Le Grotte di Frasassi

Buongiorno tutti! Today is a lovely Sunday and I got to spend it with my host family! We left the apartment at about 8:30 am. To be honest I had no idea where we were going in terms of directions or the name of the place, so it was a cool little surprise.

We drove for a very long time (3 hours?), left Tuscany and entered Umbria, and then there were sunflowers.

A lot of sunflowers.

                                                      It was kind of ridiculous.

                                                      But beautiful nonetheless.

I actually fell asleep for a while because, honestly, I'm used to doing that on long car trips. From Dallas to OU, from Dallas to Galveston, from Dallas to San Antonio, my first reaction is, 'If I sleep, this will go a lot faster.' So yeah, I conked out for a while there.

However, we finally arrived at Le Grotte di Frasassi! It's a huge network of caves that we discovered on accident by some hikers in 1948. Technically we weren't allowed to take pictures, but I did manage to snap a few.

                                                              Welcome!

                                                On the bus up the mountain.

                                                       Tunnel to the caves.

                                                    Map of the cave system.

                                      That ceiling is actually about 200 meters away.

                                    The Giants, the largest of which is 20 meters tall.

After going through the caves, we rode back down the mountain and had some lunch.

                                                                Yum!

So after that we drove home (more sleeping! Yay!) and have proceeded to chill for the rest of the day. I have also been productive in terms of paper writing, so I'm going to count it as a win for all.

Interesting Stories of the Day:

• You know someone is a good mom when she lets her husband and child do this to her.

                                                             You just know.

• My host family reserved the English speaking tour so that I would be able to understand and because they've already had the tour before. Being a English tour, you'd assume that the majority would be from North America, Britain, or Australia. We were definitely overpowered by the Germans. So there was that.
• I got to Skype with my family before my siblings go off to summer camp for two weeks, so that was nice. More importantly, my mother finally has learned how to use Skype! Yay!

A dopo!