BREaD Crumbs

Pizza in a cone at the Taste of Tasmania

St Helens. On the way up from Bicheno we saw the Sydney-Hobart fleet coming the other way. Pretty cool.

Eamon, after our first time fishing. We caught about 6 in half an hour, all of them thrown back.

At last! Eamon finally sticks his hand somewhere clean.

1.  ’that’s boring’, ‘this is boring’, ‘I wanta get outta here’
2.  ’ooooooo’, ‘interesting’
3.  ’willy… broken willy… leaf willy… no willy…big willy’

1600 Photos. Family members, I’d be setting aside 6 hours now.

1 bee sting

40 other insect bites

132 gelati (and this is a low estimate)

1 badly sprained finger (scooter accident)

15 visits to the Panthenon

5 euro, thrown into the Trevi

77 bridges the pram was carried over in Venice

35  times Rob has read ‘Mr Bounce’, the only kids book Daniel didn’t lose. 

4 meals where we actually cooked 

Ahh, breakfast. The most important meal of the day.

and Visa, the ancient Roman goddess of shopping, looked down upon Belinda and Daniel and smiled!

Carabinieri getting paid for…?

1. Why can’t you buy a plain old loaf of bread here?
2. Why are all the young Roman priests (belinda’s word) hot? Aren’t ugly people attracted to religion anymore?
3. Where have all the stylish people gone? 13 years ago it was all black and sharp, now it’s all Gen Y sloth.
4. Just how early is too early for gelati?
5. Just what do the Carabinieri do exactly?

Hmmmm.

Eamon preparing for school.

Now that’s amore.

Long bus trip from Rome. Yay for iPods.

The cast of dodgy “tour guides” and ripoff merchants circling the fresh meat by the entry gates made the Colosseum look like … oh, I don’t know, something Canadian.

Inside, 89 stunningly well preserved thermopolia but not a single place to buy a snack or a drink. Oh, and you can’t pop out and return on your original ticket. So a late lunch it is.

Spotted school tour groups from England, France, Germany and Italy. Queue jumped most of them thanks to our helpful (and crafty) guide.

If you want to find your bus before it leaves without you, probably worth going in with a map.

In a nutshell, Pompeii rocks! (And bricks and frescoes).

An unmanned Pompeii snack bar

Belinda’s holiday plan was to come to Italy, sit and eat, so eat we did! After many spectacular feasts and a few bitter disappointments we have made ourselves the following rules we would like to share;

1 never eat in a restaurant in a famous piazza or, in fact, near anything famous. If the prices don’t get you the pigeons will.

2 never eat anywhere where they greet you with ‘good evening’. It’s ‘buona sera’ or nothing with this family mate.

3 never eat anywhere that is mentioned in the Lonely Planet, Let’s Go, Frommers or Rick Steve’s Italy 2008. By the time it’s in the guidebook the owners are no longer in the food business for love.

4 anything made with anchovies is going to taste fantastic.

5 If you get desperate McDonalds is not evil. The kids will leave you alone and the parmigiano burger (surprisingly delicious!) you can’t get back home.

Hmm, we wonder if these tips will work in Aus…