What I didn’t write about in 2018: a day trip to Siena and more!
We’re already more than two weeks into January, and I’m realizing there are still adventures from 2018 I haven’t written about. Among these were a day trip to Siena during our trip to Florence with my in-laws last spring, two days in Rome during the same trip and visits to Loch Ness and Pitlochry in Scotland! No doubt there are more — such as a day trip to Enna — but as it is, that seems like a fair bit of catching up already.
Anyway, it was a beautiful year! And for my own sake, if no one else’s, I want to make sure I’ve taken the chance to remember some of that.
A day trip to Siena from Florence
Back in April/May, we visited Florence, Greve in Chianti (for our wine-tasting misadventure) and Rome for a week with my in-laws, Gail and David. We spent five total nights in Florence, but one of them we dedicated to a day trip to Siena. It was one of my favorite days of the trip, and even having only seen it on a short day trip I still think I like Siena better than either Florence or Rome.
We took the train (a very pleasant hour and a half) from Florence to Siena, then ended up catching a bus from the Siena train station to the center of town. From there, we mostly strolled through the town, acquired gelato and saw a few sights, including the following:
- Piazza del Campo and Mangia Tower
The Piazza del Campo is the center of Siena, its town square. It’s also where the famous Palio horse races are held every year — we saw some videos of them at nearby restaurants, and the races look intense! I’d love to go to that sometime, though I expect it must be a madhouse every year. I don’t recommend eating here though; we “accidentally” ended up doing that and got an enormous bill for a crappy meal. Ah well, live and learn!
My in-laws (if memory serves) went into the Palazzo Pubblico, a museum on the square, but Chris and I opted to remain in the square and watch the kids chase pigeons instead.
2. Duomo di Siena
The Siena Cathedral was magnificent on the outside and, unlike its counterpart in Florence, did not disappoint us on the inside either! It was absolutely gorgeous and should absolutely be a must-see stop if you are heading to Siena. I’d rank it, after Saint Chappelle in Paris and Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, as among the most beautiful churches in Europe.
Like the Florence Cathedral, Siena’s has a lot of gorgeous black and white marble columns within it. But step into the adjacent Piccolomini Library and you’ll find an explosion of color; it was legitimately the most stunning ceiling I’ve ever seen. It was absolutely worth the wait in line to get in (this was sort of the theme for a lot of things we did in Florence and Tuscany!)
A quick stop in Rome
Since both my in-laws and our family found it was considerably cheaper to fly into Rome than Florence, our trip ended with a couple days there soaking up that city. Of course, we’ve been there before so Chris and I took the kids to do a few different things while Gail and David got a look at the Vatican, the Colosseum and other can’t-miss sights in Rome.
We stayed in the Trastavere neighborhood, a little further from the center of things than we were in the past. However, I highly recommend this area! We had some good meals and found it to be a little less hectic than the more central places.
Our favorite activity was a self-guided food tour of Trastavere through BiteMojo. Basically, the BiteMojo premise is that you download the app, then pay (in our case, 25 euro) for a food tour of an area at your own pace, between specified hours. Along the way, it also tells you about some sites you are passing. If you don’t use all your “bite credits” you can save them for another day or even another city.
We’ve now done this in Berlin and Rome and the verdict is: we like it, but do think they may still be sorting out a few kinks. In Rome, we had a few problems with two of the places not being open as advertised. (Luckily, we did not have this problem in Berlin). The places we did get to stop, however, were excellent and the portions were ample. By far the best was this incredible burrata creation from Da Enzo, which was so good that when Fiona dropped her portion onto the cobblestones we seriously considered eating it anyway. (Don’t worry, we did resist this particular impulse.)
We also took the chance to visit a place we’d missed on our previous trip to Rome, including the Pantheon. The Pantheon is a Roman temple-turned-church that dates back to the 100s BC. It is one of the best preserved Ancient Roman temples in the world. 
It is also the final resting place of two kings of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II and Umberto I.
And this photo is just Chris and Fiona being cute in Trastavere. 
A monster hunt on our Loch Ness tour
I wrote a fair bit about our trip to Scotland (Edinburgh with kids, visit to Stirling Castle and Oban and the Isle of Skye), but with so much going on this summer I never got a chance to write about our trip to Loch Ness.
I spent a lot of time trying to decide on the best monster hunt on Loch Ness with kids, and ultimately settled on the two-hour Loch Ness by Jacobite tour on the Freedom boat. It was cute!
We drove to Loch Ness from Balamarca, stopping briefly to take a look at the Eilean Donan castle near our AirBnb. All told, I believe it was a little more than a two-hour drive to get to the Clansman Hotel, where our boat was to depart.
The lake itself was much bigger than I was expecting, and people weren’t joking when they said the water was black. It is easy to see how people could believe a mythical creature could plausibly be hiding in there!
It was pretty chilly the day we went, but we still rode on the open-air top of our boat so that we could get a good view. Along the way, the tour guide told us a little about the lake (for instance, that the water is black because of the high peat content of the ground) and the history of the quest for Nessy.
The trip included a one-hour stop to see the ruins of Urquhart Castle, and learn a little about its fascinating history as well. On the whole, our castle interests usually extend more to the intact versions vs. ruins, but it was still interesting to see. As a side note, we stopped in a coffee shop and I got to listen to a fellow tourist being absolutely incredulous that the cashier could accept neither Euro nor U.S. dollars for his order. Face palm.
On the way back, we opted to sit inside the boat so the kids could play with the activity sets that came with our admission price for our monster hunt on Loch Ness! They were more impressed with that than the “radar” you could use to monitor for signs of Nessy, which I had expected they’d think was cool. Go figure.
A stop in peaceful Pitlochry, Scotland
Our final stop in Scotland was in Pitlochry, a place I originally chose mostly as a good stopping point between Loch Ness and Edinburgh for a couple nights before we had to return to Edinburgh for a morning flight. To my surprised, we ended up being quite charmed by the little town — other than Edinburgh, it was probably my favorite. However, this is stop was one place where our lack of planning kind of bit us in the ass.
I’d intentionally left our last day in Scotland blank as a “wing it” day, thinking we’d be exhausted from the previous 11 days on the road and eager for downtime. However, if I’d looked into things ahead of time we’d have saved a lot of time and aggravation on our “downtime” day. Pitlochry and the surrounding area have a lot of nice walking/biking paths, and since we were lucky enough to get beautiful weather we wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to bike. However, the bikes we needed (a pull-behind one for Owen and a trailer or seat for Fiona) were all booked up at the local bike shop, and another one on site of a nearby castle was open by appointment only. Darn! If I could go back in time, my Pitlochry one-day itinerary would look something like this:
What to do in Pitlochry
1. Breakfast at Escape Route, a cute cafe near a bike shop
2. Morning: rent bicycles on the nearby Blair Atholl Castle estate grounds and ride around the many pretty trails in that area.
3. Tour Blair Atholl castle and enjoy the kids’ activities there, which includes a scavenger hunt, dress-up and outdoor playgrounds. Lunch: a picnic, or a visit to the castle restaurant
4. Return to Pitlochry for a tour of the Blair Atholl distillery. Part of this is adults only, but the kids were able to join after about 15/20 minutes. Tastings are included!
5. Dinner at the Old Mill Inn
6. A walk in downtown Pitlochry or, better yet, along the nice walking trails nearby. We took a path that led us to Loch Falskaddy and the “Fish Ladder.” The fish ladder — a series of water “steps” that the fish can jump between — was built specifically to give migrating salmon a way over the dam. Unfortunately, the Fish Ladder Viewing Chamber was closed when we were there. Next time!
What we actually did on our one day in Pitlochry …
Well, we wasted the morning trying to track down bikes, for the most part. But we did visit the Blair Atholl Distillery (Chris went on the whole tour, while the kids and I joined where we could) and did the walk to the Fish Ladder, which was just beautiful. I just wish we’d planned ahead and could have really made the most out of our day there!
One fun thing about Scotland: we were there in early June, and it stayed light out until so late. This picture was taken at about 10:30 p.m. Consequently, the kids stayed up very late every night because we just didn’t realize how late it was getting.
Well, I’d say that about wraps up this recap for now. My conscience is eased, ha.
Now on to 2019 adventures! Our first trip of the year is quite soon, then we’ll be on a bit of a hiatus until Baby Boy arrives in March! (Hopefully March and not April, anyway!)
