Sevierville, Tennessee

We have checked into our last hotel in TN the Wyndham Smoky Mountains Resort, and it's fantastic!!   

The weather toady was great (especially for the end of November!), short sleeves...

We got a 1 bedroom with a full kitchen, washer and dryer and ...

Free internet!!  Yahoooo!

We will be here until Saturday, and have several appointments this week to see more property and designers...wish us luck!

In Search Of The Perfect Lot

We spent last week trying to find our dream property, going from lot to lot...

Here's Stu mingling with the locals...like he does.

This is just one of the many properties that we have looked at.

Pretty flat considering this property backs up to the Smoky Mtn State Park.

And on a dead end road.

Along the border of this property there is a beautiful waterfall and little creek.

We've had a challenging but fun week with getting used to the time change and some car trouble (the bus sprang a leak in the transmission cooler) and not having internet in our room for a week!  But overall, we are really liking this area and as I've said, we have met some really wonderful people!

We have one more week left here in East Tennessee, we'll see what next week brings...hopefully our next hotel has internet!!

Getting out and about...

We have been pretty busy with property viewing and meeting with some wonderful people, but we have had some time to get out...

We found an apple orchard down the road from our hotel that had a bunch of local products for sale including about 15 different varieties of apples!

This place has a bunch of carved wood art outside, beautiful and fun!! 

While we were at the apple orchard we met Molly, who invited us to join her and her husband Ronnie on Thanksgiving day.  They are from Georgia and were camping right down the road from us.  We couldn't have asked for a better evening!  What lovely people and great company!

We sat outside, enjoyed an ingenious campfire that was built in an 18-wheeler split rim and had a lively conversation until the snowflakes broke up the party!!

Happy Birthday!

Today is my Mom's birthday!!  Have a great day!

Welcome to Tennessee!

We made it!  It was a long trip from Norfolk, with a slight (2 hour) detour...  But the detour took us right over the Smoky Mountains...beautiful views, unfortunately it was too dark to take any pictures.

I picked up the car ("The Bus") Friday morning with no problems and she made the trip here just fine.

I was able to snap a couple of shots of the local wildlife before it got too dark...Elk we think.

This is the creek right outside our "hotel", beautiful!

Its still a little early to say that TN has more to offer than the other 49 states but it's sure great to be back in the land of plenty! We'll keep you all posted as the pounds get added on......Ya'll (we are working on the Southern lingo).

We have arrived!!

All things considered we did pretty well...made all the connections and arrived in Norfolk on time.  We left our house at 4:30 this morning and right now it's 4:00 Thursday morning at home....EEEEkkkkkk!  You have to wonder why we do this to ourselves! 

I just checked on my car and the website is listing it as being still in Baltimore....We are supposed to be leaving here on Saturday morning...not much wiggle room.  Let's see what tomorrow brings! 

Let the games begin...

We leave early tomorrow morning from Naples to start our State side adventure...Everyone please say a couple of prayers to the luggage Gods for us!!!!  We aren't going through Milan so maybe there is hope!!

Happy Birthday!!

Happy Birthday Dad!  Hope you have a great day!

Florence, Day 3

Our last day in Florence go off to a nice leisurely start...

Taking a break on the steps of the Duomo.

And now it's gelato time!

We wandered into the Piazza Santa Croce and watched this puppeteer, how fun!

Beautiful old buildings, they don't make them like this any more.  So sad.

The magnificent Gothic church of Santa Croce (1294) contains the tombs of many famous Florentines, including Michelangelo and Galileo.

Gianni tending the flock...

Inside the Santa Croce church...

This statue is said to be one of the inspirations for our "Statue of Liberty".

A little bit of history – the Florentine artists were such masters of perspective, which made them excellent navigators and mapmakers. Florentine cartographers based their maps on the observations and navigational records of early explorers. That is how America came to be named after the Florentine Americo Vespucci rather then Christopher Columbus. When Columbus returned from his transatlantic voyage, King Ferdinand of Spain hires Vespucci, an expert navigator check whether Columbus really had discovered a new route to the Indies. Vespucci was the first to realize that Columbus had discovered a new continent and he described his own voyage in a series of letter to Piero de’ Medici. As soon as the letter were make public, Florentine cartographers rushed out and revised maps of the world based on Vesupcci’s account. Out of loyalty to a fellow Florentine, they named the New World Amerigo, which was later corrupted to America.

A statue called "The Portal" a circle described by the leap of figures in the process of entering and going out of the portal of existence. The plunge involves five moves. We can see the eternity of the vital leap, of the bodies that come out of the earth or water and take a leap before going back into them.

A view of the Cappella de' Pazzi - the Pazzi family chapel.

Before we jumped on the train back to Naples we stopped for a late lunch, as usual the food was great!!  But the company was even better, and the waiter was nice enough to give us a big bag of wine corks to add to our collection.

We figured a couple of these for vino in the kitchen...wouldn't that be nice!!

Ciao Firenze!!