot of SoFi Stadium right before landing. My first shot of the completed stadium from above! The World Cup will be playing there this summer!

We arrive home around 1 AM, 4 AM Florida time. Time to sleep in!

Florida 2026, Day 13

Sarasota, Ringling Bros Museum

On a day without much planned, we head over to “The Ringling” Museum to check it out. It’s a pretty fabulous collection of circus memorabilia!

A man named Howard Tibbels fascination with the circus began in his childhood. He spent summers with his grandparents in West Virginia. He would watch the circus trains unload using binoculars from a hilltop. As a child, he started making miniature models of different circus figures. He would end up spending over 50 years recreating the circus in miniature. The Ringling Museum took his models and put them on display. It is a fabulous depiction of the circus that spans about an acre of museum space! Check out the workshop that he built everything in!

Famous costumes and props the circus used.

Then we walk outside for a walk to the next building.

We step in to check out the Historic Circus Galleries and more miniature models. There is a workshop where workers refurbish and complete unfinished works! One of the train cars that the dignitaries of the circus travelled in was quite the car, complete with bathtub! And of course the ‘Human Cannon”!

A walk through the grounds reveals many Banyan trees where even a statue of a child has been swallowed up by the trees!

We checked out the “Ca’dzan” museum from the outside but did not elect to pay the $30 admission fee.

Then it was back to John & Andrea’s place for the evening.

Florida 2026, Days 09-18

Touring Florida and visiting people!

After disembarking the ship, we pick up a rental car and visit a shipmate friend from our 2 Round The World Cruises! Hey ‘E-Less Ann’!

Then it’s off towards Naples to visit Elee’s college roommate and her husband! Hey Ellen & Bob! They gave us a tour of the area!

After a couple days we head north to visit with Elee’s cousin on Anna Maria Island near Sarasota. Unfortunately, Karen was marooned up north due to the heavy snowstorms up north so John was a fantastic host who showed us around for a couple days! We also visited Brother in Law John and his partner Andrea who were both gracious enough to let us use their house! Thanks!

Then we were off to Orlando where we stayed at a Hilton (That we would never stay at again!) in the Disney World area. We did get a great deal on the room in exchange for attending a 2 hour Vacation Presentation (thinkTimeshare). Of course we were told there would be no pressure, LOL. But the presenters, sales persons, closers & check-out people were all clearly angry when we turned them down!

Our room in the hotel was next to a vertical shaft that went all the way to the very noisy Lobby where the sound carried to every room! We did have a view overlooking parts of Disney World and the Lazy River that belonged to the hotel. We did spend a couple hours prior to the presentation relaxing in the Lazy River!

Next, we were off to “The Villages” to visit another shipmate friend from our Round The World Cruises, Ron and his girlfriend Linda! It was fun catching up Guys! They took us to an outdoor Country Concert. It seems that The Villages has entertainment happening somewhere almost every night so it doesn’t matter which night you want to go out! There is always something happening!

On our way back to Orlando that evening, we even were able to pull over to watch a launch from Cape Canaveral! This was probably the most disappointing shot with the new iPhone 17 as the phone wouldn’t focus well on the rocket flames!

The next morning we check out of our hotel at 11 AM. Our flight doesn’t take off until 9 PM so we take a leisurely drive back to Fort Lauderdale. We find the Riverwalk and spend a couple hours there.