Home! (a long overdue recap)

The last time we chatted, I think we were still somewhere out in the middle of the Mediterranean Ocean.  Well, a lot has changed.  We spent a day in Naples and took a short boat ride up the Amalfi Coast to a cute little town of Sorrento.  When we returned to the ship, the girls' missing suitcase was waiting for us in our room.  Great news!  Too bad it was the last day of the cruise.

The next day, we said goodbye to our ship and loaded our family of six and all of our luggage into a taxi and headed to Rome.   It was hot but it was fabulous and Rome is now one of my top ten cities in the entire world!  All of the history and the wine and wonderful food!  Ah!  Molto bene!

I'm afraid it will be pretty much impossible to catch you all up on everything we did in Rome since my husband's previous posts have set the bar much too high.   Instead, I offer you photos.  Each of the thumbnails below represents a "set" of photos on flickr.  Just click any of them and you can see as much as you like! 

I can't even pretend to guess of how many photos we took during this trip.  The number, I'm sure, is insane and even though we deleted most of them for one reason or another, there were still hundreds that were valuable to us on some level.  And a few of those were actually pretty darn good!  While Andrew researched and wrote the text for the blog, I post-processed each photo in Lightroom and/or Photoshop.  I didn't do any heavy editing because I really didn't have time so most of what you see is pure and true (and imperfect).  All I did was some minor exposure corrections and crop/straighten.  That's it.  

Here are a few of my favorite photos from this trip (in random order). 

This was the sunrise from the ship on our first morning at sea.

This was taken in Rhodes. Anyone who knows Gwenny knows how much she LOVES swords. This store had hundreds of them. I think it was her favorite part of the entire vacation!

Here's beautiful little Maddy in Santorini. She sat on this whitewashed wall/bench and leaned on one arm and looked out at the ocean and the light was so incredibly pretty on her face. I love this photo even though she looks much more mature than five years old! I think I can look at this and see a glimpse of how lovely she'll be as a woman.

This was taken inside Saint Peter's Cathedral in Rome. I love the way the light is streaming through the window and the dark rich colors of the interior. See the lettering on the wall? Each letter is six feet tall!. Another absolutely amazing photo from St Peter's was this one.

Here's one from Tivoli. Almost all of our best photos were taken with our Canon 5D and our fancy new Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L lens but I took this one with my trusty point-and-shoot (Canon S90) and it's one of my favorites.

Gwenny climbed up in this window and got comfy and looked so beautiful! She's wearing the yellow plastic bracelet that all children on the cruise must wear 24/7. I wish it came in some color other than yellow! This photo was taken in Mykonos and we had so many awesome photos from Mykonos. Another fav was this one of Kelsey and the girls.

We got home on Saturday afternoon and getting over the jet lag has been challenging even though we're veterans of this kind of stuff.  The girls insist on sharing a room now so they wake each other up and that wakes us up then it's impossible to get back to sleep.  Many of our days have started at 1:30 or 2:00 AM!  But it's getting better.

I've missed all of my blogger friends and there's no way I can catch up on my Google Reader list so I'm going to mark everything as "read" and start from scratch.  If I missed any major life events, please tell me!  Especially if they're good life events!  ;)