There will be another hiatus in the blog for the next couple of weeks, as we head to North America tomorrow for our annual “Parenti Tour”. Now, parenti means “relatives” in Italian. I guess we should switch to calling it the “Verwandte Tour”, since Verwandte means relatives in German and we live in Germany now. BTW, the title of this blog post is actually the expression, in German, that means “to visit relatives”.

But, we told our niece and nephews to continue to use our Italian “titles”, i.e., Zio (uncle) and Zia (aunt), rather than having them have to switch languages each time we switch countries, since they were so nice to humor us with the Italian when we first moved to Bolzano. So, I think I’m going to also stick with the Italian “parenti tour” for the name of this kind of trip, and then I don’t have to keep switching languages for everything with each move, either. 😉

Using that name also makes it easier if you’re curious about what we’ve done before on these trips, as there are categories of posts on the old 22bz blog that use Parenti Tour in the category name.

To get you started, here’s a link to my posts about our adventures on last year’s parenti tour: Parenti Tour 2011 Blog posts on 22bz.wordpress.com. and a link for the posts from the parenti tour in May 2010: Parenti Tour May 2010. I should note that not all photos display properly at the moment in the 2010 (and earlier) posts, but there aren’t that many parenti tour posts that have photos, actually. Mostly in those posts I have ramblings about how, for example, we couldn’t figure out things like how to order food at KFC, or Reflections on the Food in North America, etc.

Anyway, after 15 days in which we’ll visit states up and down the East Coast (OK, just 5 states total, but still, we have 2 flights in the U.S. alone to make to get to them all), we’ll be back in Tübingen the week of August 20th. Although in the past I have always had intentions of posting while we’re on the trip, it is rare that I have ever actually done it. So I’m not even going to say that I might do it this time. 😉 Instead, look for regular posts to begin again after August 22nd.