Our Italy Trip

by Karen Riley

Our group with Tamara our tour guide

From Rec dances to Rawk Shows, calendars to cookie booth sales, six Seniors worked very hard to fundraise their trip to Italy. It was a long year with many opportunities and goals, but before you could say "Ciao!" we were waiting at the airport for our flight to be called.

Taormina, Sicily

We landed in Milan and met our EF tour guide, Tamara Stojanovic. We boarded our bus and greeted some of the other members of our tour group- teachers, parents and students from North Carolina, South Carolina and Rochester, NY. That night at dinner in our hotel outside of Venice, we met the last segment of our group, six students and 2 chaperones (like us) from Utah. Most of the students were around seventeen years old and our girls quickly bonded with them. One student was nearly deaf and our girls learned basic sign language to communicate with him.

The girls on Capri

Every day brought new adventures, from trying out our Italian (some of us actually enrolled in a community ed course at Southern Regional to learn the language before leaving!) to seeing buildings we'd only glimpsed before in history books. Along the way, local tour guides filled us in on the history and legends of the places we visited.

St Peter's Square

The leaning Tower of Pisa

We didn't climb the tower of Pisa, but we did climb up some bell towers, a castle and many, many hills! We rode the gondolas of Venice, crossed the Tiber River in Rome and swam in the Blue Grotto of Capri. We saw glass being blown, learned how cameos are made and found out how to distinguish real leather from imitation. We donned covering for our knees and shoulders as a sign of respect in the churches we visited from the tiny original church of St. Francis in Assisi, to the majestic St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.


The mountain town of Assisi	Catacombs

Tossing
coins into Trevi Fountain

My sister, Pat and I had the privilege of chaperoning six amazing signorinas (young ladies): Taryn, Crystal, Nicole, Tara, Jenna, and Laura, through Italy for an unforgettable 15 days. I know that this experience has changed all of us and if the Trevi Fountain has its way, the coins we tossed will bring us back to Rome one day!