Wednesday, April 30 - Florence

At breakfast I had loaded up my plate with pastries because I was tired of ham and cheese and then I realized they had eggs and bacon. I did end up eating that too. It was so good. After breakfast we met our guide for our 4-hour tour. We spent the entire morning at the Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens. We learned a lot of history about the Medici family and some interesting facts about some of the paintings in the Palatine gallery. There was one artist who was a 50 y/o priest that fell in love with a 18 y/o nun. They ended up getting married and then he caused a scandal when he used her as the model for a portrait of Mary and the baby Jesus. Afer we toured the Royal apartments, we went to the gardens, which were massive, 30,000 square meters. There were some steep hills in the gardens that had me out of breath in no time at all. The view of Florence and the Tuscany countryside was wonderful from the top. They had several fountaints that were in need of repair but it was easy to see how spectacular it would be if they were operating. We went back to the hotel for the bathroom and to re-group a bit so we could decide what to do with our afternoon. We decided to grab a sandwich and eat as we walked to the Accademia museum to the Michelangelo's "David." We almost opted to skip that but I'm glad we didn't. It was so massive and impressive. It was the sort of thing you could not stop looking at. The detail was unbelievable. Just so beautiful. Later we kept saying we couldn't believe we even thought about skipping that. From there we walked to the train station and bought a ticket for Pisa. Just before we got to the train station, we saw a woman on the sidewalk who had an "Awake!" tucked under her arm. Troy said, "Do you think she's a witness or do you think someone just gave that to her?" I had no idea of course. So Troy approached and said slowly in English while pointing to the magazine, "Is that yours?" The woman, "Yes, it's mine." She was a Brit, lol. Here Troy was worried she spoke only Italian. Come to find out she was a pioneer and she had been in Florence for 9 months helping out an English congregation. She said she and another sister had decided to "step over into Macedonia." {ha ha} But they were going home in a few days and she was so glad. She said she was sick of pasta and olive oil and fish and she was ready to eat some beef and potatoes! We chatted with her for maybe 10 minutes. She asked if we had heard the announcement about ending the small book studies. We had because my mother had called us the night before and told us. At that moment we could really appreciate how unified Jehovah's organization is. We got to the train station and went about trying to get some tickets. The train schedules can be very confusing to read, especially when some of the stations have over a dozen tracks. But we were getting good at figuring things out on the schedules and once we knew which train we needed, we just had to find a ticket counter. We found the counter and the lines were unbelievable. There was no way we would make it on the train we wanted in time if we waited in line. They have these machines where you can print out your own tickets and we were a bit nervous to try it and perhaps do it wrong and lose our money, but we watched some other people do it and it looked simple enough. So we printed out tickets there without incident and we were off. It took about an hour to get to the town of Pisa and then a taxi was needed to get to the tower itself. That was a crazy ride! I couldn't believe we got there without killing anybody! The tower was very cool. We took lots of pictures of it. We bought a ticket to go to the top. That was rough for me. I just can't handle a lot of climbing. I thought at first I would never make it. I had to stop and rest nearly every 15 steps. We did make it and I am glad we went. It was pretty at the top. When we got back to Florence it was late, about 9:30. We had planned to eat at the hotel but the menu was not appealing at all. We left headed to a restaurant recommended in a guide book but we got there 10 minutes before they closed. It was not enough time for them to cook for us. We did find supper but it wasn't that great. It filled us up though so that was okay. As we walked back to the hotel, we saw the "purse bandits." That's what Troy nicknamed them in Venice. It looks like a bunch of guys from Kenya selling these purses on the street. They carry them around in big trash bags. In Florence they were bold enough to display a few on the ground. Well the the police drove up and they scattered. They tried to pick up all the purses as they ran but there were two left behind. One cop ran to get those. He got one but one of the bandits got the other. Then from behind the cop another bandit ran by very fast and snatched the second purse out of the cops' hand. I couldn't believe how fast he was. They didn't run far, maybe to the next block and just stood there laughing at the police. We couldn't get over the fact that the police did nothing more.

16329 steps walked
6.482 miles
832.3 calories burned
2:33 hrs walked