O/T Ortona

[Gunner]

Hi Barry:

Firstly congrats on adding a daughter to the offspring collection!

I toured Italy when I was on leave from Bosnia. Put away your Canadian sense of scale... Italy is small by our standards; rent a car and you can easily see many sights in a week. If you don't go up to Venice (which the Canadians liberated) you will never live it down!

The best way to see the battlefields is to grab a couple of good histories and a Commonwealth war graves cemetary map (on-line). In three days I covered all the major battlefields and cemetaries as well as enjoying a coffee and sending postcards from San Marino (a small independant mountain country surrounded by Italy). Venice took a day on its own.

Your off on a great adventure... our achievements in Italy have always been overshadowed by the stuff going on further North!

Good luck and have fun! Mike