Dave & Meredith's Travel Blog

On the suggestion of Dave’s co-worker who writes guidebooks for Italy, we decided to check out an area along the Tuscan coast on Friday after arriving on the red-eye (and before starting our villa stay in Tuscany on Saturday).  The area is not very well known by American tourists – mostly, Italians go there to […]

When I rented a car for this trip, I knew I’d need room for four people and I knew I had to allow for a decent amount of luggage since some people would have been traveling already for a week or two and I would have a load of photo gear. At the car rental […]

We’re dusting off the travel blog for our upcoming vacation to Italy!  We thought it was a good idea for a few reasons: 1. We’ll be away for 10 days, so that’s enough time to do some meaningful blogging, instead of just a couple quick status updates on Facebook. 2. My mom is STILL NOT […]

With apologies to Bon Jovi. This is how Meredith rolls. Or at least how she rolled in Venice.   (Yeah, it’s old news but I couldn’t resist 🙂 .) – Dave

We’re leaving for the airport in an hour to fly to Mongolia so I have just a little time to polish up some blog posts that have been sitting around in half-baked form and publish them before they become old news. 🙂 One of the things I always like to do after visiting a new […]

We were sitting in a small restaurant in Montepulciano and our waitress was fascinated by the electronic dictionary gadget we’ve been using for English/Italian translation (highly recommended by the way; worth the money). She asked me to translate the word “gelato” and the result that came up was “ice cream.” She pointed this out to […]

I’ve just posted three more galleries of photographs from our trip to Italy. It feels good to finally be caught up since we left Venice one week ago. So without further ado, the gallery from the Cinque Terre is here, the gallery from Lake Como, Ravenna, and Bologna is here, and the gallery from Venice […]

I think that “The Dolomites” sounds like it could have been the title for a bad Hanna-Barbera cartoon from the 1970s.  The Dolomites are a band of crime-fighting heroes.  There’s a strong man, a hot woman, a not-so-ambiguously gay teenage boy, and some mascotty-type animal that speaks gibberish, but all the Dolomites can understand what […]

The doctor in Merano took my plaster cast off for good!  It’s been replaced by an air cast that I only wear during the day with a sneaker.  I’ll need to wear it for four weeks.  But, I’m quite happy hobbling around, and I’ve already ditched my crutches for most walking situations. BTW, my left […]

Here is the view from our apartment in Merano:   – Meredith