It’s been an embarassingly long time since our last post but we’ve both been working hard and studying our German over the last couple of months. And other than exploring Tübingen and Stuttgart’s restaurant and bar scenes, we haven’t done any major traveling to blog about.

But in mid-April we finally took a well-deserved trip to Italy, with a stopover in Zurich on the way down. Click here to see albums from both CH and IT. In Italy we rented an apartment in the Le Marche region of the Adriatic coast. It was in a tiny town called Monterado, about 15 mins inland from the beach resort of Senigallia. We had heard that Le Marche is “the new Tuscsany” and that most tourists don’t even know about it yet. We discovered that is still very true as we were literally the only foreigners in most cities we went to, with the exception of Assisi and Perugia (but that’s because people already know about Umbria)

It was a very relaxing week as we could just sit back and take in the Italian culture…and food and wine…lots of it! The dogs came along and had a blast running on the beaches and hiking in the Sibillini mountains with us. On the drive home we stayed one night in Verona, which is now one of our favorite cities. It’s known as “little Roma”–colloseum ruins with cosmopolitan atmosphere; We really enjoyed the place and will definitely be going back soon (sans pooches:)