What a wonderful day!

Well, this was indeed a lucky day.  We went to Codroipo first thing this morning where Joe's grandfather and grandmother were both registered at birth.

Below is a picture of the wheels that got us on our incredible search

After a cappuccino and a hot tea we began our search.

We managed to find BOTH the registrations which was amazing, all written out by hand.  The lady who was helping us, Miss Emanuela Ventola, translated a lot of the information for us.  They were actually both born in Zompicchia and we have their house numbers but not the street name.  They lived at 43, and 45, so we presume they were neighbours.
When the parents registered them, the custom in those days was to bring the baby with them, but they were too far away (2.3 kilometres) for them to do that, so they had to have a witness for verification.  Amazing to find all that out.  She gave us a copy of the registrations.

We then went to Zompicchia to look for the house numbers.  We walked and drove through all the streets but were unable to find them.  We did find the amazing cemetery and the church in the town.

We found a number of De Tina's in the cemetery but only 2 DeClara's. I guess the DeClara's were a hardier stock.

We also had lunch at the restaurant and it was strange to think that Joe's grandparents, great grandparents and other family members were right there years earlier.

In the afternoon, because it was so sunny and nice we decided to drive to Trieste on the far east coast of the Adriatic Sea.
We were so close to Slovenia that you could hit a 9 iron from Italy to Slovenia. (That would be a 5 iron for Norm and Wayne)
What a beautiful city (it was huge) but it got cloudy and did finally rain while we were there.  Oh well, we had already had a great day.  The city is on the side of the mountain so the roads were typically very winding.

Back home we couldn't find a restaurant so decided to bring back a McDonalds salad each and enjoy it in our room with some wine.  MMM Good.

A couple of notes about Italy:

First of all I don't know why they even bother putting turn signals in the cars because NOBODY uses them,  just the foreigners.  The trucks do use them though fortunately. The cars just whiz in and out wherever they want to go.  Pretty scary at times.

Second: Our GPS has done a wonderful job of getting us around.  The only problem is that she will say for example "turn right at Via Blah blah blah blah blah.  Well in the cities they do not post the names of the streets, just where it goes to.  So that is useless.  The towns seem to post the street names though.

Third:  Joe has done a great job of driving the gear shift car, watching out for crazy drivers, checking and following the GPS and navigating the narrow roads.  Also listening to me saying "watch out for this, or that, or the other thing.

Tomorrow, off south, down the Italian east coast to the Bristol Hotel in Pesaro, a city on the Adriatic.