Archive | video

Ravello, caught between earth and sky

August 13, 2012 at 7:58 pm

Our second morning on the Amalfi Coast dawned so crisp, clear, and beautiful that we almost didn’t mind our daughter rousing us at 7am. Just look at the view from our apartment! (If you’d ever like to stay there yourself, here’s the listing.)

Elliott took this video of the scene as well as his two lovely ladies:

We couldn’t wait to see the town so we set off on a short walk to shop for some fruit. Lena enjoyed a fresh apricot (she’ll eat five a day) on the steps of the church in the middle of town.

Later that morning we all walked back down to the beach below our apartment for surf and sunshine:

The individual lidos are demarcated by the different colored umbrellas. If you choose to go to a lido, you will pay between 3-5 euro for a day’s use of an umbrella and a couple of lounge chairs. As always, we chose to pay nothing and laid our towels down wherever we could find space.

photos by Jess Garber

Check it out, Lena is actually looking at the camera and smiling!

Twice! Sorta.

Finally, after Lena’s afternoon nap, we hopped into our car and drove about 20 minutes up into the hills to visit the magnificent town of Ravello. To my surprise, Ravello was my favorite of all the Amalfi Coast towns we visited, although it’s far from the coast. The beauty of the mellowed-by-time buildings, the peace in the many blooming gardens, the spectacular views down green hills to the coastline, the clinks of cutlery on crystal in the piazza-side cafes, the bursts of color from pottery shops, and the overall understated charm of the whole town completely drew me in.

Lena is wearing an outfit I wore when I was a baby. Jess is, as usual, wearing an outfit I wish I could wear today. (We’re definitely enjoying each other’s clothes as long as she’s visiting!)

The magnificent Villa Rufolo, which I imagine Mark Ruffalo lives in between filming movies.

Old vineyard just outside the center of town.

Quiet garden where a father and son were painting together.

A cinquecento (or “500,” named for its 500 cc engine), the quintessential Italian car.

I took the video below of Lena climbing steps in Ravello. I love how she grunts after each step. Such an effort for little legs!

We returned to the town of Amalfi and almost had a heart attack when fireworks started exploding right outside our window. Later we learned they were to celebrate the festival of Our Lady of the Snows. Italians, who love all festivals and any excuse to shoot off fireworks, were commemorating a legend from 4th century Rome in which snow fell in August. A parade of boats streamed from town to town along the coast and each town obliging shot off fireworks late into the night.

photo by Jess Garber

Elliott and I put Lena to bed and left Jess in charge, and then dressed up a little and headed into town on a date! We’d both been craving a meal of fine seafood, and Elliott had researched for an hour earlier that day to determine an appropriate restaurant. He settled upon Ristorante Marina Grande, an establishment that prides itself upon upholding sustainable fishing practices and serving locally caught seafood and locally grown food. It was a perfect choice.

I love their bread bags instead of baskets… and the beautiful drawing of the town of Amalfi on the front of their menus. We could find our apartment in the drawing!

Elliott perused a wine menu that was almost as big as he was. To begin, we chose the tasting of seven appetizers, which included seven vastly different types of seafood. For a main course I chose the homemade rosemary gnocchi with prawns and oranges (there were a lot of flavors goin’ on in that one… almost too much for a pregnant woman to handle) and Elliott chose a dish bursting with seafood: linguine twisted around shrimp, calamari, and several kinds of shellfish.

That was our last day on the Amalfi Coast, at least on this trip. We must come back! We drove down the coast the next day and enjoyed our first stay at an agriturismo that night. Tomorrow I’ll have some photos of Lena with pigs and horses and kittens (oh my!).

4 :: in Amalfi Coast, eat this, travel, video

Ravello, caught between earth and sky

August 13, 2012 at 6:58 pm

Elliott took this video of the scene as well as his two lovely ladies:

We couldn’t wait to see the town so we set off on a short walk to shop for some fruit. Lena enjoyed a fresh apricot (she’ll eat five a day) on the steps of the church in the middle of town.

Later that morning we all walked back down to the beach below our apartment for surf and sunshine:

photos by Jess Garber

Check it out, Lena is actually looking at the camera and smiling!

Twice! Sorta.

Lena is wearing an outfit I wore when I was a baby. Jess is, as usual, wearing an outfit I wish I could wear today. (We’re definitely enjoying each other’s clothes as long as she’s visiting!)

The magnificent Villa Rufolo, which I imagine Mark Ruffalo lives in between filming movies.

Old vineyard just outside the center of town.

Quiet garden where a father and son were painting together.

A cinquecento (or “500,” named for its 500 cc engine), the quintessential Italian car.

I took the video below of Lena climbing steps in Ravello. I love how she grunts after each step. Such an effort for little legs!

photo by Jess Garber

I love their bread bags instead of baskets… and the beautiful drawing of the town of Amalfi on the front of their menus. We could find our apartment in the drawing!

29 :: in Amalfi Coast, eat this, travel, video

“better than a water gun!”

June 26, 2012 at 1:54 pm

Jessica reminded me about this video that I took on our family vacation. She wants me to post it so that she has a pick-me-up while studying for the NCLEX (nursing exam) this week. Wish her luck… she takes it on Friday!

In the meantime, goofy fun with the Garbers, with lots of giggles from Lena. This is probably my favorite Lena video ever. :-)

4 :: in family, holidays, Lena, video, Virginia

"better than a water gun!"

June 26, 2012 at 12:54 pm

In the meantime, goofy fun with the Garbers, with lots of giggles from Lena. This is probably my favorite Lena video ever. :-)

4 :: in family, holidays, Lena, video, Virginia

“rain day” in Sicily

February 22, 2012 at 10:39 pm

photo taken this morning by Luke Roberts

You’ve heard of snow days, but… rain days? We hadn’t heard of them either.

The rain started yesterday. Elliott suggested at lunchtime that I should perhaps close the shutters around the house, just in case. Our Italian house has thick old wooden shutters for each door and window. We’ve learned the hard way that leaving them open, rain or shine, means bad things when the rain comes. So yesterday afternoon I closed most of the shutters, and then that evening I shut a few more. We had a couple potted plants in our bathroom window so I didn’t bother with that window. Oh, and we took the shutters off our gigantic kitchen window months ago (we want to see the valley and Mt Etna all the time!), so there was nothing to shut there.

The wind picked up during the night but we slept like babies. Around 6:15am Lena woke up, as she always does, and I went into her room to nurse her. I couldn’t believe the racket in there. The wind was whistling around the cliffs beneath our house at a million miles an hour, throwing rain right through the thick shutters. Wind was traveling right through the AC/heater unit over my head, making a shrieking nose. I turned Lena’s sleep sheep/noisemaker back on and slipped back into our room.

The racket was even worse in there. The wind whipped along our balcony around the edge of the cliffs, carrying debris with it and undoubtedly sweeping our balcony clean of anything we’d been foolish enough to leave out there. (Our kitchen rugs hung out to “dry”? Our potted plants? Would we ever see them again?) Even opening the doors between bedrooms took some strength because of the suction created by the wind. I felt like I was yanking open the door of the fridge when I pulled open the door to our bedroom.

At 7am Elliott’s alarm went off, which was just as well because we were both lying there in the dark anyway. A few minutes later his phone rang. It was one of his soldiers. Should he cancel all the veterinary appointments for the day?

A few more minutes passed. Elliott checked Facebook on my phone. School buses were leaving to pick up kids for the base school, but Elliott wasn’t sure if he should leave the house himself.

A few more minutes. Elliott checked my phone again. And this time… an astonishing turn of events. The base was closed! All non-essential personnel were ordered to stay home and stay safe. We looked at each other with glee. We got a “rain day”! No snow days in Sicily… but rain days, well, we’ll take ’em! And when the scene looks like this outside of the base, you can see why they decided to keep everyone at home.

photo taken today by Jen McComb

Elliott said he would go brew us some coffee. I got out of bed, yanked on my pants. “I want to be with you to assess the damage.”

We opened the door to our room and starting flipping on lights, examining our house to see what had flooded, what had been blown away, and what shutters and windows were still in place. Our potted plants hadn’t made it, sadly. They were smashed on the balcony and only scattered pieces of them remained. Our kitchen rugs were still out on the balcony, but they had been ripped off the line and were lying in matted messes against the railing. We walked on to the kitchen, where Elliott spotted the water first.

There was a deep pool of water underneath our kitchen window, with more pouring steadily in. We switched from slippers to rain boots and began to slosh through the dining room (also partially flooded) and into the kitchen. I guess the floor slopes in the direction of the big window because the water hadn’t continued towards our kitchen cabinets and food items. Water blew in our faces as we stood in the puddles; it was being blown through the hinges of the windows and was also coming from new leaks in the ceiling. We blinked in the onslaught, getting our bearings.

And then we did the only thing we could do: pulled out a bucket and broom and started cleaning up the mess.

Here’s a video from midway through the mop up:

We continued to clean up for most of the day, especially as the rain and wind abated in the evening. There is more rain and wind predicted for tonight and tomorrow, though, so we’ll see what the morning brings us! In the meantime, we’re tucked cozily in front of the fire, knitting, reading, and writing letters to family. The perfect rain day.