Italia!

We vacationed at Oma and Opa’s place in Italy twice this past year- October vacation and Easter vacation. Altogether we spent about five weeks in Italy (France and Monaco as well since they’re less than an hour away!). So there are lots of vacation blog posts coming your way!

For October vacation, we flew to Nice, France (closest airport to our place in Italy) just four days after we had moved into our new apartment. Thankfully we’d already bought plane tickets months earlier when we thought we had an earlier move-in date. Otherwise, I probably would have tried to talk Simon into staying in Köln to unpack and organize. Plane tickets meant the vacation was happening no matter what.

We were living in such chaos (stacks and stacks of boxes), that I could barely even find the things we needed to pack for vacation. I barely found one bathing suit each for the girls even though we were going to be spending most of the three weeks there at the beach. It was hard for me to leave that mess behind knowing it would be waiting for us when we got back, but we all really needed the vacation and family time.

We flew out of Konrad Adenauer airport in Köln. There were big slabs of the Berlin wall inside.

Getting on the plane. / I love that their barf bags say, “Don’t worry, we don’t take it personally.” !

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The girls both love to fly- especially our airplane obsessed Kiera (though you can’t tell from this pic!). I think the flight was only a little over an hour.

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The girls are always fascinated by the luggage carousel. I know they’d get on it if I let them!

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Then it was off to pick up our rental car. I love that they call the drop off area “Kiss and Fly”.

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The scenic route from the airport to Oma and Opa’s place takes about 2.5 hours- and is incredibly beautiful. The fast route (highway) takes about 1 hour.

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Almost there! Our place is in Imperia (in the region of Liguria, Italy).

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We stopped at the local grocery store to buy some essentials…

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Does chocolate count as an essential? They had so many different kinds of Kinder Chocolate that I’d never seen before!

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Before heading to our place we stopped for a sunset swim. It was so nice to be back in Italy again!! This was Quinnie and Kiera’s first time there, so it was extra special.