Pisa

Friday 6/19/09
Today has been another day full of travel. We woke up early in Venice and caught a water bus towards the train station. We made a quick stop at the Rialto Market to pick up another couple croissants and a kilo of cherries. They were so wonderful yesterday we had to have more. Then we got to the train station, and got on a train to Florence. We reached Florence around lunch time, and found our hotel with no trouble. The room is the nicest we have stayed in so far, which is good because we are here for several days. The only snag is the “wifi access in every room” advertisement that they have on the web, means pays us outrageous fees to use the wifi in your room. So even though I’m writing this now, it may not get posted for a few days. We’ll be keeping and eye out for café’s that have wifi access, but I’m not hopeful that it will happen before Rome. After checking in, we unloaded our stuff, and went back to the train station to board a train for Pisa. Along the way we bought lunch at a shop just down the street from our hotel. We were quite pleased to find that the food was very good, and significantly cheaper then Venice, yay Florence! Once in Pisa we walked for about a half hour to get from the train station to the tower and dome. We went on a tour of the dome, but the cathedral was closed. We were also very excited to find that they are once again letting tourists into the tower. So we climbed several hundred stairs, after paying primo dollar, to have a view from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa. It’s the kind of thing that you really have to do, even though it’s expensive, because it’s once in a lifetime kind of thing, the kind of thing that you can tell your kids about some day when the thing collapses, which I am certain it will do in my lifetime. It is leaning significantly more then I remembered, and that’s after a project done to try and correct some of it’s tilt. We also spent a little time relaxing in the shade of the tower, eating a gelato, which made both of us feel a little refreshed. We seem to be going through water at a quazi alarming rate, and yet both still feel dehydrated at the end of the day. I don’t know what it is about Italy, but the combination of heat, sun, humidity, and constant walking around seems to be draining us quickly. Coming back on the train from Pisa was the first time on this trip that I felt like maybe 3 weeks was too much. We both seem to have hit a wall, and are much more easily exhausted then we were only days before. Tonight we’re crawling into bed at 9:30pm, something we haven’t done all trip. Hopefully with a little more rest tonight, we will be energized to face tomorrow.