The Talmadges European Vacation

Post by Jonah and Thomas In Arles (southern France) we went to a bull game. There was a big Roman arena in Arles where they held bull fights. They weren’t actually fighting the bull, they were just playing with it. The goal of the sport was to get some string that was atatched to the bull’s horn. The bull would get pretty mad and charge at the people trying to get at its horn. One time, one of the bulllfighters fell as he was running away from the bull. He curled up into a ball to protect himself from the angry bull. He ended up being okay but it was pretty scary to watch. Even though they are dangerous, the bull games are actually fun to watch. We liked it so much that we went three times. It was especialy exciting when the bull jumped out of the ring. When this happened, all the bystanders had to hide behind boards or jump into the arena. It was a nice thing to do while we were in Arle.

Post by Thomas In the span of three days we went on two very different boat rides! One of them was a boat tour on the Mediteranean to see the Cinque Terre coast. And the other was a gondola ride through the water ways of Venice. On the Cinque Terre coast we got to see the cliffs, mostly made of sandstone, which apparently leads to landslides, especially during the winter when it rains. Also on the bottom of the cliffs we saw many caves; the driver of our boat even took us part of the way in to a cave.

Posted by Thomas I n Ven ice we had free time and decided to go to the park. We brought our soccer ball with us to kick around. We tried to play alone on a part of the path but it didn’t work very well. Then we decided to go to another part of the park. There turned out to be some Italians playing pick-up soccer there. The older ones, named Galileo and Tomas, spoke a little english so we were able to join without too much trouble. We played with them them for a few hours before it got too hot and they had to go home. All in all, it was a pretty fun way to spend an afternoon.

Posted by Thomas One of the fun things we've done on this trip is ride a scooter in the Alps! The thing I liked about it was that it was mostly all downhill which made it easy to go really fast. You might be thinking that going fast down a curvy mountain path would be dangerous. Well, it wasn't all that bad because the brakes on the scooters worked very well.  Here is a picture of me and Jonah on our scooters: Stay tuned for live action video that my dad shot with a GoPro! And here is that video (sped up to improve your viewing enjoyment): One more thing--if you're ever in the Swiss Alps and want to ride a Scooter, you should know that they call them Trotti Bikes.

 Posted by Jonah Today we decided to take a short hike up to Reichenbach Falls. Little did we know, a thunderstorm was on its way. After we’d taken the funicular (train on a mountainside pulled by a cable) to the top, we began to hear thunder in the distance. We decided to continue and, right as we entered the trees, it started pooring down rain. It got steadily worse, and even started hailing. Suffice to say, we made it back home. But not without getting thoroughly drenched. Here are some pics of the storm: