Florence and Pisa

Right now I'm looking at the beautiful Italian sun kissed countryside from my train window as we head back to port. It looks like something from wine bottle label. It's interesting how the trees and country look so distinct in different places. Even southern France and northern Italy have their own countryside that's obviously distinguishable from each other. I would say even Rome and Florence are different.

Florence ended up feeling a little more rushed than I wanted it to be, but what did I expect with all the stuff I planned? We went to Pisa in the morning, and after an unfortunate misguidance from the cruise staff, ended up on the wrong bus which put us in much later than I wanted to be, but we got where we needed to be in the end. We walked around the Field of Miracles and took pictures of the leaning tower of Pisa for a while, and then headed to Florence. The real David at the Accademia was not a disappointment. Some works of art make me wonder why they are so famous, but David is not one of them. He really is a masterful statue. After that we did the RS renaissance walk down the main drag of Florence, which was really the rush of the day unfortunately. I really liked Piazza Signoria, with its history, fountains, statues, and buildings, but I wish I would've had more time to sit around and eat gelato there or something. The Ponte Vecchio was so picturesque, and we strolled up and down the bridge and stopped to look out on the city, probably my favorite stop of the day. After we squirreled the Uffizi gallery, which was more like a drive by, which I'm totally ok with. We saw the main most famous art pieces, and at this point I'm kind of museumed out. We've seen all of the greatest works of art in the history of the world in the Lourve, Orsay, Accademia, Uffizi, Vatican, and others in castles, churches, and other places in two weeks. I'm excited to just bike around and stroll through the rest of our cities without a hit list or anything.

Florence was clean, bright, and exciting and I feel like there could have been a few more days of wandering there for us. Maybe someday well make our way back.

At the end of the day Garrett and I take great satisfaction in going over the days expenses and comparing what we paid to the cost of what we would have paid of we'd taken the overpriced ship excursions. We did a little better in Rome, where we paid about 1/8 of what it would've cost to do even the most basic tour, and even got to do and see much more than those offered. For some reason Florence transportation ended up adding up way more, and we only had a 50% savings. Darn. Haha, but I feel really satisfied that even though we did rush it, we saw everything we wanted to and got a surrounding area tour in the back of a taxi in the end which was really nice, and did the whole thing for a great price.