Tour de Italy

Greetings, blog followers! For this post, I'll talk about how we've been exploring Italian cities. That makes this post quite similar to the previous two posts, but this time there are bikes.

Lots of bikes.

Day One: Lucca

Lucca is an Italian town that is actually not on a hill. Instead, it has thick town walls as its method of keeping out intruders. Nowadays, however, the walls mostly serve as a pleasant walking and biking path with a view of the city inside.

The entrance to Lucca.

Yet another stop at a café.

A view from up on top of the town walls.

Biking on the town walls.

Lucca was once one of the region's most prosperous cities. Back in those days, one could tell how rich a city was by the color of their pasta. If the pasta was light-colored or completely white, it meant that the region was poor. If the pasta was very yellow, the region was very rich. Why? Because eggs, the ingredient that makes pasta yellow, were expensive. The more money you had, the more eggs you could afford, and the more yellow your pasta would be.

Day Two: Bike Tour

For the second day of our biking adventure, we took a long tour- several hours long, in fact- throughout some Tuscan countryside. We also got to tour a nearby winery.

Some of the wine barrels were... well, this. The size was just staggering.

Sorry there wasn't much to report on today. There won't be much tomorrow either, but after that, the third phase of our trip begins- and we're kicking it off with Paris, France. Hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for reading!

Aidan's Greek Myths

Episode Four: The Titan War

Zeus's side, the Olympians, attacked from Mount Olympus, while the Titans were based on Mount Orthrys. The resulting battle tore apart the valley between the two great mountains. Lightning rained down with explosive force while the hundred-handers threw huge boulders, and even mountains, at every Titan they could find. The sides were mostly evenly matched, but the Olympians were slowly wiping out Kronos's forces.

Just when it seemed that the battle was won, Kronos used the last of his strength to call forth the most horrible monster in existence: Typhon. Descriptions of him seem to vary, but some say the creature was akin to a gigantic humanoid with snakes for legs. It took every ounce of strength of all of the gods to finally seal the creature away, and even then, he was not completely defeated- instead, he was imprisoned under Mount Etna.

(Mount Etna is a mountain in real life as well as mythology. In fact, it is a highly explosive volcano, and the Greeks thought that its eruptions were actually Typhon's fire.)

After the gods finally sealed away Typhon, they were able to claim victory over the rest of the Titan forces. Kronos was cast into Tartarus, and Zeus became the ruler of the sky and the new highest god. His brothers, Poseidon and Hades, became the gods of the ocean and the underworld, respectively. The gods set up a palace on Mount Olympus, and a golden age came to the world.