Packed it up and moved from beautiful Switzerland to our goal, Reggio Emilia but not without some minor glitches!
We headed out at 6 AM in the rain but the expression no rain no rainbows was fitting as we saw both ends of this beautiful rainbow with one side ending in the lake. We can use these pictures with our kids at school....see we are always workin' it!
We chose the scenic route over the Gotthard pass which Rick and I had done last summer and I knew I wanted to do again. Snow in the mountains and scenery beyond description everywhere you looked.
From there to Bellinzona where we took a quick tour of Castelgrande and tried to get lunch but everything is closed on Sunday. Food was going to come from an Autohof....not necessarily a bad thing as they have near gourmet food. Carly got her pizza so she was happy!
On to Lugano where we decided to just have Limone gelato instead of real food.....ahhh to travel with the youthful!
From there we headed on to Reggio with minimal turn arounds. We have constantly been challenged with directions in foreign languages. Our little car, a Lancia Musa (her mother was a minivan) was stressed out, flashing Italian words at us, engine light on and some little measly warning triangle. Being the preschool teachers we are, no one knows better than we how to completely ignore annoying whiny messages, especially in Italian! We rubber her dashboard, told her it only felt like 36C outside and just to stick with us for a bit.
She brought us all the way, she will be rewarded in Musa heaven!
To shorten the long story of our arrival, the hotel was pretty seedy so that was a no go. We had arrived late so Carly and Liz dash over to the Loris Malaguzzi center to get us registered and let them know we were really here. It was a long walk and hot, hot, hot. I began to call other hotels, dealt with the bitchy lady, unhappy that we were leaving and moved my stuff.
We had to skip the talk with the mayor of Reggio to move the rest of our things but did make it back to the Piazza Prampolini Sala Tricolore in time for snacks and the walking tour of Reggio.
At 9 PM when the walking tour ended, the taxi driver that had taken us at 7 magically showed up where we were to bring us back to our air conditioned rooms! Yippee....snacking and going to bed. We have our first day of seminars tomorrow. It looks like they have many fun and interesting things planned and that we will be busy. We are looking at train schedules to see where else in Italia we can hang this weekend.
Phew, I am going to need to sleep for a week when I get home!
Ciao for now!
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