Some additional notes

Nora did a pretty good job of describing our European vacation, but I thought I’d add a few extra notes as well.

- The best way to travel with children is to travel with other people’s children (and their parents) as well. You not only score some friends for yourself, you also have friends for your kids – who will keep them occupied and happy by playing either competitive or collaborative fantasy games. Or just soccer, if you’re Nathan.

- Hearts is a wonderful game. Especially when played with good friends.

- Venice: better than I expected. I’m not really a city gal, but Venice is beautiful and also interesting. Loved the Grand Canal, in particular the UPS and FedEx boats, and the trash boats. Not as enamored of the endless tchotchke shops.

- We stayed in a lovely old / renovated villa in Stra, a city about an hour by smelly bus outside Venice. The villa was large and recently renovated, with a luxurious foam-mattress bed in the master BR. The downside: its recent renovation was somewhat underpowered/unfinished, shall we say. Ants, blown fuses, a crabby dishwasher. Even the clothes dryer, which made Jon so happy upon first seeing it (a clothes dryer in Europe!) didn’t function. With all the decrepitude, it was like vacationing in our own home.

- As Nora noted, the girls in the party slept together on a four-poster, canopied bed. Nathan made himself a little nest on the floor nearby, and happily passed the week sleeping on a 2-inch foam mattress. Like father like son. Poor Seth was relegated back to a crib (it was the remaining bed in the place) and promptly protested by waking before 7 every day of the trip.

- We traveled up to Asolo, where Jon and I honeymooned a decade ago. Nora made us proud by reading aloud the Hebrew tablets embedded in the exterior of the main square -- a memorial to a small community of Jews that lived there in the sixteenth century.

- After 25 years of searching, I finally found a cathedral to my liking: Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The exterior is a mish-mash of styles, though to be hideous by many architects but IMHO, brilliantly brings together a thousand years of Cathedral-building culture. The inside is very simple and geometric. Think the palace from the Wizard of Oz. For a shot of its awesome ceiling, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sagrada_Familia_nave_roof_detail.jpg

Finally, a note on lodging for a “familia numerosa” while on European vacations. With three kids, most hotels won’t let you stay in one room; Residence Inn-type facilities, which often have 2-bedroom suites, are also not common and if found, will cost you all your Marriott points and then some. So we’ve taken to going the vacation-rental-by-owner route. Here’s my observation:

-- Best case: a vacation home owned by the almost-wealthy and advertised on VRBO or homeaway.com. Because the owners themselves stay in it, it’ll be renovated nicely, the beds will be comfortable, and the kitchen will be well-equipped.

-- Worst case: Friendly Rentals, which owns apartments all over Europe. Two strikes and they’re out—the first time a moldy apartment in Lisbon, this time a slightly more acceptable but still downtrodden apartment in Barcelona. Think badly installed fake wood floors, gently coated in grime. The entire apartments in both Lisbon and Barcelona were furnished by IKEA, including in both places a bed named “Hanestad” which is Swedish for “even harder than granite.”

Onward to pruning my neglected in-box. Sorry if you’ve got something stuck in there--I'll get back to you soon.