Ciao!

I hope this finds everyone doing well.  With Thanksgiving approaching, I am missing family and friends more than ever!  I hope you all have a wonderful holiday.

Things are very good here.  It’s wintertime, now, for sure – cold, but thankfully sunny a lot, so I am happy with that.  Mike is stressing some with work, but not for the kinds of reasons it so easily could be right now, so we are thankful for that too.  We are both looking forward to our trip home for Christmas so much!  Brandy is so happy it’s hysterical – I think her new food, with glucosamine in it, has made an incredible difference in her arthritis.  I never would have guessed it could have that much impact, but she is like a puppy again!  Which, for those of you who know how hyper she’s always been, will explain why we sometimes kind of miss the days when she was old and stiff!!!

We’ve been frantically Christmas shopping, in the hopes that we will be able to mail most stuff so we don’t have to carry it home with us.  We want to get things in the mail within the next week or so, so the pressure is on.  I really don’t mind, though, because I am loving the shopping!  It’s so much fun to find cool things here that we think people at home will like.

I went to Venice on Friday for the day with another wife.  It was lots of fun, we just wandered and shopped for hours.  Just the kind of time I have been wanting to spend there.  The previous weekend (10-12 Nov) Mike and I took advantage of the three-day weekend to go down south to a place called Vieste, on the Gargano peninsula, about halfway down south in Italy.  It’s on the eastern coast.  It was so beautiful I can’t describe it.  A little like I picture Greece might look, with white towns hanging on the cliffs over the ocean.  Very, very OLD.  Everywhere were huge olive groves – miles and miles of them – and vineyards, which were just changing color and were glowing gold and orange.  Everywhere we looked was a patchwork of the bright colors of the fall vineyards and the silver-green of the olive trees… so gorgeous!

I can’t explain it very well, but looking at some of the ancient, craggy olive trees gave me the strangest feeling – of, I guess, timelessness?  That’s the only way I know to describe it.  I kept having visions of Christ, kneeling under just such a tree, praying, you know?  I don’t have any idea why they hit me so, since I had never seen olive trees nor had any pictures or associations in my head with what they might look like.  They were just very – I don’t know… they just touched me somehow.

We drove a lot, since it was cloudy and rainy off and on.  We drove to a town about an hour away from Vieste, intending to go see a particular historic church that houses a Madonna statue that, apparently, cried real tears once.  When we got there though, we “stumbled” across the remains of a castle that – get this – is so old that it was RENOVATED in 1491!  Originally it was built in like 800.  It’s been renovated and added onto several times over the centuries, and still what is left now is mainly walls open to the sky, but you can tour it and we did!  It was amazing!!!  We even walked through underground tunnels and saw what used to be dungeons.  Unbelievable.  It totally took my breath away.  Sadly, the church that we had gone there to see paled in comparison in my mind.  Not to sound sacrilegious, or disrespectful, I was just so completely overwhelmed by the AGE of this castle!!!  I have never seen anything like it and could not have imagined it.  That is pretty old even by standards over here, which are much different from ours.

Let me see… what else?  Our friends RJ and Mari, who are stationed in Greece, with whom we were going to go to Austria or Switzerland over Thanksgiving, aren’t able to travel that weekend.  So we debated what we were going to do that weekend and decided to have our own little Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, then road trip Friday-Sunday.  We plan to go to Verona and to someplace called Lake Garda, which I don’t know anything about yet but is supposed to be beautiful.  We are looking forward to our weekend.

I can’t think of much else to tell right now.  Oh yeah, I need to mention that we are having really long waits to get our pictures on disk, so be patient with us!  We are frustrated because we come home from our trips all excited to share what we’ve seen, but then by the time we have our pictures on disk, a couple of weeks later, the urgency has worn off and we have to “make” time to put them on the website and explain them.  Sorry!  Pics from our day trip to Venice should be up within a few days, but it may be a couple weeks till we have the ones from Vieste posted.

I guess I will go now and get the site ready to upload since it’s been so long.  I hope that you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!!  We are so thankful for all of you.  Hug each other for us, and we will say (another) prayer thanking God for the gift of you.

With all my love,

Shelly