Our First Trip to Italy

Here are some pictures from our first trip to Italy. I say, "our first trip," because we are certainly going back. Karen and I both want to see Rome and Florence, etc.

Karen and I took a week long trip to Northern Italy. We stayed in Riva, a costal town on the northern shore of Lake Garda. We went with an Irish tour group called The Travel Department.

We were the only Americans on our trip; the group was all Irish otherwise. What a wonderful people. It's hard to accurately describe what is so nice about them, they're just a genuine people.

Here's the view from our hotel room. It was so nice to wake up with these mountains all around us. The views were gorgeous!

You can click here for a movie we took of our room in Riva. We stayed in the Grand Liberty Hotel which had a spa, pool, sauna, steam room, etc. It had a real old world charm to it.

First day in Italy we hiked up to a Basilica of Santa Barbara. This is a view of Riva from the mountain. After we had some food at a regional alpine mountaineering club the clouds started to roll in. The views were really cool.

We went for a tour around the lake and stopped at a nice marina town for some espresso and fresh pastries. The mountains around the northern part of the lake are just so beautiful.

On the North East shore of the lake, the mountains come almost straight out of the water. In a lot of places they had to dig out tunnels through the rock because there was not enough land on which to build a road. They were really neat to drive through and beautiful to look back on.

We also took a day trip to Venice. It was really cool to see all the canals and architecture. Venice is a pretty expensive city though. Our tour guide arranged for a few discount things for us. It was great to have her looking out for us in financially like that.

I'm really glad to have seen Venice, but I don't know if I needed to spend a whole lot more than a day there. I can't imagine seeing it in the height of the summer. Probably better with a fraction of the tourists.

Check out the pigeons in the middle of St Marc's Square below. They sell bags of bird food you can feed the birds... actually you just let 'em see the food and they maul you. We watched it happen to a few people and vowed NEVER to feed the pigeons again.