Dave & Meredith's Travel Blog

Venice has been praised and put down by so many people.  I think it’s the kind of place you have to experience yourself and make up your own mind. The Cons It’s touristy, expensive, and it’s hard to find a good meal at a remotely reasonable price. The Pros It’s beautiful, over-the-top, and fun to […]

Let’s have a little quiz. Where are we in this picture? Oh, wait. You can’t tell. Because there are no clues in the picture. It could have been taken anywhere which means it’s not a great vacation photo. I find it very tough to get someone else to take a picture of us on a […]

First, let me start off by saying that I’m not looking for pity by writing this post.  If you’ve heard enough about the ankle incident, you may not want to read further.  Although, it’s not really about the ankle, so much as it is about the experience of having limited mobility.  This is a blog […]

Here is the view from our Venice hotel room: Hmm, that probably requires some explanation. A week before we arrived in Venice, our hotel emailed us to say that the building they are in just started renovation by another tenant. They gave us a discount if we were willing to keep our reservation so we […]

Well, we left Tuscany over two weeks ago but with everything going on, I’ve had less time than usual to devote to working on photography. Better late than never: a gallery of pictures from Umbria and Tuscany is now here. As usual, the Photo Galleries page is also updated. I hope you enjoy them. Stay […]

Bologna isn’t on the tourist agenda for most Americans.  Though our stay here was brief (a day and a half), we saw enough of the city to know that it *should* be on the agenda.  It’s a beautiful city that feels so vital and young, even though many of the buildings are over 500 years […]

Oops, this is really #10. We forgot to take a picture from the sisters’ apartment in the Veneto. Here is the view from our Bologna hotel room: – Meredith

I’ll keep it short. It turns out that one of the most famous/best orthopedic institutes in the world is in Bologna (Rizzoli Institute).  We learned that the best thing to do would be to go to the emergency room there, take a number, and wait for a doctor to see me – we were told […]

I nearly minored in Art History in college (I found out too late that I needed 10 classes for a minor; I had taken 9.  Oops).  Anyway, my favorite classes were medieval and Byzantine art and architecture. There’s a town in Emilia-Romagna near the Adriatic named Ravenna that was the seat of the Western Roman […]

After Lago di Como, we went to the Veneto to stay with two sisters we met while traveling in the Caribbean last year.  We kept in touch with them via email, and when we told them we were coming to Italy, they generously offered to have us stay with them. Silvia and Valeria live in […]