I know i haven’t posted much in the last little while, life’s been busy but whatever today the family is going to Orlando!  We’re going to take Brandon to Disneyworld and it’s going to be fun.  Will post some pictures later. 🙂

As promised here are some videos that I took while we were in Italy, they were taken with the Canon 70D, my 24-105 f4L lens & Rode shotgun microphone.

I’m glad Brandon can be happy anywhere…  The Gondola ride was 80 Euros for 30 minutes (was more like 20 minutes though) but it was totally worth it!

Let me start by saying that Italy is an absolutely beautiful country, in fact I enjoyed being there so much I told Maggie that I would consider retiring there in the future.  In a way it’s a shame that Brandon is so young and doesn’t understand the significance of where he was because the history is simply amazing.  I won’t dwell on American Airlines losing our luggage as I covered that previously but we started our trip in Rome and spent two days walking around.

The city is an amazing mix of history and the modern world all combined into one, one second you’re walking on concrete and the next you’re on cobble stone.  Some buildings are brand new, others have been standing for thousands of years and while I’m not religious the amount of ancient churches and the quality of the workmanship was amazing. 🙂  It was hot, much hotter than Toronto and with only the clothes on our backs I endured the summer heat with a long sleeve shirt and long pants, both are designed for the heat but still it was very uncomfortable at times.  At the end of the second day you could see the salt stains on my shirt, luckily we started to buy clothes to wear.

Yeah sorry for the large amount of photos, if you know me I like to take pictures…  As you can see we hit all the touristy areas, Maggie did some shopping and Brandon and I played Pokemon Go. 😉  I thoroughly enjoyed all the sights except… for Vatican City.  I don’t know what it was but the grandeur & opulence of it all made me sick, Jesus talked about helping the poor and getting rid of all one’s worldly possessions but Vatican City seemed to be counter to that.  I guess it’s not Jesus’ fault (and I don’t believe anyway), people are imperfect and Christian leaders over the generations have all perverted his supposed teachings.

The Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit was very cool and lol maybe exposing Brandon to one of the greatest minds in history will increase his interests in science. 😉 The rest, well it was great and we all had a wonderful time walking around the city and learning about Roman history.

The next city we hit was Pisa, lol all tourists have to see the leaning tower right.

Pisa is very much a resort town and while the leaning tower was cool, meh it didn’t seem so special when I got up close.  Everyone was doing the stupid holding up the tower pose and I forbade Brandon from doing it because it’s retarded, yes I’m a spoil sport.  What I did like was the narrow streets, that really gave me the city an old time history feel and it was nice to duck into those tiny shops to see the things for sale instead of the commercial shopping area that well feels like every other commercial shopping area in the world.

We didn’t stay in Pisa long there were a few other attractions around but I wasn’t that interested, instead I wanted Maggie to go to Milan to do some shopping so yeah we did that. 😉

Milan is known for its fashion and I figure Maggie would enjoy it, the city itself is also beautiful with its grand central rail station.  We took trains to the various cities because it’s more efficient than flying and Italy (like the rest of Europe) has a well developed mass transportation system.

On the train we had some beggars that leave notes for you, lol just like we do in TO I guess they’re everywhere.  Nothing much to report on in Milan, it’s a cool place but we went there for Maggie and she had a lot of fun shopping. 🙂

We spent a day in Florence, at this time we weren’t sure if we’d get our luggage back and Maggie’s $1k Gucci purse was in the packed luggage so we walked around so she could get another.  Funny this place known as “The Mall” is outdoors and it’s full of Chinese people from China, there are so many Chinese here that they even had signs, menus & product desciptions written in Chinese.

After Florence we went to my favorite city of the trip, Venice.

Venice is beautiful, instead of cars everyone has boats and the small winding pathways in the city are for pedestrian traffic only.  This was the one place I wish we stayed longer and again it’s a place I could see myself living in, I mean just look at those pictures it’s amazing!  We did a gondola ride where I took some video, I’ll upload it later and post it here and it was super relaxing.  I probably should have sat next to Maggie but Brandon wanted that spot and I couldn’t say no, we walked around took the boat bus then had some Chinese food, Maggie wanted to try it and it was pretty good, though very expensive at ~$50 Euros for the 3 of us (dining out is very expensive but it’s a vacation right).

There was this other shopping destination that Maggie wanted to go to in Florence so we went back there the next day then back to Rome…

Heh my Mini Cooper would be a mid sized car in Italy, there were some really neat vehicles and pictured is a one seater.  Super small and easy to park but I guess whomever drives that is single and doesn’t carry anything.  The pasta in Italy was as you can imagine superb, I love Italian food and gained about 5 lbs despite walking at least 15k steps a day (one day we did 26k).

The bookends to my trip were a disaster but the vacation itself was amazing.  I’ll be frank, I wasn’t looking forward to the trip because I knew it’d cost an arm & a leg but Maggie pushed for it and did an excellent job with planning, she was the star of the show.  I’d go back in a heartbeat but there are so many other places that we need to travel to as well and whether this was a once in a lifetime trip we’ll see but I thoroughly enjoyed myself and will have great memories the rest of my life. 🙂

We arrived home safe and sound last night around 12am and man even the trip back was an adventure.  So American Airlines got to screw us twice, they found our luggage after 7 days and when they let us know we were at the tail end of our trip, city hopping in Italy so we said we’d pick it up from the Rome airport.

Tuesday we leave the hotel 3 hours early and it freaking takes an hour to get our lost luggage!!! I don’t know what the delay was (this is with the AA staff at the airport) but I just waited and waited at the security area.  After I rush to Terminal 5 and check in is closed.

We ask the customer service lady what’s going on and she’s says check in closes 45 minutes before the flight takes off, what 45 minutes I look at my watch and there’s still an hour!  I tell her that we’re before the cut off time, she shrugs her shoulders makes a call then says she can’t reach anyone.

Thank you American Airlines for losing my luggage on the way to Italy and with this retarded system of closing even before the “known” check in time.

Anyway as you can guess we missed our flight and took one yesterday that routed us to Chicago, then to Buffalo NY because all connecting flights to Toronto were full.  I rented a car from Avis drove home and it was nice to sleep in our beds again.

The book ends of our trip were terrible but the vacation itself was great.  I got a ton of pictures to edit and will have more American Airlines updates later when I submit my expenses to them for reimbursement (they said they’d cover the cost of our day to day necessities while we were there and we only had the clothes on our backs).

So we flew American Airlines to Rome and while the service and plane was great they… lost my luggage.  Technically for some reason it took a detour to London and should be on it way here.  Pretty passed about it as we don’t have changer of clothes with us so we ended up buying some new clothes.

Rome is absolutely beautiful, I love the city and history behind it.  Here are some unedited pics I pulled off the Canon 70D.

Low resolution photos I pulled off the Canon 70Ds WiFi feature.  Unedited but still illustrates how beautiful the city is.  Will call the airlines tomorrow to find out what the hell is going on.

Tonight is the last night together as a family as Maggie and Brandon are going to China tomorrow. 🙁  I would like to go too but I just don’t want to spend the money (I prefer to spend that money elsewhere) so it’s bachelor life for me for the next 3 weeks.  LOL it’s during times like this that I can’t stop thinking about plane crashes, I guess if I were religious I’d pray to god but that’s just delusional right.

Let’s hope the time travels quickly and we’re reunited soon.

Ugh so tired…  This morning Maggie and I landed in TO around 4AM and yeah we’re pretty tired.  Uh I guess the update from day 3 & 4 is that we went to see the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, saw Cirque de Soleil  Mystere (wanted to go to O but couldn’t get tickets) then more shopping and then we came home. 🙂  I’m kind of tired so I’ll let the pictures do the talking…

DAY 1

DAY 2

DAY 3

On Sunday which was the last day (#4) Maggie and I were in Las Vegas, I didn’t take any pictures as all we did was shop at the Fashion Show Mall.  We left there early afternoon to go to the airport, Maggie was shopped out and both of our feet hurt so we got to the airport around 2PM and just chilled there.  Unfortunately our flight was delayed over an hour but meh that’s how things go sometimes.

A totally excellent trip and one that you can see was very fun, sigh while I’m glad to be back at home with Brandon I will definitely miss Las Vegas and would go there again in the future.