Italy and a contest

The husband and I just came back from a week long trip to visit his family in Italy. Whenever we make the trek out there, we usually spend the bulk of our time with his family and in his hometown. When vacation time is so limited, it's hard to justify taking time for ourselves. Still, we managed to steal away for two days and visit Cinque Terre - a series of 5 cliff hugging villages on the Ligurian coast connected by a 5 mile hiking trail. We've meant to go for a while, but the weather, or family obligations, have always conspired to keep us away in the past. But this time the weather was perfect and the family obliging. We stuffed ourselves with seafood and with lemon gelato. Apparently, the carefully terraced cliffs are teeming with olive and lemon trees. Human ingenuity has managed to transform a tricky landscape into a place of bounty. The town I liked best was Vernazza, the second village on the trail:


In other news, my brother's first Threadless design has debuted in their store:

And to celebrate his first (and hopefully not last) Threadless design, I'm holding a contest. Just leave a comment and I'll pick one at random to receive a shirt in the size of his/her choice. I know, I'm boring. I can't think of something more clever than that and at the same time, I don't want anyone to feel they have to jump through hoops, so I'm making this easy peasy. Of course, you can leave a comment even if you don't want to enter the contest. Just indicate your disinterest in the comment and I'll try to mitigate my brother's heartbreak ;)

ETA: I just realized I didn't impose a deadline for the contest. I'll keep the contest open until I next post. Since my posts seem to be pretty infrequent these days, the contest should be open for a couple of weeks.