Real photos of monuments outside our window

Mont Cappucini (flickr shot) - just out our window, in Blue for the holidays

A real image (not by me) of the Gran Madre

Torino, Rapallo - Mahaney & Flinn

Kevin (Godfather to Lila) and Lila at a local restaurant - "24"

Walking around Torino, there are plenty of interesting art objects in the streets. This week the TFF - Torino Film Festival starts and the City is full of lots of Internationals - been hearing a lot more English out on the streets...

As day in Parco Valentino - the girls entertained themselves for hours on these little push carts.

Ante and Julia - my iphone does not take good photos on dim light, sorry for the poor photo quality.

Stuart Flinn, Julia in the middle of the sandwich, and Ante - in Rapallo (just South of Genova). Ante, Stu and their other crew Mike easily won the Etchells Europeans there last weekend. We drove down to go out with them - and have a few Pops.

Kevin Mahaney came to visit for the weekend, he was only here for three nights, but we managed to check out Torino and also Rapallo down on the Ligurian coast. This shot show Mt Cappucini, lit with blue lights for Christmas in the background.

The 4th in 4 weeks!

I must confess I've lost track of our blog postings on Claire's disappearing dental work, but suffice it to say, she has lost 4 teeth in 4 weeks in 4 cities around Europe and now looks exactly like a jack-o-lantern. This most recent one came out in Paris in yes, you guessed it...a crepe au chocolat.

More of Paris

This is why people buy Smart cars here in Europe.

The girls made it through the entire audio tour at Notre Dame and were fascinated by the fact that the organ has more than 7800 pipes.

And then we spent over 3 hours in the Louvre, which flew by thanks to our guide and treasure hunt host, Kristen from New Hampshire who was getting her PhD in art history in Paris. She truly made the most fearsome museum come alive for all of us.

The girls took their clue gathering seriously...

And then we walked all the way up the Champs Elysees to strike a pose at the Arc de Triomphe. Are these girls headed for Solid Gold or what! 

Yup. Another tooth.

Are we scaring you yet?

If not, maybe this will. We allowed Lila to fulfill a wish on her 9th birthday that she'd had for quite a while. Notice anything new?