Give Me an Apron and Call Me Susie Homemaker

Because I made tortillas today!!  Why has it taken me so long to do this?  Tortillas are practically my favorite food and the one food I've been missing in Dubai.  We have only found fresh tortillas in one store, but it's about 30 minutes away and parking is terrible so we never go there.  We can get "tortillas" here, but they have the longest shelf life ever, and something about tortillas that expire in a year creeps me out.  Now with my new and improved cooking skillz, we can have tortillas whenever we want!  They're so easy - flour, olive oil, water, salt, bam.

Here's the recipe I tried today if you're interested.  Next time (tomorrow) I'll try them with different flour to see if they're just as tasty.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Cow Bells, Donkey Friends and Italian Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeese

ITALY!!  After the 'steins we drove to the mountains of Lake Como hoping for a George Clooney sighting.  We originally planned to stay on Lake Como but by the time we were ready to book a hotel, they were either all taken or too run-down.  We weren't sad for long because we found Il Tivano Bed and Breakfast in Zelbio, Italy.  It was everything we needed in the middle of our trip - comfort, relaxation and peace.

Introducing Il Tivano...

A cute Italian couple renovated this place and live in half of it with their kids and pups.  The other half is a perfectly designed B&B/organic berry/honey farm.

I took a million pictures of this place because I want my future home to be a mixture of this style and old things I find and repaint/refurbish.  It was a beautiful place to spend a few nights.

And - the best part - we were surrounded by cows!

If the owners of Il Tivano got the urge to give me their B&B, I would move here in a heartbeat.  We decided, on this very day as we were sipping red wine on this glorious porch, that we're moving back to Denver next summer and saving for a place like this in the Rocky Mountains.  We're always back and forth with where we want to be, but Il Tivano helped us make up our minds.

We braved the crazy mountain roads to visit Bellagio for the day.  It's just as cute and Italian as it gets.

I'm carrying a bag of desserts in this picture and they were all incredible.  One thing Italians do right is food.  Everything we had in Italy was amazing.

Side story: About 2 seconds after we got to Bellagio, a snarky American teenager looked at me and said, "Yeah, like that looks good," rolled her eyes and nudged her brother so he looked at my outfit...  I was wearing my favorite lace maxi skirt and a black tank top.  I don't know why that was so offensive, but I guess one year in Dubai has made me out of touch with what's cool to wear and what's not.  That's probably the rudest thing a stranger has ever said to me.

Didn't ruin my day, though!

Selfie #236

Oh, just another sunset in Italy...

This was our view from dinner the first night.  Restaurants in Zelbio operate mostly on reservations because they cook everything fresh that day.  We went to two different restaurants during our stay and both were incredible.  The owners were so warm and friendly and couldn't wait to feed us their best recipes and shots of limoncello.  They don't get many tourists up in the mountains, so they were as interested in us as we were in them.  The second night, we asked the waitress to give us whatever she'd feed her family for Sunday dinner.  She brought us two dishes, both completely smothered in cheese, and as I've told you before, cheese and my stomach are not friends.  But, when you're in Italy, how do you turn down cheese?  I decided I was gonna go for it so I could have the full Italian experience... and about 15 minutes later, I had the WORST stomach pains since I quit cheese.  After a night of cheeseystomach, Casey finally started to believe that I have some sort of dairy allergy.  It was totally worth it, though, because real Italian food is amazing.  

And finally, our dinner friend, cutest donkey ever.

Minus the too-skinny roads and crazy drivers, Italy was one of my favorite places on the trip.  Hopefully we'll make it back one day so we can stay a bit longer.

Our Annoying Word List

Big Mama, Casey and I have a list of annoying words people say.  Words like eXpresso, Chipol-te and  acrosst are on there.  I would like to add a special section to the list called "Annoying Words I Can't Spell Correctly No Matter How Many Times I Screw It Up."  Here's my list so far:

1.  lead instead of led - I ALWAYS write lead when I really mean led.  Why?  I'm a teacher for Pete's sake.

2.  probable instead of probably - Again, I have no idea why but my finger always types e instead of y at the end of probably.  This was actually a joke when I first met Casey because I did it like 7 times in emails to him.

3.  Whatever else you notice when you're reading the blog.  Please enlighten me so I stop.

Casey's would have something to do with apostrophes.  All of those years of schooling and he's still missing basic apostrophe knowledge.  It's a mystery I'll never understand.  Maybe his brain is just so packed full of awesomer things he doesn't have any room left for apostrophe rules.

100th post, what what.

Day o' the 'Steins

Hallo!  I'm back after another long break.  Sadly, I don't have a good excuse, unless visiting my family in Texas counts.  I've been having such negative feelings about blogging this month and finally realized it's because Dachau was next up in our string of vacation posts.  Visiting a concentration camp is one thing, but remembering everything you saw and read and then retelling the terrible stories just doesn't sound like my idea of fun.  Finally, I realized (duh) that I don't have to blog about Dachau.  I'm doing this blog for our own personal memory book anyway, so I can leave out whatever I want.  Dachau, I'm leaving you out, at least for now.

These vacation posts seem like they're never going to end, but this was my ultimate dream vacation so I want to make sure I remember every part.  After Munich, we drove to Liechtenstein and stopped in a cute little German town on the way.  This cute little German town happens to be the home of the famous Disney castle.  Supposedly, it inspired Walt Disney when he was creating Sleeping Beauty's castle.  It was the most beautiful of all the castles we saw on our trip.

The town of Schwangau and Hohenschwangau Castle.  King Ludwig built this "tiny" thing for his son so he could have the big castle.

Neuschwanstein Castle, aka Sleeping Beauty's digs.

Proof that we were there :)

And that's pretty much it.  We ate lunch at a cute little restaurant on the lake and then headed for Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

Vaduz was STUNNING.  Liechtenstein is so tiny we never actually knew if we were in Liechtenstein or Switzerland until we arrived in Vaduz.  They have a sweet little vineyard, a castle (of course) and beautiful mountains filled with cows and wooden houses.

Don't you want to live here with a lawn-full of gnomes?

One of my favorite memories from the trip.

We drove up to the tippity top of the mountain and got caught in a traffic jam with cows.  I've never seen anything like this in person, so it was fascinating to watch.  The farmers were wondering why we were excited about a bunch of cows, and I love cows so much that I just wanted to get out and pet them all.  But I will admit that it got a little scary when they started crowding the car.  Thousands of pounds of anything is scary when it's coming at you in herds, even if it's just a bunch of sweet cows.

That's pretty much it for Liechtenstein.  It's tiny and the mountains are magical.  If you're ever in Austria or Switzerland, it's worth a day trip.  On a side note, did you notice I found the "create a collage" button on picmonkey?  I figured this was better than an entire page of pictures.