The itinerary

Departure Friday November 12, Delta Flight 44 CVG to CDG arriving in Paris at 6:30am Saturday the 13th. 

Leave Paris at 8:30pm on the overnight train to Venice, arriving at 9:30 in the morning on Sunday the 14th, staying at Ca Guardi in the Santa Croce area of Venice.

After two days in Venice we take the train to Rome on Tuesday the 16th.  We are staying in what we are told is a less touristy area called Testaccio at a two bedroom apartment that is about a fifteen-minute walk to the Colosseum and other major attractions in Rome.

We stay in Rome until Thursday the 18th, when we rent a car and head for Tuscany, staying in a classic Etruscan hill town of San Gimignano, from which we will take day trips of an hour or hour and a half to Florence and Lucca and Pisa, stopping on the way in Siena.  We are staying in the heart of San Gimignano which is an ancient walled city dating back to the 12th century.   After a couple of days exploring Tuscany, we head north on Sunday the 21st by taking a train from Milan to Zurich, staying there with our friend Luzia who we met when she was an exchange student in Madeira.  We will enjoy her hospitality for two days, then take a train early on the morning of the 23rd getting to Paris around 11:30 in the morning.  That night, we are taking Ben and Marley to their first ever concert, seeing The National, a band with Cincinnati roots at Olympia Music Hall in Paris. We will explore the city of light until we head back home on Saturday the 27th.  We hope to be able to blog from the road and add pictures as we go.  Bon Voyage!