It’s our last day on vacation. Tomorrow we have to leave. Sad.  This morning started with a bit of a late start. Nashon enjoys his sleep.  After breakfast at the hotel, we started on our long walk across town.  The weather cooperated quite nicely. The day started with a light rain but by the time we got to the streets it was clearing up.  The sun was even showing through in places.

The walk was worth it. The Coliseum is beautiful.  We joined a tour just starting into the Coliseum.  Nashon enjoyed the history lessons, Jamie enjoyed the ruins. It was a win-win situation.  With the weather even sunnier, it was time to have a treat and relax before we tackled the Roman Forum and Palatine hill.  Jamie chose the largest donut ever made; it was almost a foot across. 

After the pick me up snack we were off to see the surrounding ruins.  The area must have been beautiful in its heyday.  The marble was all stolen during the renaissance for other things. The most prominent of these other things, is the Vatican.   Much walking and meandering over the hills around the Coliseum ended with a tired Jamie.  Nashons feet weren’t doing much better.  A taxi back to the hotel ended the day.  Tomorrow is a long flight home.

Woohoo, a day on the town in Rome, AND we had nice weather!.  The Vatican is our first stop today.   A nice long walk through town, stopping at Trevi Fountain, ended at St Peters Basilica.  We joined a tour for the Sistine Chapel because the tours line was much quicker than the general admission line.  They were recruiting people from the crowd, they were good sellers though.  It took almost 60 minutes for the tour to finally get moving, but the guide explained quite a bit about the Vatican while we were waiting.   The tour was nice, explaining the significance in certain paintings, statues, and tapestries.  The Sistine Chapel is gorgeous.  We learned that Michelangelo was completely full of himself, quite stuck up and demanding.  Even demanding certain concessions from the Pope himself. 

The tour ended at the entrance to St Peters Basilica Dome climb. It’s 551 stairs to the top of the dome.  Theres an elevator that will cut out 221 stairs but we opted to skip it and save the extra 2 euros.  What a climb. It’s all inside, some parts in narrow spiral staircases clearly made for smaller people. Nashons shoulders touched both sides at the same time.  Towards the top, the walls start curling inward and you end up walking with a 20 degree lean because we were now climbing in the dome itself.   The view of the city was beautiful. A nice breeze and a cool afternoon were needed after all those stairs!  We spent 20 minutes soaking up the views and then started the long climb down.

We took another taxi to Piazza Navona to have lunch.  Jamie really wanted to splurge on her lactose intolerance and have a pizza finally.   The Piazza was originally built in the 1st century for chariot races.  In the 17th century a Pope had the place redesigned and added in a fountain and church.  For a hundred years, every August, the piazza was flooded by stopping the fountain drains.  The rich would splash around in their carriages and the street urchins would paddle around.  For us though, it was in the middle of set up for a music festival.

We visited the Pantheon.  It has the largest dome in Rome.  While sitting outside admiring the building and the very large crowd, a bird flew overhead and let a present go.  This bird must have had GPS and laser guidance for its bomb.  It was a direct hit on Jamies glasses.  Some managed to get her in the eye, the rest ricocheted onto Nashons pants.  Fortunately for Jamie (and Nashons pants), this bird seemed to leave almost all water with a small amount of solids.  Jamie laughed so hard she cried.

We walked slowly back towards our hotel and enjoyed some of the quieter side streets.  Jamie didn’t care for the pizza she had at lunch, so we had an early dinner at a nice restaurant.  This time the pizza was tasty and the outdoor table we had was nice.  The rest of the evening was the stroll back to the hotel and dropping our shoes as fast as we could. Our feet were very tired!

Today was our last morning in Florence, and the first day we’re out of our room by 8am.  We had breakfast and caught the first train to Pisa.  After winding our way through the city, we arrived at the Duomo and Tower of Pisa.  Jamie was quite disappointed, as the Tower was not nearly as impressive or large as it was supposed to be.  Against his better judgment, Nashon did get the typical picture taken with the tower (though he’s pushing it over instead of holding it up).  The grounds, along with the Duomo, baptistery, and Tower were simply beautiful, though very crowded with families and classes.  We took a million pictures of the tower, and opted to not climb it (the cost would have been about US$50).  We got back to the train station with 2-minutes until the next train back to Florence where we picked up our luggage which we had stored at the train station, and boarded a train to Rome.  We made the train only because it was running about 10-minutes late, and found that we had needed prior reservations for the ride (after we had taken off of course).  After paying the train attendant (who appeared very patient with us), we got to sit back and enjoy the train ride full of 8-10 year old kids making a lot of noise.  Rome has some of the craziest drivers!  It’s like they haven’t discovered how to put lines on the roads to separate cars, so no one knows how to stay in their own lanes.  We’ll leave the driving to the taxi cabs and locals.  We walked to the Spanish Steps which aren’t far from our hotel, but the wind picked up, so we retired early after dinner for a video in bed.  We’re hoping for better weather tomorrow.

Today was a wet and yucky day in Florence.  We had very little on our “to do” plate, so decided to try and sleep in a bit.  Instead, we were woken up by the herd of elephants that ran up the stairs past our door to the breakfast room; one person even tried to open our door!  We made it out the door and stood in line at the Uffizi Gallery for about two hours.  While in line we did chat with the nice young couple behind us in line; they were from Florida.  After 2 hours of waiting we got in and said good-bye (they got an audio tour), and went our separate ways.  After that much talking, we still don’t’ know what their names were.  We took a couple of hours to walk through the museum where we got to see works of art from Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Leonardo Da Vinci.  We took a short break mid tour for a snack, and sat outside under an umbrella to not get wet from the downpour happening around us.  We decided that there is something about the weather on this trip; it seems to rain when we have no plans to be outside, and nice and warm on the days that involve walking and hiking.  After the 4-5 hours here, we felt we didn’t have enough time to fully enjoy the Pitti Gallery for the price, and decided to skip it for this trip.  We walked around Ponte Vecchio and looked at a few more art galleries and found ourselves back at the place from yesterday.  We bought another painting!  The frame is being custom made, and should be delivered to our house in about 20-25days.  After this, Jamie was very tired, so we went to the hotel and took a nap for about an hour before enjoying our last meal in Florence.   We both had dessert, and decided perhaps we should start with it next time, as it was simply divine (chocolate ice cream in brandy for Nashon, and flan for Jamie).  Tomorrow is off to the Tower of Pisa and a train ride to Rome.

Today started with a bit of a late start after a visit to the tourist stop at the train station to talk about our trip to Pisa and Rome on Wednesday.  Then we got to the activities for the day.  We walked to one corner of the city to see San Marco Cathedral.  This, like many of the other churches, wouldn’t allow us to take photos.  We decided it was way over priced, but it had a beautiful bibliotheca with books with gold pounded pictures in them.  We got to see a variety of frescoes and statues, the monk quarters, and some of the garments from hundreds of years ago.  Nashon is still stuck on the idea of having a house big enough to have a courtyard (they really are pretty).  Then we walked to another corner of the city to see Cappella Brancacci Cathedral.  However, they require reservations, the earliest of which was at 4:15pm.  So instead of trying to make it to the other church and back, we wasted 90 minutes walking around this end of town.  Nashon discovered that cappuccino was much cheaper when out of the center of the city (and now he isn’t going to buy them at the caf? for lunch anymore).  This church (when we finally got in), was simply breath taking.  They DID allow photos without flashes, so we took a few.  The chapel was simply beautiful, but we weren’t allowed into most of it (unless we waited till 5pm to go in when the church opened for services).  So we trekked across the city to climb another mountain (not nearly as big or hard as the ones in Germany) to see San Miniato al Monte.  This cathedral is on the hill outside of Florence, and was built as a tribute to an early christian martyr, built on the place where he fell after being executed.  We got to listen to some monks singing during a service, and saw more beautiful paintings on the walls.  The marble inlays on the floor were simply wonderful.  We walked a short distance to Piazzale Michelangelo to see more breath taking views of the city from above.  We sat and watched the sun fall in the sky and clouds roll in, and decided to walk back to town to find dinner.  It was a beautiful sunny day, full of walking and beautiful art and history.  It was simply wonderful.

Compared to Deidesheim this place is a zoo. We were up and out of the hotel about 10am and the streets were filling quickly. So far so good!
Today was our first full day in Florence, Italy.  In our exploration of the city, we learned a few things:

1. Compared to small town Germany, Florence is a dirty dirty dirty city.
2. Some museums don’t open until the afternoon on Sunday.
3. Turns out everything is closed on Mondays in this city.
4. Tourism isn’t so bad when you’re looking a menu written in English.
5. It is harder to find dairy-free food here than in Germany, despite being able to read the menus.
6. When in doubt, join a line (we saw a pretty church that appeared to be closed to the public, but there was a line near by with a sign that said “free entrance”.  Turns out the line was part of a 2-day special event allowing tourists and locals into the inner courtyards of the beautiful church).
7. Most of this city appears to be older than the 16th century (Renaissance was good to this city).
8. We learned they glue the paper onto the gelato cones (Nashon learned it tastes gross when you know it’s there but still eat it).
9. They have more knock off hand bags for sale here than in China (including right in front of the actual Gucci store).

We spent the morning just walking around, and getting lost and finding ourselves again.  We visited the “old bridge”, Ponte Vecchio, where stores were built on the edge of the bridge (and out over the river), where we looked at some very pretty jewelry.  Nashon said it might be fun to buy Jamie some jewelry instead of an art piece as our souvenir.  From there we walked along the water to Palazzo Vecchio where we had lunch and enjoyed a cappuccino for our friend Kathryn (who used to live here).  We also visited the Duomo (St. Mary’s Cathedral), where we purchased a pretty print of the building.  Nashon really wanted to go to the Galleria dell’ Academia where we saw Michelangelo’s David, among other statues and paintings.  We walked from here to get gelato and walk through the San Lorenzo Market (man, there are a lot of knock off merchandise in this country)!  From here we started to look for dinner, and to waste some time before going home when we saw the Santa Maria Novella church and walked over to take some pictures.  This is where we had nothing better to do, and joined a near by line.  This line took us through the inner courtyards of the church to see all of the frescoes that were painted 400-500 years ago; many of them outside in direct sunlight.  Nashon commented that they were in great condition for being so old and exposed to the elements; sorry, no pictures allowed here either (a theme in many of the museums in this town).  We finished our night with a divine dinner at a local restaurant called “Il Porcospino”, where Jamie cheated on her no-dairy diet and enjoyed the BEST lasagna ever.  Even with many of the museums closed tomorrow, the day should be full and quite fun (though even more tiring for our poor feet).

Today has been a most uneventful day.  We woke up to the most rain we’d seen since arriving in Germany, and “enjoyed” the walk in the rain to the train station; we were on trains the entire day.  We caught the first train in Deidesheim at 8:30am, then Neustadt, to Karlsruhe.  Then a long train over the border into Bern, Switzerland.  We got a very pretty view of the Swiss Alps from the train, and even tried to take a few pictures through the windows; we’re hoping they turn out alright!!!  We also kept our eyes open, and we think we saw Heidi’s house!!  Though we were unable to agree on which side of the German/Swiss border it should have been on.  While on the train from Bern to Milan, we finally found lunch (train food is only a slight step up from plane food), crossed another border and changed trains yet again in Milan.  The final leg of our trip was the three hours spent on the train from Milan to Florence, arriving at 7:44pm.

Unlike the last arrival, we found our hotel while there was still someone at the front desk!  In fact, there is someone there 24-hours a day; we know this because they don’t want us taking the key out of the building, leaving it at the front desk until we return instead.  A quick dinner at McDonalds (yes, McDonalds was close, cheap, and open…), and we retired to our room to plan the next day’s adventures.  It should be nice to be within walking distance of many of the sights here in Florence.