Europe and the Purple Valley

Greetings from the land of the Purple Cow!

After slogging through spring semester, my family spent a few weeks in Europe before settling in for the summer. It was so much fun, but also absolutely exhausting. We covered a lot of ground, and, fortunately or unfortunately, the mountains were by far the best part and the only place where I took reasonable pictures (I was going to say good, but then I realized that Connie will probably be posting soon...). Here's a scattered overview:

For all you geography nerds out there (Evan and Andy pay attention), the overall route was Paris-Stockholm-Rome-Venice-Dolomites (plus a bonus day in New York City at the end). In case you can't count, that's a lot of airports, and the two busiest train stations in Europe (bonus points if you can name them).

We did all of the typical tourist stuff:

Saw Notre Dame post-fire (from afar)

The Eiffel Tower

And the view from the top (sooooo many stairs)

Saw lots of ruins in Rome

And had LOTS of LOOOOONG museum days. I'm currently researching/debating with Jay whether I can log these as ODs in the "other" category...

We even happened upon a stage of the Giro d'Italia

And of course, it wouldn't be a blog post by me without a skierg. I can happily report that the skiergs in Sweden are far inferior to ours (no ercolinas yet).

But now for the mountains. We spent a week in the Dolomites, staying for a few days at two different "huts," which are among the nicest hotels I have ever been to, and certainly the best and largest quantities of food I have ever seen at a hotel restaurant, or maybe any restaurant. While the first hut made us pay extra for hot showers, the second hut actually had automatic doors, so it balanced out to a very civilized "wilderness." Spent a lot of long days exploring and saw very few people (as it turns out, no one else wants to hike in calf deep snow, no matter how nice the view is). Should have brought skis, but oh well...

This summer I am part of the small minority of the team that decided not to live at Lucy's house in Sun Valley, so after another long day (I really feel like these are loggable) of walking around New York City, I headed up to Williamstown for a summer of math. So far, as expected, it's been a lot of math (I've actually had to request breaks at times), but I've also had plenty of time to get out and explore. So far it's only rained half the days and it hasn't gotten above 80 yet, so I'm hopeful that the predictions of a miserably hot and lonely summer will fail to come true (although as I'm writing I just looked at the forecast and it's going to be 85 tomorrow). I met up with Jakin Miller (Williams class of 2024!!) for a rollerski last Saturday (no pictures, but I promise I'll get some for a later post), and, of course, I've been spending A LOT of time with my best friends, the ercolinas.

Hope everyone is enjoying their respective summer adventures!

Miss you all,
Lime

p.s. To all current and future blog slackers (and I admit I am usually a member of that group), I would like to point out that although far from perfect, this post demonstrates that someone with relatively little free time and very little creative talent can actually put together an acceptable post and avoid whatever terrible punishment the captains have devised for failing to post. Keep it in mind.