Vacation 2009 part 2

by Amy ~ June 28, 2009

After 5 days in Slovenia, we headed west towards France, where we would spend the remainder of our vacation. We always seem to visit Europe during heat waves and this year was no exception. We’ve become ‘soft’ after living in Seattle’s cool weather so 100 degrees was boiling for us!

We wanted to spend the bulk of our time in France so we planned to drive the entire first day in Italy (a very long drive!). On the highway outside of Venice I recognized the logo/name of my favorite wine – an extremely small vineyard, that produced a wine we often bought when we lived in VA. We stopped at the offices and once we found someone who understood English we tried to explain that we were trying to find out where to buy their wine in Washington state. Unfortunately for now, they don’t have a distributor here but hopefully we can buy their wine again in the future! They gave us a bottle of our favorite wine as a gift for stopping in!

We continued to a hill town in Italy called Apricale. It’s incredibly beautiful in this area and we hope to spend more time in this region some day. Next, we headed to France. We drove the beautiful coast and visited several seaside towns before heading to Monaco. I wasn’t all that excited about seeing the huge boats/fancy cars when Z told me about Monaco, but I’m glad we went. It is incredible! Think Vegas grandeur but not fake.

We met up with our friends from Seattle who were also in the south of France on Vacation one day and headed north to Provence the following day. We spent most of our days driving through wine country and the agricultural regions of France, and stopping to explore the little hill towns in France. I have never seen as many cherries as we did when we drove through the cherry orchards in France!

We also headed to Lyon to meet up with Lucija and Erwin in their new home city. We had a great time touring the city with Lucija on the Velo’v bike rentals. It’s such a cool program and a great way to enjoy the city.

We spent our last day driving from Lyon to Zurich where we spent our last night.

It was a great trip and we saw a lot but covering over 2000 miles in 2 weeks is a little much and I don’t know that I would recommend that for everyone!

View our photos from Part 1 of Vacation 2009.