Evidence Not Seen by Darlene Diebler Rose

I just finished reading the most amazing story of faith by Darlene Diebler Rose entitled Evidence Not Seen.  She and her husband, as newlyweds, were missionaries serving in the jungles New Guinea when World War II began and they were taken prisoner by the Japanese and spent the next four years in Japanese prison camps.  She was forced to sign a confession to a crime she did not commit, faced an executioner’s sword…and was miraculously spared.

This story of faith and perseverance and humility and strength is amazing.  If you love Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, you will absolutely love this book.  Miracle after miracle happened, evidence of God getting the glory for providing abundantly more than they could ever ask or imagine happened regularly!  My favorite scene was her begging for even one banana and ninety-two bananas showed up.  WOW.  How can you not cry at that?

Her willingness to learn more and more about His character throughout these trying years and life-threatening circumstances without letting bitterness drag her down is only one aspect of this amazing testimony that inspires me.  It remains inspiring and convicting all at the same time!  How important it is to hide the word of God in our hearts!

Pick it up.  You won’t regret it!

God Stuff

• It’s July 4th!!
• Well, only for 29 more minutes on my side of the world.
• I’ve still got Florence and France and Barcelona to go on our Mediterranean tour.
• I’ll get there.  Because I know ya’ll just can’t wait for the next post.
• Strangely, these random posts are my most popular.
• Ya’ll are just weird.
• Or maybe it’s me.
• Don’t answer that.
• It’s been busy ’round here.
• We got a new roof.
• I’m still hyperventilating from writing that check.
• The kids are in swim lessons and loving every minute of it.  We go to the local university to the indoor pool.
• Speaking of indoor (great transition, wasn’t it?), G is doing great at indoor soccer!
• It’s so fun to watch him score a goal.
• No one is keeping score, it’s all for fun.
• Except for Chris, who is secretly keeping score.
• I wonder if all the daddy’s are doing that?
• My mom and dad (Nana and Pa) will be arriving tomorrow to visit for a week.  Yea!!!!!!!
• Because that means Mommy gets a break from playtime for a week.  Double yea!!!!!
• And….(drumroll please)….we have started kindergarten homeschooling!
• So far, G LOVES it!  He keeps asking to do more and more and more.
• He’s wearing me out, ya’ll.

Going Nowhere, Growing Up, Homeschool

Ah, Roma!  I was just beside myself in excitement to get to Rome.  As you can tell from my Pompeii post, it just thrills me to my toes to be able to see in person what I’ve only read about or seen in pictures before.  I was most excited to be able to see the Coliseum.

To back up a little bit, I wanted to admit to a slight fear of traveling in foreign countries.  We had been to England back in 2000 as large family trip of sorts and I loved it.  England was very easy to travel around with the trains and the Underground, not to mention the language minus the terminology differences.  It was the language similarity there that gave me a certain comfort level.  What I discovered is that it is really not so bad!  Italy was a very friendly place, the Italian terminology very easy to figure out, especially when you have a background of some Spanish.  The trains were, like England, very easy to navigate as was the Metro, also like England.  And cheap!  Relatively.

My entire goal in Rome was to see the Coliseum.

The Coliseum (and Larry's thumb's up)

What was amazing to me was the amount of ladies who toured rome and the treacherous ankle-twister streets of the ruins in high heels.  Just like this.

Random lady getting ready to tour ruins of Coliseum in heels. Yes, I'm shameless. And perplexed. My ankles hurt just looking at her.

The inside of the Coliseum.  It was everything I thought it would be.  I just loved being there.  Also a bit bittersweet, knowing that Christians were martyred in that place.

They built a replica of the floor at one end over the ruins of the tunnels underneath at one end of the Coliseum.

I personally liked the characters of the Roman gladiators here and there to appease the tourists.  Cheesy, if you ask me.  My favorite part, however, is when you catch them with baseball caps on.

Roman gladiators and baseball caps. Good stuff.

Oh, let me back up, we stopped by Trevvi Fountain first, as well as the Spanish steps.  Here is us in front of the Trevvi Fountain.  It’s huge and beautiful and CROWDED.

Trevvi Fountain or Fontana di Trevvi (I think?)

And the crowd…

Very crowded at the Trevvi Fountain. Lots of coin throwing.

Back to the ruins at the Coliseum.  We moved on to the Forums and other ruins.  Here, we walked through a park-like area and saw some of the aquaducts.  Chris loved that.  Here he is under part of it.

Chris under the aquaduct

We proceeded on to other areas.  We did not do a formal tour so I need to do more research on exactly what we saw.  I think this is us in front of the Temple of Apollo.  It was HUGE.

All the temples everywhere was very, uh, weird.  Being a family of Christian faith, it just felt so wrong and weird and I was thankful they were ruins.  The history was interesting.  I have some reading to do.

After walking and walking and more walking through Rome, we decided it was time to catch the train back to Civitavecchia to board our ship.  We really wanted to stop and see St. Peters and Vatican but there was limited time and foot power remaining.  It would have to wait for another trip back to Rome.  We really, really enjoyed seeing this amazing city and we know only touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we saw so we look forward to returning in the next five or ten years hopefully.

Next:  Florence!

Going Somewhere

Ick.

That’s how I would describe Naples, Italy, or Napoli.  We had heard from everyone that it was not really a very pretty city, and they were right.  Graffiti, trash, trash, and more trash was everywhere.  Decay, disrepair, heavy traffic, madness.  It was quite the busy place.  After being assaulted by tour salesman upon disembarkation and subsequently discarding my usual calm demeanor in response to their, ahem, forwardness, we made our way to the train station.

And made our way.  And made our way.  And maaaaaade our way.  It was a long ways.  Apparently the rule in Italy to crossing traffic at crosswalks it just to GO and don’t make eye contact with drivers and hope you stay alive.  That we did.  And we stayed alive.  Tiny cars zoomed and criss-crossed everywhere.  Parked in the tiniest places imaginable.  I missed the orderliness of the States, for sure.  I was much happier aboard the train.

Finally, after spending a only few Euros on a train ticket, we were Pompeii-bound.

Heading up the long steep hill into Pompeii. Would you believe people walked around there in their high heels? It was hard enough in our flip-flops and those weren't by choice!

Ah, Pompeii.  I have always loved studying Pompeii, as long as I remember.  Every time it came up in history class I was fascinated.  Basically, Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. and buried this Roman city under approximately 22 meters of ash.  It wasn’t rediscovered until the late 1500s and that was by accident.  Can you imagine?

My favorite spot in Pompeii. Just huge. I have no idea what it is, we didn't take a formal tour.

What surprised me the most about Pompeii was how incredible huge it was.  In all of our walking, I don’t think we even covered maybe 25-30% of it.  It was really huge.  I thought it was much, much smaller.  I was also surprised at the detailed architecture, the surprising bursts of color, and the detailed art and really how much of it just survived!  Not only did it survive almost 2,000 years but a volvanic eruption, excavation, and according to Wikipedia, almost 2.5 million visitors a year. Pretty amazing.

These columns were so TALL!! Amazing! It was a gorgeous day, too.

Walking down the streets was interesting all by itself.  There were sidewalks, I think, and crosswalks, and you could see wagon ruts, all deeply engraved in the giant cobble stones.  Fairly challenging to walk on – you had to be careful not to turn your ankle.  We all greatly missed our sneakers, we were dreaming of them arriving and actually being in our staterooms when we returned to the ship.  But back to Pompeii, I digress…

There were temples here and there, big houses, little houses, stores, pools, wall-ovens (we think).  Floor designs still intact.  We dodged giant tour groups as we went.

Oh this one really got to me...

There was a large covered barn-type building with urns and artifacts uncovered during excavation.  There were people found, but any in this building are just casts of the people, including a dog.  This man…well, this man just broke my heart.  The utter desperation in his pose as he prays…imagining him huddled in a corner as hell is raining down on him…  That was hard to process.

Did the people of Pompeii have the same flowers? Why not!

Again, the weather was just incredible there.  Beautiful flowers, too.  We could not have asked for better.

It's a king of the mountain thing, I think. Girls just don't do that stuff.

Mt. Vesuvius

Can you see the vivid blue back there? Isn't that remarkable?

They recently opened up one of the Roman baths there.  It was quite crowded with tour guides getting their groups in.  You had to be, ahem, bold to get in.  But Chris did and got some good pictures.  Here is one:

Roman bath

From here, we could look out over the more modern town and over into the Mediterranean.

From there, we caught the train back to Napoli and trekked back to our ship and quite a long trek it was.  Chris just googled the other night and found out there was a closer train station.  Thank you very much, RC, for an incorrect map.  *Sigh*  Ah, well.  Now we know!  We also later found out that we should have taken the train further out to Sorrento, seen that beautiful town, then taken the hydrofoil (boat?) back to the ship.  Apparently the ride up the coast was incredible and it would’ve taken us right to our ship.  Hindsight is 20/15.  :D

We arrived to our to no bags yet but they did arrive shortly after and we nearly had a party in our room at seeing them.  I ceremoniously threw my underwear I had been friendly with for so long into the trash can.  The upside?  I now had THREE outfits to choose from every day left of our vacation!  We headed to dinner and this was our view from our table.  Our assigned table was next to a wall of windows where every night we got to watch our ship pull out.  This night featured Mt. Vesuvius:

Mt. Vesuvius from our dinner table aboard the ship.

Tomorrow?  Roma!  Yea!!!

Going Somewhere

Day 4 – Day at Sea

Ahhhhhhhhh.  It’s amazing how much you appreciate clean clothes when they are actually clean. We quickly took up RC on their laundry voucher and got our clothes washed.  (Can I mention how weird it is to have someone else, a stranger, wash your under garments??)  After a brief mix-up of receiving someone else’s undergarments (presumably they lost their luggage as well), we received all our clothing and set out to make the best of it and enjoy the gorgeous day on the water.

And I mean gorgeous.

The weather was fantastic.  I think it was low 70s the entire time.  Disappointingly, the shipboard shops only had men’s swim trunks and not women’s swimsuits (figure that one out) so we were left with entertaining ourselves in other ways.  So, putt-putt anyone?

Putt-putt golf on the deck of the Voyager of the Seas. Islands in the background.

Chris aims for a hole in one.

Chris and Tara, on the Mediterranean

Dinner time in the Magic Flute dining room came around again.  So do we attend in our 4-day old clothing or not?  Why, yes, we did!  Was it formal night for the rest of the ship?  Why, yes, it was!  :D  We waltzed right in and sat down.  Everyone looked fabulous and we were mightily comfortable in our comfy clothes and stretchy waist lines.  We were even asked how one could attain the RC t-shirts we were wearing at Formal Night – the complimentary ones received when you lose your luggage.  Our response?

“You don’t want one of these t-shirts.”  There were several on-board with these shirts.  It was a special camaraderie that we shared.  All hoping and encouraging that we each received our missing luggage upon arrival in Naples/Napoli.   Chris is sporting his in the picture above.

The remainder of Formal Night was spent in The Pig and the Whistle Irish Pub with Christine leading Irish drinking songs.  And there were plenty of Irish folks on board the ship, too.  That makes for a VERY entertaining night!  I think we all miss Shane dearly.  We loved hanging out there.  I toasted with my glass of ice water and had a ball!  I was even drafted to play tambourine a few times, but let’s not talk about that.  :)

Another fun thing we got to do – talk to our family from my cell phone from the middle of the Mediterranean Sea! How cool is that??  They were in Washington D.C. for Thad’s Change of Command ceremony, walking down the Mall towards the Washington Monument, and we were in the middle of the Sea.  Just plain cool.  And it goes without saying that talking to the kids was an absolute highlight.

We have yet to see the phone bill.

Tomorrow – Napoli and Pompeii!  And hopefully….clean underwear!!  Yea!!!!!

Going Somewhere