Visitors From Afar...

About a month ago, I got an email from Uncle David asking if he could visit us while visiting the USA.  Uncle David lives in Italy with his wife (Auntie Valentina) and son (cousin Lorenzo).  The answer was of course a HUGE YES.  I haven't seen him since I was in high school.  It wasn't long before Uncle emailed me his flight info and would be arriving in just a few short weeks.  I can't even begin to explain how beyond excited and nervous I was to visit with them.  For those of you that aren't well informed, my mother and I don't speak.  We haven't since I was 16 years old.  Uncle David is my mother's brother.  He moved to Italy around the same time that things went bad between my mother and I.  He and the rest of my mother's family stayed "out of it" and time just began to pass by ever so quickly.  Living in an entirely different country makes it very tough to stay in touch never mind that I live far away from the rest of the family making it hard to visit us when he did visit the family in the states over the years. 
Their visit was short but it didn't matter how long they were here, just that they came!  They arrived late Friday afternoon, poor Lorenzo got a bit sick in the air.  So they didn't make it over to the house until 7pm for dinner.  Luckily, by that time Lorenzo was feeling much better.  After dinner, we visited with each other while the kids played some video games.  Dillon was on cloud 9, since Lorenzo is only a year older than him.  The evening ended with plans to enjoy the entire next day together.  My in-laws and brother in law made it over for lunch, so they too could meet everyone.  After lunch, we left the younger kids with the in-laws and went to Arizona Mills Mall.  We went through the Sea Life Aquarium and then went to see The Bourne Supremacy.  Apparently movie seeing in Italy, isn't anything like movie viewing in the States.  After the movie got out, everyone was hungry for dinner (mind you it was 9:30pm at this point).  We ended up across the street at Aunt Chalidas.  A very tasty Mexican restaurant.  By the time we got home, it was close to 11pm and everyone was ready for bed from such a long fun day.  Sunday was their last day in Arizona.   They needed to leave for the airport around 11:30am and since they like to sleep in, they had just enough time to stop by and say their good-byes.  We all were so sad to have to see them leave.  They had just gotten here but we understood they had many more places and people to visit before returning home to Italy! 

 

I can't thank my uncle enough for squeezing a visit to Arizona into a very full travel schedule!  We hope they comes back to visit soon.