Picture Us Here

All right friends, I am breaking the news to those of you who haven't heard. I never ever, ever, ever thought that I would be saying this any time soon but can you picture us here? Because we are going to Italy! We won't be going until June '09 but hey, were going! This little development all came about due to James' board position with Mali Rising Foundation. Mali Rising builds schools in Mali West Africa and James became a board member through his affiliation with Daily Dose and friendship with Executive Director Yeah Samake. So anyway, your probably wondering how this all turned into a dream trip to Italy. Every year the foundation has a fundraiser dinner auction. Well, not long ago James enlisted one of our good friends to become a board member as well and consequently they attended the dinner with us.

Anyway, the auction got pretty exciting this year because they had some really great stuff to auction off, one of which was a 7 day trip to Italy staying at a converted convent in Umbria Italy. If you can believe it this is actually where we will be staying. It is called Levigne (levigne.net if you want to check it out) and it is a old convent that sits on 15 acres of olive groves. We will be the only guests on the premises and will have our use of the pool, bocce and tennis courts, gardens, and Italian cooks. Umbria is located in central Italy not far from Rome, Tuscany, Pisa and all kinds of other amazing places.

So anyway, James and I usually purchase some artwork to support the foundation and had already done so in the auction. James was up front assisting the auction when they began auctioning the Levigne trip. The bidding started pretty high. It got lower and lower and lower and surprisingly no one was bidding. That's when in the heat of the moment our friend's hand shot up and we all gasped. He'd done the math quickly in his head and realized that it was the deal of a lifetime for this kind of trip. He won the trip and yelled to James, "You wanna go to Italy!" You can probably figure out what James said. Luckily the company gave us oodles of time in which to use the trip package, so we decided we would take it in June of 2009. That will give us plenty of time to save and dream. Ciao!