An incredible two days

Yesterday saw the world finals of the Ferrari Challenge (the Pirelli Trophy and the Shell Cup) at the Mugello race track. We thought, based on Saturday's turnout, that it would be a fairly low key event. How wrong were we? The track is about 5 minutes drive from our house and about 3 minutes out, we saw people parking and walking. We had not prepared ourselves at all for what turned out to be a fantastic day at the race track.

To begin, we arrived 2 minutes before the flying start of the Ferrari final. As we parked ourselves on the grass hill about 100 metres from the start, the Ferraris roared through the start line and then, quite spectacularly, crashed. Big time. Right in front of us. Five cars (worth apparently a million each) written off. A huge adrenaline rush!

The race started again about 20 minutes later and was heaps of fun. I have to admit to not being that much into cars but watching Ferraris, in Italy, on a beautiful autumn day really did it for me! The kids loved it, the crowd was incredible, lunch was fantastic (roast beef bread rolls with vino rosso) and the weather was incredible - all in all a superb day. And Mathew and Ana are now so much into siestas, that we arrived home at 2.30 and they promptly fell asleep for 2 hours!

And when you think life can't get much better, today happened.

Firstly a quiet start with Ralph taking Ana on the weekly supermarket shop, while I worked on our family scrapbook with Mathew. Then we all drove into Florence, where there was not a cloud in the sky. We wandered around a market, ate EUR2.50 lasagna for lunch, drank some more vino rosso (EUR0.50 per glass!) then came back and "siested" (can I convert that into a verb?). When the sun started setting at around 5pm, we lit up the BBQ and started roasting chestnuts. We then mulled some red wine and sat outside as the sun set in front of us over Florence. And if that sounds cheesy, it really was. I had to pinch myself a couple of times...I hope these photos give you a sense of what the evening was like.

We are blessed - by what or whom I don't know but I'm feeling it!!