The Hinkles are in Italy… Again.

I’ll go ahead and put a warning out there… We have always lovingly referred to our own family as the “Hinkles”… Yes, that’s right. We were the peopled that watched “The Beverly Hillbillies” and said, “Wait a second! We’ve driven across country with a wooden rocking chair strapped to the trailer… What’s wrong with that??!” So needless to say, family vacations can sometime have a flair of the unexpected, and even trashy at times… As my sister would say, “that’s just how we roll”… :)

Carolyn found a little bunny friend in the trailer park! :) 

Lago di Garda (Garda Lake)… With the Italian Alps in the background!

So when my Aunt Laura suggested that we stay in a motor home instead of a hotel during our two nights in northern Italy, we all just had to laugh… It was just too typical. :) Little did we know that we’d go ALL the way with the “trailer park” jokes… And I mean all the way, as in my mom fired up Spam for breakfast. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like it hasn’t happened before… In fact my brother was thoroughly excited to wake up to the smell wafting through the motor home… It’s just ironic, because oh-so-many people around Stuttgart would just never believe the Commander’s family were capable of such behaviour… :)

But we quite enjoyed ourselves! When we got back from Verona, we packed our cooler full of beer (in plastic bottles none the less) and headed to the beach of Lago di Garda (Lake Garda)… We had a great afternoon baking in the sun (something that hasn’t been possible in Germany so far this summer because it’s been so darn cold!), swimming in the lake, and watching the rather scantily clad men strut around! :) And later that evening we retired for a true all-American dinner of beans n’ franks… (I told you we were the Hinkles… Haha)

Sisters on the beach! 

Gorgeous sunset on Lago di Garda!

 

Carolyn was quite surprised by some of the tiny swimsuits walking around… Haha

And of course there were lots of other shenanigans along the way as we attempted to live up to our red-neck roots… :)

My mom and I are too cool… Haha

With Love from “a trailer park in northern Italy”… :) Mary Elizabeth

The Delights of Verona, Italy…

Lovely, fair Verona… <3

Verona, Italy… Home of the star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliette. Unfortunately there was to be no whirlwind romance for me in Verona, but there were lots of beautiful back-alley streets to wander, delicious pizza, and lots of icy gelato! So, no surprise, I was content… :)

We started our wandering through the city with the touristy city centre… I had been excited to make a stop by Casa di Giulietta, because really, what else does Verona really have that’s much more notable than Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette?  Unfortunately, we were completely let down by her house/balcony courtyard… Here I was imagining: how sweet and romantic… A quiet courtyard that is a pilgrimage site for thousands of giddy little teenage girls every year, just praying for love. I even thought, “Sure. I’ll touch the right breast of Juliette’s statue (not my idea, someone else started that ridiculous tradition) if it’ll give me some good luck in love. Not like I’ve got anything to loose at the age of 22, right?” Haha :) Wrong.

What I didn’t expect was to have to fight my way through the courtyard, past middle-aged Asian men… Haha :) Definitely not the cute little, meditation spot I was imagining it would be… Instead of quaint little love notes tucked in the wall, all we found were graffiti and bubble gum stuck to everything… Although I will admit that the graphitized love notes were a little cool… :) I even left one of my own: I visited fair Verona on August 11th which coincidentally was the 23rd Birthday of my best friend and “heterosexual life partner”, Jetta… So somewhere in Verona, if Jet should ever visit, she’ll find a heart with our names in it. <3 

 

Juliette’s Balcony…  

Love note graffiti… <3

 

 

Anyway, so after our disappointing “tourist-trap” moment, we headed to the back alley streets for a little less of the crowds and a little more “authentic Verona”… We found our way to the river and eventually to this amazing little cafe for lunch… We sat outside for most of the afternoon just chatting it up and eating pizza… And on our way home, of course, made a stop for gelato! :)

  LOTS of pizza

Oh fair Verona… How pretty you are… :) 

 Crazy cousins!  GELATO!

The party was just getting started though… Because after we left Verona, we headed for some beach time! :)

With Love from Verona, Italy… <3 Mary Elizabeth

Over, Under, and Through the Swiss Alps

On our second and last day in Switzerland we awoke to gorgeous blue skies! :) So we hopped out of bed, made a quick stop at the bakery, and headed towards the train station! We took a train up to the village of Wengen, and then a cable car up the mountain and began hiking! We took a trail that went just along the mountain ridge-line, and gave an amazing view of the “three peaks”… The tallest being the Jungfrau…

The hike took us a good portion of the morning and afternoon, but only because we stopped so often to take in the view… Or drag my mother away from talking to the cows! :) The weather was perfect, and we found a great little place looking out over the three peaks to stop for a picnic lunch of fresh brot, Swiss cheese, and Swiss chocolate… Yum!

 Snack Break, anybody?? :)

My mom likes cows… And apparently I do too! :)

  Planking atop the Swiss Alps. Basically wins.

 

It was truly amazing to realize how much of the Alps you can’t take in from the valley… As in we literally could not see them! From the our guesthouse in Lauterbrunnen it seemed as if they stretched on forever, and we marveled at watching the clouds move, revealing a new peak… They just kept appearing from thin air… But we really had no perception of how massive they truly were from the valley… On the train and cable car up, they just kept unraveling before our eyes… And just when we thought we’d reached the highest peak another would appear… So it was truly amazing to stand atop the ridgeline and realize the Lauterbrunnen was so far below that we could hardly spot it! :) It was definitely an amazing experience, and one we nearly all voted as our “favorite” since moving to Europe over a year ago! 

Gorgeous views the whole way… 

Picniking along the way… :) Fresh brot, Swiss cheese, meat, and Swiss chocolate… It doesn’t get any better! 

We left Lauterbrunnen later that afternoon, tired but rejuvenated from an amazing day atop the Alps… But little did we know that our Swiss adventure wasn’t quite over yet!

We hadn’t headed down the road more than 20 minutes before two things became very obvious: 1) we were driving to Italy on the curviest, steepest, tightest mountain road we’d seen yet and 2) we were frighteningly low on gas! We finally reached the top of a never-ending uphill chain of mountains, and just when we could go no higher our “gas light” turned bright red in warning… Despite looking for a gas stop for the last half hour, there was not a single town or even house in sight… If we broke down up here there would be no help until we had hiked to an SOS phone (that we passed every few miles)…

Roadside pull-off at the top of the never-ending mountain road… Where we stopped to desperately search the map for the nearest town before the gas completely ran out! Haha

 

Part of the ridiculous winding Swiss roads…

 

Gas on empty, gas-light on, and car in neutral!  

Luckily we had reached the top, so we put the van in neutral and coasted all the way down the mountain riding the brakes! We must have coasted for 30km before we rolled right into a little town and the only gas station for miles… And just in time!

After that, the rest of the trip seemed relatively mundane… Although we did spend a considerable amount of time driving under mountains and through tunnels… In fact, between Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland and Lago di Garda, Italy we went through 47 tunnels! One of which, at 17km long, was the longest tunnel in the world! Pretty impressive Swiss engineering!

So in retrospect, I guess you could say that we spent the day going over, under, and through the Swiss Alps! :)

With Love from a windy road in the Swiss Alps… <3 Mary Elizabeth

Where there are “Mountains Beyond Mountains”

As a family that hails from seemingly endless generations of “Shenandoah Valley settled Irish-Presbyterians” we generally consider ourselves “mountain people”… So it was no surprise that we absolutely ADORED our time in Switzerland! It was a first for everyone on the trip: Mom, Drayton, Carolyn, Aunt Laura, Uncle Donald, Julia, Katherine, and I… And everyone was thoroughly impressed by the sheer magnitude of the Swiss Alps…

We stayed Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland on Tuesday evening (before continuing onward to northern Italy late Wednesday afternoon)… When we got there we were unfortunately greeted by on-again, off-again rain, but decided to venture out anyway to climb up to Staubach Waterfall, which overlooked the town (and of which we had an amazing view from right out of our guesthouse window!) The climb wasn’t too bad, and well worth the view of the village from the caves behind the falls… Although we did get a tad wet in the process! Haha :)

View from our Guesthouse Balcony!

Mom sketching and I attempting to “dissertation write” with absolutely gorgeous views!

Staubach Waterfall… We climbed up to the cave behind it that afternoon… It was only one of many amazing falls in the area! :)

 Hiking Up!

  And the view from the top was worth it!

 

After hiking up to the falls, we decided to retire to the local pub… Which despite being the only pub in the little village of Lauterbrunnen, also claimed to be the best! It was clearly the hotspot hangout for all the locals and young base-jumpers, which was kind of cool… So we sat around for the evening, avoiding the rain, eating some burgers, and drinking several pitchers of beer… Our now 16 year-old Carolyn even had her first legal beer! :) 

Ready for Carolyn’s first “legal” beer! :)

 I can’t even begin to explain the hilarity that ensues when you put a few pitchers of beer, some fresh air, and my family together…

i guess you just had to be there… :)

With Love from Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland… <3 Mary Elizabeth