Arrivederci Denver, Ciao Siena

Being with Charlie--our favorite Denver pasttime!

We haven’t written much lately; apologies to those who have been waiting on tenderhooks.  Our life here in Denver pretty much revolves around Charlie and family, though we have managed to take in some movies, good live theater and lots of walking.

 These days Charlie is learning to walk, so he wants to walk all the time, which means we walk.  His usual modus operandi is:  he comes up to you, pulls on one of your fingers, wraps his little hand around it, and starts walking to where he wants to go. This past weekend he took off walking solo and has been doing so ever since with a huge grin and often giggling gleefully, sometimes so much so that it makes him fall down. 

Besides walking with Charlie, we try to take a daily walk along the south Platte River or just along 16^th Street in downtown Denver.

So what does retirement mean for us?  Some days we ask ourselves what did we do before we retired, because there is not enough time to do everything we want to do. 

Both of us are trying to live a little healthier. One of our friends (thanks Tom Fisher) told us about an App that monitors what you are eating and the exercise you are getting: “My Net Diary”.  Keeping a daily food diary is incredibly revealing; until we did so, we didn’t realize how much we were eating and sometimes how badly. We are also fortunate to have a very nice exercise center here in our apartment building—it makes it easy to roll out of bed, dress quickly, and take the elevator down to the center. Let’s hope that we can keep up our resolve, once we are back on the road.

We are also enjoying the opportunity to see some theater here.  The Denver Center for Performing Arts is just one block away from our apartment building, so it is very easy and convenient to take in a show. This month we have seen one Broadway Musical—“Jekyll and Hyde” and two plays: Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” (thanks to Erin who gave us a gift certificate for Christmas) and “Grace, or the Art of Climbing”, a new play whose author we can’t remember.  The fun thing about “Grace” was that we met one of the actor’s who was staying in our building.  She got us complimentary tickets and we loved feeling connected to her and also to the stage manager, whom we had also met here.

Another entertainment treat for us was seeing a simulcast of the Metropolitan Opera production of “Rigoletto”.  We thought we would be among a very few in attendance, but when we arrived a few minutes before the start, we found a full theater with perhaps 400 or 500 people, so we had to sit up front in the third row.  This is a new production set in 1960 Las Vegas—it really worked well for Rigoletto, depicting the same sort of decadence and duplicity as 17^th century Italy.  Seeing other Met simulcasts will be on our agenda for the future and we highly recommend the experience.

 We will be leaving Denver at the end of the month and have plans to be in Europe for the next five months.  We have rented two separate apartments in Tuscany: March in Siena and April in Greve (Chianti).  We have also arranged to lease a car for our entire stay as we want to be able to visit a lot of the small hill towns in Tuscany and Umbria.

In May we will be going to Croatia and Austria, as we make our way to Germany.  We have been offered the use of an apartment in Munich for the month of June.  We hope to take some German language lessons and visit with family in Munich and Western Germany.  After that we will need to drive back to Rome for our flight home on July 16^th.

We have purposely rented two bedroom apartments in Italy because we hope that some of you will be tempted to join us.  We are already anticipating that one friend will join us in late March and early April.  If you are tempted, here are the links for information on the two apartments:

Apartment in Siena: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/184208

Apartment in Chianti: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/312849

Make those plans now: we would love to see you in Italy!