Living a Dream

Italy is so full of wonderful things and places that I've written about 20+ different places that we visited without getting to one of the most iconic structures in the entire country. I'm talking, of course, about the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I don't actually remember our train route to Pisa from Milan, but I do know that I took a photo of the toilet on the train. It was the first time I'd ever seen a train-toilet that didn't even pretend that the waste was going anywhere other than the train track below.                                   (That's the ground) We hopped off the train at Pisa and started wandering, not really knowing where we were going. We sort of assumed that we'd get off the train and immediately see the Tower somewhere off in the distance and just walk that direction. We were wrong. Basically we left the train station and walked straight ahead in a 12:00 direction. The Tower was ...

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about hosting people on AirBnB and how it's been really cool to trust people and meet strangers who are moving around in the world. To revisit the topic, it's a pretty eye-opening thing. One of our first guests was a family of four. They had spent the past several weeks at the woman's parents' house in Parma (that's about 15 minutes from our house, for those who don't know) and just needed to get out and be a little closer to the city for a couple of days before they moved to the Congo. To provide a little more insight, this was a girl from Parma and her husband who she met in Madagascar while she was teaching English. They now have two unbelievably well-behaved (and adorable) children who were about to stomach a 24+ hour trip from Cleveland to Newark to Brussels to Kinshasa, which is the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The husband was from Guinea (that's in west Africa) and before they departed, he ga...