We are celebrating Janet’s birthday today! 

Interesting Italian facts:

Average Italian makes about $1000 euro a month. Car insurance is based on the size of the engine. Smaller the income; smaller the car due to necessity. A lot of small cars here like the smart car and even some one person cars. Parking is done completely willy nilly. Frontward. Backwards. Sideways. Whatever way it makes the car fit. 😊

Enroute to Innsbruck via Verona today. The road is so windy it made my headphones keep falling out of my ears. 

Italian saying: you must love the woman, the wine and the singing or else you will never become a saint. 

On our stop in Verona, we visited the balcony of the famous Romeo and Juliet scene. The characters names may be fictional but there really was a Capulet and Montague feud where two children fell in love. The kids got their picture taken with the statue of Juliet and had to touch her booby. Legend has it if they do that they would have good luck for the rest of our lives. An eye opening experience for all of us was when we were being good true Canadians and patiently waiting our turn to touch the statue. We were swarmed and stampeded by an Asian tour group of older adults. We were next in line and all of the sudden found ourselves five deep in a crowd where we were at the end. I tried to be aggressive and have Noah just go up so I could take his picture. I kept getting told no and had my arm slapped many times by an ancient lady. Wow. Those people really wanted to feel up that statue!  We just kept waiting and eventually our kids got up there. 😊

For lunch, our tour guide took the adults in our YG  group to an Italian restaurant where we had a nice glass of wine and a delicious dish of risotto made with the same wine. OMG! So good!!!  We then were allowed to tour the wine cellar in the bottom of the restaurant by special request of Daniel (our tour guide). There were 20000 bottles of wine there and many bottles of cognac and others. They had a bottle of cognac that was worth $50000 euros. We decided to leave it for our next trip. The wine list for the restaurant was huge. Literally. It was a book about 2 or 3 inches thick and the dimensions were probably about 1 foot by 2 feet. 

Austria!

Language:

Groosegot: hello in Austrian 

Bruck : bridge 

Danka -thank you 

We have arrived to amazing Austrian our rooms are spacious, modern, plentiful with hot water and beautiful scenery. The view from our rooms is incredible of the Alps. This hotel is very modern. We will have an early day tomorrow to see the castle enroute to Munich. Later. 

Look at our view from the hotel room.