Luna de Miel con Amici!

We headed to Florence filled with anticipation for the arrival of our dear friend Quang, whom we’d convinced to take a few weeks of vacation to join us for the last few weeks of our honeymoon.  For those of you who might be thinking that it’s not particularly normal to invite friends on your honeymoon, we have two replies.  First, this is clearly no ordinary honeymoon.  Second, you clearly don’t know our friend Quang.  When you honeymoon for 6 months, there’s always time for some special guest appearances, and a little dash of Q in our lives just always seems to brighten the day.  We also tend to spontaneously break into song a lot more frequently. 

It has created a little bit of confusion among some of the Italians we meet along the way… It’s hard enough to break through the language barrier, without trying to explain how it is our honeymoon, but there are three of us.  There was one particularly confused Italian, for whom I had to clarify that when I said ‘we were married in October’, I meant just Amy and I, not all three of us).  So we’ve taken to calling this portion of the honeymoon our ‘luna de miel con amici’, and that seems to sort things out.  And if that fails, we just tell people that Quang is our adopted child.

We woke up that morning in Spezia knowing that our rendezvous with Q was only a few short hours and a few short train rides away in Firenze (that’s Italian for Florence), until we looked at our phone and saw 6 text messages from Q, each one updating us on the status of his eventually cancelled flight.  (The last was a photo of Q having dinner with the Lufthansa gate agents in their employee dining area… Only Q could end up in that kind of situation.).  So we decided to take our time getting to Florence, and distracted ourselves with all the tourists posing as if they were holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. 


Which is more exciting... this tower?...



Or all the tourists posing
 as if they are holding it up?



In Florence, we decided to take the more challenging urban route to our adorable little bed and breakfast.  The house was a working farm back in the day, located just outside all of the hubbub of downtown Florence, connected by a beautiful, serene 4km bikepath along the river Arno.  Of course, we only learned about the bike path after our harrowing and less-than-direct route through the traffic of Firenze.  Our hosts Stefania and Mario were as welcoming as they could possibly be – arranging bus/tram tickets for us, doing our laundry so we could enjoy the city instead of wasting our day at the Laundromat, and even giving us a ride to the airport to meet Q when he eventually arrived.  Almost certainly our favorite inn from the entire full-moon (except for Dougie, of course). 

We were so saddened by Q’s delayed arrival that we had to drown our sorrows in one of the finest meals we’ve had on the full moon.  The Lonely Planet never steers us wrong with its recommendations.  This was a meal the Fong’s would definitely have been proud of.  Of course, we started with our favorite appetizer, prosciutto con melone, which has taken a slight lead in the competition with gelato to see which food we eat the most of during our time in Italy.  Amy chose the raviolis with black truffle for her primi piatti (the pasta dish) – a specialty of the region – which melted in her mouth and caused her eyes to roll back in her head a few times.  My filleto steak was pretty outsanding for the secondi piatti… but not as good as the heavenly panna cotta I had for dessert, which for some reason, required me to close my eyes as a I savored each spoonful.   


Oh Prosciutto!  What kind of cruel religion could make you forbidden???








Potato Ravioli with Black Truffle...
Not sure this one will ever be topped.

The next day, Q’s plane finally arrived…


Yes... we were excited...



Bongiorno, Q!  Italia has no idea what it's in for!

And for some reason, every photo we’ve taken since then has seemed more ‘blog-worthy’ than the last.



Arm thing!  Arm thing!  Arm thing!



As many of you know, it usually takes 2 sips
for Amy to start getting silly...
You should have seen her
after she downed this whole bottle!



Yep... something about being around Q...



We picked up his bici in a little town outside of Firenze called Tavarnuzze, and headed south along the Chianti Classic route, through the heart of Tuscany, towards Greve-in-Chianti and Siena… where more crazy hyjinx await…

Until then, Ciao Bicis… from the Luna de Miel con Amici!