Turn that frown upside down

This post is brought to you today by the word SMILE, lol-I crack myself up-too much Sesame Street I suppose...

We did eventually make it over to Pisa. It was a bit of a drive from our home in Pordenone. If memory serves it was a 5 or 6 hour drive? We left our house at 0'dark early and arrived at around 10AM. We were of course hungry, but there is no food served in Italy until 12:30PM therefore we stopped at Camp Darby, an Army Post, and grabbed a quick bite at the Burger King.

When we arrived at Pisa I was very disappointed. The whole thing is a courtyard with the tower and a church and I think there is another building? We did not have a reservation to climb to the top of the tower and it was very expensive if memory serves. For some reason we didn't climb to the top. We walked around, went in all the buildings and an hour later we were looking at each other like, what now?

I had noticed on our way to Pisa that we had driven past the city of Vinci. I looked it up in my travel book and it was the Vinci - as in Leonardo di Vinci (Leonardo from Vinci). It was on our way home, if you think getting off the main road and driving on tiny back streets for a hundred miles is on the way. (that is a really rough and most likely exaggerated estimate). Mandy and I were able to convince Jeff to take the detour. We arrived in Vinci at about 5PM. By this time we had been on the road for a very long time, Jeff was not in the mood to do a lot of museums. I love museums and Vinci has tons of museums all about our dear Leonardo. Jeff made me pick one.

I picked the closest museum and we entered. It was like a house the had been turned into a museum. There was an entry way and then you traveled from room to room. This was the most wonderful and fabulous museum in the entire world. You really have to go. Leonardo kept a sketch pad of ideas. He would think of an invention and then draw out a sketch, he would include dimensions and mechanical jargon. Most of these inventions never made it past his sketch pad. The people of Vinci had taken these sketches and built the actual item from the sketch. The actual sketches are housed in Paris, but copies of the sketch are framed on the wall next to an actual rendering of the object. They also show the year Leonardo made the sketch and then the year that object was actually invented. You see he invented all kinds of things hundreds of years before those things were invented by someone else. I always wonder if the second person who saw his sketches or if it was a coincidence? Some of these items include the bicycle, the helicopter, the machine gun, the hand glider, that is all that comes to my mind. It was so much fun to see all these things.

We also bought a print of one of Leonardo's sketches for only a couple of dollars. It says on the bottom of the sketch that it was printed in Vinci, Italy. So cool. I had it framed and it is one of my most treasured pieces.

By this time we were very hungry, it was around 6PM no restaurants serve food at 6PM in Italy. So we stopped and ate dinner on the way home at a rest stop along the Autostrata, an Auto Grill. It was pretty good.

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I have been tagged for a ton of Memes and I have been so very bad at keeping up. So sorry, I feel like an ingrate. I am going to try and put a meme at the bottom of every post until I catch back up.

This first one is an award given to me by the Nap Warden. This is the makes me smile award. Thank you very much. Be sure to check out her blog, Chronicles of a Stay at Home Mom. Her blog is smart, funny and very upbeat. I am passing this award along to some of my blogging buddies who have left comments that made me smile this week.


meno, I loved your yellow lab comment.
mamadaisy, I loved that you felt about the Colosseum the same way I felt about some of the places I have been-feeling history.
marion, sitting on the stones that told the stories of the ages, I love that you put into words what I was thinking.
luckzmom, I too have been moved to tears by the history of a place, glad to have a kindered spirit.
lorelei, you totally made me smile with your comment about a good meal, "The only thing I can make is reservations."