our adventure begins ...

If you don't want to read all the "DRAMA" leading up to this vacation, you are more than welcome to skip this entire post ... I promise I wont be offended  :)

First things first ... our little man's passport.  November 8, 2011 (a week after his birth) we took a trip from the comfort of our home and headed on post to apply for all the important documents we needed (birth certificate, born abroad certificate, no-fee and tourist passport).  We had to apply for all this in order to get his social security card which of course one needs to fill out taxes (due in April BTW).

I called at week 8 ... still no passport.
I called at week 9 ... still no passport.
I called at week 10 ... still no passport.
I skipped week 11                                             Yes, I was a bit embarrassed to be calling so much.

Other business took me to the same office on post at week 12, so I decided to check in person.  Guess what?  They hadn't even turned in our packet, so none of the 6-8 weeks things were getting processed.   Awesome!
One concern - we were planning a family vacation in 2 weeks ... not 6-8 weeks.
They applied for an emergency passport (free of charge of couse) and we got it the day before we were planning to leave.  They had to physically drive it out to Frankfurt and physically drive it back.  (We are so grateful they were willing to do that).  Miles and I then spent the entire evening the day before our trip trying to book our hotels since we didn't want to chance anything.  It was a very LATE night.  In some cities there were no hotels so we had to 'reverse' our trip - putting the last city first and the first city last.

But the adventure continues ...
We got a late start since we stayed up so late the night before and we were too tired to pack.  Our GPS said our route had traffic and was going to re-route us a different way.  Sure, why not.  Our new route also had traffic - stand-still traffic for 2 hours!!  I swear, all of Germany was trying to get over the Alps into Austria or something.  Finally, we turned around and tried to go over the Alps another way ... we got all the way down and up the mountain again to find out that the 2nd road was closed due to snow.  Another 2 hour adventure.  Finally we stopped at McDonalds, fed the kids, turned the GPS off, used the iPhone and headed to the autobahn to face whatever traffic there was just to get over the Alps.  Our 6.5 hour trip took us 15 hours.  FIFTEEN HOURS!!!  Oh, and my baby was at the beginning stages of a nasty virus.  He was sick the entire vacation.

At least the view was AMAZING!

Since we got into Vicenza, Italy too late to run our errands Saturday evening we had to do it all Sunday morning.  By the time we got to Florence we barely made the

Galleria dell'Accademia

in order to see Michelangelo's David.  They sell their last tickets 1/2 hour before closing time and we were one of the last people they let in.  Unfortunately we weren't able to see the 

Uffizi Gallery

which seriously made me sad!  The Museums are all closed on Monday's so the second day we were there we couldn't hit up any of them.  The kids didn't mind much about missing the museums, they got to ride on the carousel outside our hotel and were thrilled.