The Great Hallelujah Holiday Tour of Churches

This past Saturday, hubby and I attending this years Hallelujah Holiday Tour of Churches.  Despite the fact that it rained the whole day.  There were about 300 of us in attendance.  This annual tour includes beautiful old historic churches in downtown Columbus.  I wonder if other cities have something similar?  At each location someone told us a bit about the history of the church and there was a musical selection or two.  

The first church was First Congregational Church, built in 1931.  Of the four churches, it was the newest; but historically the one that I enjoyed learning about the most.  Located at 444 E. Broad Street.

Look at the beautiful pipes in this large organ.  This is one of two organs in this church.  One also in the back of the church in the balcony area.  The style of this church is Late Gothic Revival, and the  architect, John Russell Pope also designed The Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.  He was joined with a local architect, Howard Dwight Smith, who designed Ohio Stadium.  Both men are quite noteworthy, as are the buildings they designed.

The wood carving was beautiful and the stained glass window breathtaking.  I imagine on a day with sun out instead of rain, the light coming through this goregous window would be even more spectacular.  

But what made this church so remarkable to me, it's it's history.  On Sept 24th in 1852, 42 members of the then 2nd Presbyterian Church who were abolitionist, decided they could no longer remain with the congregation.  So with a loan of $1,000.00 started a new church.  Their church was The 3rd Presbyterian Church.  The movement and the church grew, and a new location and new building built.  The also decided the needed a new name, and thus became First Congregational Church.  Through multiple leaders and locations and growth the church always remained keenly involved with social justice issues.  

In 1882 Dr. Washington Gladden led the church.  The many years he led the Church are referred to as The Gladden Years.  He preached a regular sermon and always had a 2nd sermon where he taught and spoke about issues of the day, like proper treatment of Black Americans, proper treatment of workers period.  As a result, The Washington Gladden Social Justice Park was dedicated in his honor and memory, quite recently On Oct 28th, 2018.  This park is the first Social Justice Park in the country.  We plan to return to read all plagues on a day when it's not raining.  The park is next door to The Church.

**Please return to read about the other 3 churches on this wonderful tour, check to see if you have something similar in your area.  AND....yes, I will be getting back to posting about Italy, but given the time of the year...the posts about this Christmas Tour of Churches seems most appropriate.



PLEASE leave me a comment when you come visit, so I know you were here. Your visits and comments are very special to me.

Travel Pot and Running Through the Airport

This is a travel hot pot.  The converted-- I hope you can see has lots of variations so you're good with many types of plugs as you travel.  

A close up of the plug, plus you can see you even have a cover for plug at the end of the cord so it doesn't poke through your luggage...AND, look at the pot.  All nestled in a 4 inch pot.  The pot collapses into itself.

It holds enough water for 2 cups of hot water to make tea or coffee or oatmeal, or hot chocolate in your hotel room.    I was in search of this right after arriving home from Italy.  Unlike Ireland and Scotland, we did not have any coffee service in any of our hotel rooms in Italy.  We like to have a cup while getting dressed and organized for the day.  So, wherever we travel next, we are ready!

Now I need to find appropriate cups that will do well with travel.

And to leave you with a smile.  How's this for a routine on the treadmill?  LOL, seriously if you've not felt this way at some airport during your travels it's miracle.



I'll be returning to posting more about our wonderful trip to Italy with Insight Vacations, so please pop back in.

PLEASE leave me a comment when you come visit, so I know you were here. Your visits and comments are very special to me.

Day 8 Continued, Verona

The City of Verona is the 2nd time we've needed to leave the coach outside the city limits, and seek alternative transportation.  Well actually, the 3rd time.  Once we were able to walk, once we took the train in Pisa and here...apparently the city bus is the transportation.  We're milling about the parking lots while our guide pays for the 40 of us to get in line for the ride into the town center.

Verona has a working Coliseum.  The Arena di Verona built back in the 1st century is still used for life performance, Opera's.  It's located in the Piazza Bra

It's quite large.  We did not tour, but ventured on.  

Verona has interesting architecture throughout the city, but is probably best known for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  However..........

 Juliet's balcony....What a tourist trap.  Our guide said...I have to take you there, it's part of the "deal".  Then you're on your own, meet back at...whatever our appointed time was to get the city bus again back to the parking lot to our comfy coach.  The wee little balcony you see, speculation has it or perhaps folk lore that this could have been "The Balcony".  However, there isn't proof, or documentation to support that.  It's crowded, as you can see, the courtyard with people reminded me of the scene from Animal House when the drum major leads the band into a dead end alley.

There is no plague, or historic marker to tell you this is something special.  There's lots of notes and graffiti to the left under vines.  The bricks were getting destroyed by notes left..often stuck on with chewing gum.  So the city decided they needed to do something and put up wooden boards and when a panel is full of notes, they remove it and add another panel.  You're suppose to leave a note to Juliet.  It's suppose to be romantic.  One article indicated you could tour the house and stand on the balcony, another article indicated they no longer permit people to stand on the balcony.

 These two pictures aren't photo's I took, but those on line (wiki), where you  get a better feel for the graffiti.

We spent maybe 3 minutes there.  What a huge disappointment!!  There used to be a bronze statue of Juliet, and it was said to be good luck if you rubbed her breast (not making this up, honest).  The statue was getting worn down so was removed and is in a museum.

We decided to explore a bit and Wondered who was being honored here.

Google tells me it's Flavio Tosi, the Mayor of Verona.  Apparently he served the community/area in multiple capacities.  The assumption is, he must have been well liked.

Verona is a medieval town, and it might have been worthwhile to spend time looking around at the buildings, a Basilica perhaps, but we're now off on our comfortable coach making our way to Venice!

I've stressed the words comfortable coach in this post twice...why, because people kept calling it a bus and our driver and tour guide would correct them and say coach..........after taking the city bus to the town center............I see why.  Our comfortable coach was like business class compared to the city bus.

PLEASE leave me a comment when you come visit, so I know you were here. Your visits and comments are very special to me.

Day 8, Wine at Contadi Castaldi

Yawning, as you can see by our bulletin board note...we're scheduled for an early morning departure from Lake Maggiore.  Bags out at 6:45, breakfast starts at the same time and we're to be on the coach at 7:45 am, ready for departure.

Welcome to day 8.  Our tour guide posted signs like this every day on the bulletin board at each hotel, so incase we forgot what he told us, we always had a reference.

Our itinerary for the day says we're following the southern fringes of the European Alps to the vineyards, close to the shores of Lake Iseo.

The purple twins for the day, perked right up at the sound of wine, vineyard, and snacks.  See how ready Jeanie and I are!  We've shaken off the sleepy early morning start and have disembarked the coach to Que up for wine tasting.  

But, before we get to drink the wine, this good looking guy wanted to talk to us.  LOL  He really did have all the ladies attention, as he described the process and location (see maps behind him), about this vineyard.

 We continued on with the promise of getting to taste the wine.

 He even showed us how they rotate the bottles, explaining as the process continues the need to tip the bottle more comes into play and these special wine racks help accomplish that task....even though they are manually turned...one bottle at a time.

 Back upstairs, I spot some rather large wine glasses!

 The tasting room was quite pretty with flowers about

Glasses and bottles a plenty lined up....can we have a drum roll.

We enjoyed our tour and wine tasting at Contadi Castaldi, and now it's time to board the coach and make our way to Verona,  O Romeo, Romeo wherefore art thou Romeo?

PLEASE leave me a comment when you come visit, so I know you were here. Your visits and comments are very special to me.

Day 7 Lake Maggiore Continued

Day 7 Lake Maggiore Continued.  In the previous post you saw pictures of The Church, and The Square.  Though these are quite faded, I thought it still nice that they exist.

I did photo graph all 13 stations, but will share just a few.

I spotted this in this square and photographed, so I could look it up later.  Giovanni was in an Alpine regiment, and was taken prisoner by The Germans/Nazi's.  He died in a prison camp and 73 years later he was repatriated here in Baveno, the place of his birth.  I believe the sign was to let people know the ceremony would be here the following Sat.  We were there on Sept 23rd, and the ceremony to honor him was the 29th of September.

**While this video is in Italian, you can see how pleased town folks were to honor him and his family.  He was awarded a medal.  It appears the ceremony took place in the little church we visited (please see previous post).

What a nice explore we had!

We met up with the tour group again in the lobby of the hotel at the appointed hour to disperse for dinner.  Menu's had been passed around the coach on our way to Lake Maggiore and folks selected where they wanted to dine (included meal), based on the 3 menu's.  

Our group was the largest of 3 groups, but I'm not sure based on the reports from each group about dinner we choose as well as the other 2 groups.  They had some outside tables, but our reservations took us indoors.

To a back room with no windows, and it was quite stuffy.  We did finally get them to turn on the fans.  We were sitting at one really long table which made it difficult to talk well with everyone.  It wasn't a great meal, but wasn't bad either.  We had a really good time with our group.  But the reports from the other 2 groups...sounded like their meals might have been better.  One was there at the hotel and they said they had so many courses they couldn't eat it all (ours wasn't that filling), the other group sat outside on a very pretty patio and said it was such a nice evening and such good food.  Some in our group made their selection of this location because it served rabbit.  We selected it because it had Tiramisu for desert, lol.

Returned to our rooms and sat on our patio's.  Several of us were next door to each other.  Had a night cap while we watch fireworks!  They were fantastic out over the water.  Tomorrow up early, and back on the coach making our way to Venice with a stop in Verona.