A Week of Endless Snow

This past week was a vacation at Gio's school.  We have been in Ukraine over 2 years now so we finally qualified for "home leave," so off we went to Italy.

Before we left we were honored with Gio's first ever Valentine's Day card. Priceless.

The day before we left we took Gio to a giant park (reputedly the largest park in all of Europe- need to do some fact-checking on that one!) that even includes an all-season amusement park!  

And then we got to Italy.  A double gelato was on the "must do immediately" list, with some scary creature supervision. Gio is wise and always orders this disgusting "Puffo" flavor to discourage me from trying to share.  I find it discouraging enough that my beloved Smurfs from childhood were renamed "Puffi" by those silly Italians.  Sigh. 

We were serenaded frequently by our budding musician. Unfortunately, he seems to have inherited his mother's musical voice.  Not good.  

Our first few days were sun-filled with "only " about 6 inches of snow on the ground....at first. 

And then storm #1 began.

And storm #2.....

Storm #3 (in 3 days).  By this point our driveway (a very long and steep one!) became impassable. Gio tried his best to shovel us out.  

I could not capture the beauty of this much snow with my phone (I swear I am getting a new camera soon!), but believe me, it was spectacular).  By this point we had had nearly 3 feet of new snow in 4 days.  

Paolo and best friend Angelo (who lives just down at the end of our driveway) did a LOT of shoveling.

On Saturday afternoon the most intense storm of them all began, dumping nearly 2 more feet of snow into Sunday morning.  It was a dicey 6AM departure for us as we had a 10AM flight out of Bologna and had to literally dig our way to our car.  Luckily we had Paolo's dear cousin Willy driving us and he is an expert at mountain snow driving.  With only one incident where we had to stop for a giant tree in the road we actually made it AND our flight was on time!  For once my usual travel troubles never struck.

While waiting in line at the airport Gio somehow got a hold of my iPhone. I did not discover his over 115 self-portraits until I sat down to write this blog.  Do not worry, I only ended up saving 3 of them!

Ciao, bella Italia!  We will see you again when all of that snow melts.  xo.  Clara