Verona With Grandma

Before we left Dinan, we decided to have a car rental in place for when we arrived in Menton in case we wanted to go on some adventures with Grandma King before she left. She was doing great after our big travel day and so we went ahead and picked up the car on Friday, April 25th.

Usually we just get a crossover type car that is compact and fits 7 people, but when we went outside to the car lot, we found this big van waiting for us. We had won the upgrade lottery, but unfortunately parking isn't an easy thing with a small car and so we were nervous how we were going to park this thing! We contemplated going back in and switching it to what we had requested, but the Nice Airport was very busy and so we decided just to take it back to Menton. It was pretty frustrating for Jeff (our resident driver) to get used to and it took awhile to find a parking space by our apartment. Once we left Saturday morning, all the passengers in the back were so happy to have some space in the larger vehicle.

We were so excited when we learned that one of our favorite Italian cities, Verona, was just under a four hour drive and so we jumped at the chance to show it Grandma. We also decided to make a weekend of it and planned to head to Venice on Sunday. We are right at the border of France and Italy and so we passed this sign early on and I had to take a picture of it. We drove through so many tunnels like this on the drive that we lost count. The GPS was a little frustrating, but it finally worked and we arrived in the beautiful city of Verona, Italy.

When we visited Europe in June of 2011, we were lucky to spend 4 days in Verona before heading to Venice to hop on our Adriatic Sea Cruise. 

It wasn't as busy then as it was this time we visited. We headed to the Arena first. Last time we were able to take a tour of the inside, but this time it was looking like it was going to rain soon and so we passed on it. 

Is still was fun to walk around the outside.

We then walked around the beautiful streets trying to avoid some of the crowds.

Here is the Casa di Guilietta. Letter to Juliet is one of my favorite movies. I made sure my mom watched it before we went :)

Then the rain came:

It started to pour hard like a Georgia rain! So we took advantage of a local gelato store and enjoyed our gelato while waiting for the storm to stop.

The storm didn't cooperate to well and so we ended up heading back to the car.

I would have loved to have more time in Verona, but we were tired and so we left for our hotel that was in a little town just south of Verona.

Speaking of the hotel, it had the coolest furniture. All of it was distressed and had Italian words written all over.