One of the surprises we had from our Italy trip this last March was that the Milan transit system had adopted tap-to-pay for tickets. A fine idea, but we found out the hard way that you can’t buy two tickets on the same tap credit card. We only had one (our second credit card didn’t have tap-to-pay), so we scrambled to figure out how to buy an actual ticket.

I didn’t want to get caught by that again, so I ordered a replacement card for my card that didn’t have tap-to-pay on it, figuring that all major credit cards would have the technology now. I was wrong. The replacement cards still didn’t have it, and my last-second attempt to get a different card with tap-to-pay on it didn’t work in that the cards didn’t arrive in time.

And so we found ourselves facing the Stockholm transit system. A system that implemented single-user tap-to-pay for on-board tickets. You can buy a transit card that has credit on it to tap, but on Sunday the stores that sell them don’t open until 10:30, and we were ready to go places a little after 9:00. And so it was that we made the decision to enjoy the sunny day and walk forty-five minutes to our first destination of the day.

That was a nice choice. We walked along the water (is it a harbor if there keep being more water places where boats tie up?), and Stockholm didn’t disappoint, with varying views of the water, some parks, built-up islands, the amusement park, and tasteful old architecture. It was great looking around at the sights, and seeing people out enjoying a beautiful weekend day. The only downside for this fair-skinned (pasty) lad was the sun. It beat down on us the entire way, so that by the time we got to our destination, the sun exposure and jet lag had quite tapped me out.

But we had made it to the grand original open-air folk museum, Skansen. Founded in 1891, Skansen was the very first museum to move farm buildings, old schools, churches, tradespeople’s buildings, and so on, from various parts of the country to one location. The goal was to preserve the buildings from an older time when those buildings were giving way to modern ones. Skansen has been highly successful at it, now occupying 300,000 square meters of land (a football field? Rhode Island?) with 190 buildings on site.

Meredith I have been to enough folk museums in the US and in Europe to have seen enough buildings to house most of the peasant population of Poland, and we are fond of them. So, it was a sort of pilgrimage to go to the original one here in Stockholm. It amazes me that there are seventy-five acres inside the city limits on high ground overlooking the water that remain as a museum for old buildings. The 1890s Swedes were a bit visionary.

The museum greeted us with a steep uphill climb, but that was an opportunity in the form of the ever-loved funicular. This one was the first we’ve ever been on that curved around a bend on the side of the hill (they’re usually straight). We’re always happy to ride a funicular, and this one dumped us out at the top of the hill, in the “forest region of northern Sweden.” Mer, who was in charge, skipped that section to go to the central area (where the food and merchants are) to scout out touring options. Along the way, she let me rest on a bench in the shade while we watched geese and goslings wander around. Since these weren’t Canadian geese, we dubbed them Norwegian geese instead. The goslings were cute fat little fluffballs.

The museum has several sections, all arranged around the central hub. We started in the stage area with a great view of the water and amusement park. We then explored, in halting steps interrupted by demonstrations and lunch, the Town Quarter, a little bit of the garden area, the Northern Swedish Farms, the Southern and Central Swedish Farms, and the Nordic Animals mini-zoo (which takes up a good chunk of the north of the park for large animal enclosures). All of this took us from 10:00 to 5:00, in typical Riordan museum touring fashion. See it all! (Or, at least, most – even in seven hours, we skipped a couple of buildings).

We also saw a blacksmith demonstration, hosted by a woman. She said that women blacksmiths are documented as far back as the middle ages, but were usually limited to the daughters of blacksmiths or the widows of blacksmiths. She used a little portable forge table with a foot-driven bellows fan, and she made a steel flint for making sparks for creating fire.

We also saw a couple of folk dances with people in traditional dress. Only a small number of buildings were open, but the ones that were open were hosted by people in folk costumes, and the people were very friendly and had tons of knowledge about the buildings they were in. Some of the things we learned:

– In WW I and WW II, Sweden had a food shortage. They were neutral in the wars, but were blockaded from buying food from countries that were at war with each other, leading to shortages in Sweden. People in the cites were given plots of land outside the city to grow food on, leading to the creation of small cabins to sleep in and/or to help them escape the rain.
– Sweden had twenty percent of its population emigrate because of religious issues (early) or poverty (later). That made Sweden have the highest rate of emigration in all of Europe.
– Northern Sweden had more trees, which led to those there building bigger houses than were in the south. The bigger houses took more wood to build and more fuel to heat.
– It took five workers five hours to typeset one page of a newspaper. The typical newspaper only sold a few hundred copies, which were shared around.
– Stockholm had over two thousand dairy stores back around 1900 since local people didn’t have refrigeration. The milk was kept cool by ice in the store. Dairy stores were allowed to be open on Sunday morning until 11:00, which is when church started.
– The oldest building on the site is from 1320 and is made of wood (it’s an old storehouse). That’s pretty incredible for a wooden structure.
– Most of the farms and other buildings had wooden floors and some windows, and most had wooden roofs (some had turf roofs). That was quite different from folk museum houses we have seen in Ireland and Scotland.
– Manor houses, when their wallpaper became unfashionable, used it to paper the rooms of the servant areas.

That, along with lunch, took us seven hours. We left the museum at 5:00 and tried to find a bakery where we could get a light supper, but it seems to have gone out of business since Mer’s guidebook was printed. We did get to walk past the amusement park entrance, which was fun to see. After talking with a tram official at a tram stop for some time, we did decide we could use the tap-to-pay feature on my debit card. That will probably cost us some in foreign transaction fees, but at least it worked.

A twenty-minute tram ride and a forty-minute bus ride got us out to a suburb, where Mer had found a church that had English options at 7:00 p.m. We got there about thirty minutes early and were surprised at the number of young people (in their teens and twenties) roaming about the place. We also discovered that the service was in Swedish, but with translation available on radio units they gave us. It’s also the first church I’ve been to that had a sixty-year-old woman as a door bouncer. She wasn’t letting anyone in until 7:00, darn it! I guess that was to control the rush of many of the young people to get to the edge of the stage.

The service was contemporary, high energy, loud (but not painful), and very produced, with lights and fog and a band and multiple video screens and even a dance team for one song. It seems to be working – the place was packed with enthusiastic youth. All but one of the songs was in English, so Mer and I were able to sing along. The sermon was in Swedish, but my translator was fine, until it wasn’t. The battery gave out about five minutes into a twenty-minute sermon. Meredith told me it was an excellent sermon on the power of the Holy Spirit and how that power is a blessing that is often provided to help a believer through a difficult time. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand most of it and spent that time fighting the effects of jet lag. I’m still glad to have gotten to church, and I’m pleased that the local church we went to seems to be doing well at reaching the local community.

We took the bus back to our hotel, only to find the restaurant closed (it was about 9:00 p.m.). We walked around a bit and settled on takeout from a local Swedish fast food restaurant. After seeing lots of evidence of how people from one hundred years ago struggled to put food on the table, it’s hard to complain about having to get takeout.

A happy but tiring first full day of touring. I anticipate sleeping well tonight, especially because I don’t need to share my room with four other people or sleep as an apprentice on my work table.

We’ve reduced the selection of our summer trip largely down to two rules – a) we can’t have been in the country for a two-week summer trip before (starting as of Mer’s 40th birthday in 2013), and b) it should be as cheap as we can find using Google Explore.

While preference does hold some sway in the final decision, the first two rules are great narrowers of the choices we have in Europe. They both landed on Sweden, and we had no good reason to override the rules, so here we are.

The odd thing about the cheap fare is that it was for very specific dates, and so we are on our longest European trip ever, lasting 19 days from leaving the house to getting back to in (inclusive of the travel days). 17 days is probably going to feel like a long time at some point around day 13, but we’re excited (and filled the time with plans and even left some things out).

Also, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose using Google Explore. When we found tickets under $500 each out of Pittsburgh, we jumped on the offer. Since then there have been multiple dates that have popped up f0r $380 each. Such is the travel life.

I worked a full day Friday and we left a little after 4:00 for an 8:20 flight. We had no issues, but I was a little worried when we got to the airport only 2.5 hours before we had to fly. I usually like to have the full recommended three hours, but it worked out fine. Pittsburgh is quickly becoming my favorite airport – it looks new, has tons of good restaurants, only one building (so no guessing which terminal your airline is flying out of), and we’ve breezed through security there twice now in less than five minutes total. The airport is roomy and aesthetically pleasing with high ceilings and public art, and both times has been a calm atmosphere. Good job, Pitt!

Our flight transferred in Reykjavik in Iceland, with only an hour and twenty minutes to transfer. No problem. And we even cleared EU customs in Iceland and so skipped that here in Stockholm. Our plane to Stockholm was out on the tarmac, and our bus driver was a very cheerful and extroverted man from Turkey who was singing and making jokes with the passengers at 7:00 am. Fun man.

We had a smooth flight to Stockholm, although we had to sit one row apart because we checked in so late. On the other hand, I got an exit row and had tons of room to stretch out, and I didn’t have to pay extra for it. Ha!

We’ve gotten to a point in our lives where we find it easier to take a taxi or Uber to our hotel from the airport, as long as it’s reasonable. Uber was about $40, and most public transit options were the same or more, or involved multiple changes. We took the Uber car, and so ended up checking in to our room a little after 2:00, and finally getting to sleep for a couple of hours around 3:00.

After sleep and a shower, we ate dinner at the attached restaurant, where we split a…wait for it…hot dog tower. It seems Scandinavians really love hot dogs. A Norwegian student told me I had to have hot dogs when I got to Norway, and Icelanders had them on many menus. We split the platter of six hot dogs (three different types) and fries. Two of them were excellent, and the third was a tad too spicey for me. Which led to ice cream to settle my spiced-up stomach when we did our…

…Rick Steves walk. Mer loves Rick Steves guidebooks, and Rick has two walks for Stockholm. After supper, Mer wanted to do the “modern Stockholm” walk, so we walked along a pleasant pedestrian street down to the central island and harbor of Stockholm, stopping for ice cream along the way. I hoped (correctly) that strawberry gelato would calm my stomach some.

Stockholm has diverse and often pretty architecture. There are art deco buildings and “wow! concrete!” buildings from the 1970’s. There are office towers and classic palace-looking buildings. And lions, There seem to be lion statues everywhere, and we’re not sure why yet.

From the parliament building, we walked along the water and then to a nice park area where festivals are held. We saw the nearby main synagogue for the city and the associated Holocaust memorial, as well as a memorial to a diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg who saved Jews during the war by getting them Swedish passports.

We got a grand view of the in-the-city amusement park across the harbor, which is fun. We walked along a shopping district and saw Swedes loudly celebrating a soccer match result, but with teams that didn’t seem to be Sweden. We finished up in a modern square with a lit-up 1970’s fountain that I liked even though it was dated looking.

We headed back to the hotel to try to get a full night’s sleep before the touring starts in earnest tomorrow. From a two-hour walk, Stockholm looks like it will be fun to explore.

Sometimes, in touring around Europe, it’s only one strike and you’re out. We took a high-speed train back to Milan today, which took four hours. We got to our hotel and settled, and by then it was 3:00. Mer had allowed me to be in charge, so I was determined to go down to the city center, which is a twenty-minute subway trip away, or a thirty-five-minute walk. Easy enough – we would use public transportation.

Except the local transit union declared today a strike day, and the metro was warning that trains might run behind or even not run at all. Rather than walk to the station and find that the next train was going to be packed with people and twenty minutes late, I decided to walk. Mer and I like walking in cites because we feel as if we see them better. But in this case, it meant having Neuf and Susan walk along with us. They’re game souls.

On the trek to the center, we got to go through a pleasant park, and we saw a street full of obscure stores like “Armani” and the like. After we walked for some time, Mer suddenly said she knew where we were – we were in front of the world-famous La Scala opera house, and on the back side of the high-end shopping mall next to the Duomo. She was right, so we walked through the shopping arcade again, coming out by the Duomo. The square was very busy, but thinned out as you got away from the mall entrance and the front of the church. Neuf ducked into a shop to get some Olympic souvenirs, and then we continued on our way. We walked west of the Duomo for another twenty minutes, aiming for La Chiesa di San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore, which is a church that is plain-looking on the outside, but really spectacular on the inside, with paintings and mosaics. There was one new decoration added to the outside – a sign saying that because of the transportation strike, the church was closed. Sigh.

I took solace in a stop at a high-end chocolate cafe, where I did some research on how to get to a hop-on-hop-off bus tour of the city. The location service on my phone wasn’t working on the interactive bus map site, and that site wouldn’t come up on Neuf’s phone, so I gave up. I told Meredith that I was done being in charge and she could do what she liked. Her response was that she needed to go the thirty-five minutes back to the hotel to get her guidebook, so off we went.

We did have the happy luck to be passing within a block of the Sforzesco Castle, an impressive fortification from around 1600 (in the current form). Getting inside the walls is free, so we did that much touring. Further on, we saw a large and pretty church facade made of red brick and swung by to see it more closely. The church was open, so we popped inside. It was huge compared to the facade, and was decorated in many side chapels and around the altar and the dome above the transept. We had stumbled in to San Marco, where a church of that name has been since around 1250. It was a good find and redeemed the miles some.

Back at the hotel, Mer planned the last couple of touring hours in Milan. Susan decided to stay at the hotel and rest up for tomorrow’s long day, so Meredith, Neuf, and I set out to walk about a mile to the new glass-and-steel skyscraper zone of Milan. It had been built on a wasteland area of Milan that had been neglected since being bombed during WW II, and Milan did it up in style. It has parks and condos and stores on ground floors and a pedestrian-only zone of restaurants. The buildings are innovative and interesting, including one two-tower set that has hundreds of tress growing from the building to offset the carbon made by the building itself. There are wide spaces and a special-events venue, and it’s all surprisingly people-friendly for a place made up of thirty-story buildings. I quite liked it.

We had supper in a restaurant at the end of the pedestrian zone, and then we walked home to the hotel. We need to be headed to the airport around 8:00 am tomorrow, which starts our being in motion for about twenty-one hours. It will be good to get home. Still, despite the curveballs and strikes on this trip, it was a major home run. We had a great time.

I’m not sure what it is about waves, but both Meredith and I are are quite happy to watch waves come in to the shore. If you add in twenty mph winds and the surf is up, then it’s even better. We finally got to the coast today, leaving Lucca for the Italian Rivera. We had to change trains one time in Pisa, but our first train was fifteen minutes late, so we missed our second train. We got rebooked on the next train about thirty minutes later, so all was well.

We have the working harbor and town of La Spezia as our home base for the day. We got checked into our hotel, which seems to be run by a religious order (all the rooms are named for saints), with the profits going to the order’s charitable work and for programs for kids. It’s a very nice place, and the people are great. We were a bit surprised to come home in the evening to dozens of children running around the indoor square that serves as a couple of small soccer fields, but that was okay. We’re not sure if we have hot water yet, but that seems to be the only drawback.

We dumped our bags and walked a couple of blocks to catch a bus for the thirty-minute bus ride to the adorably cute coastal hill town of Porto Venere. Along the coast in this area are the Cinque Terre (“the five towns”), which were very remote fishing villages until the railway came to them. The towns are dramatic and very cute, and so tourists discovered them, and now even tour boats pull into the bigger harbors. Porto Venere is south of the Cinque Terre and remains a quiet town. It has tourists, of course, but the pace is still slow. That’s where we spent the afternoon – wandering the streets of the small town and the coastline along the front of the town.

Porto Venere is situated on a large hill or cliff, and so the town is very vertical. We started at the edge of the sea and explored streets and paths at that level until we went up to the next street or path, and so on. There seem to be four (or more) distinct levels to the town, each with narrow streets that can open up into jaw-dropping views of the Mediterranean coast or views of the harbor back toward La Spezia.

Out at the very tip of the land of the town is St. Peter’s Church, a small, pretty church made of striped marble. The church was open, and so we looked inside. It has a plain interior, and Mer found a wedding program on the lectern. It’s a dramatic place to get married. The church is next to an old fort or tower of some kind, and while many of the old doors were barred off, the windows were still open to let people look out over the land and sea. The sea was quite active today with windy conditions, so it was fun to see it (and not be on it).

We then wandered the main shopping street, which is all of about eight feet wide, and we found a four-table restaurant to eat in. The place specializes in focaccia bread and in pesto, both of which hail from this part of Italy. We ate well. That didn’t stop us from getting pastries that we ate while sitting on a bench down by the sea. Good times.

The best part of the day was next. We found an opening in the seaward side of the old fortress wall, with a plaque claiming that Lord Byron had been inspired by this small harbor. I can see why. The hole in the wall let us go down on the rocks next to the ocean, where the waves were crashing against the shore. Most of the waves were good-sized and put on a show, but every now and then, a really big wave would come in and crash spray thirty feet into the air. We all pulled up seats on the rock and watched the waves come in, and we watched people watching and laughing as waves came in. A few people got very wet, and Meredith got slightly caught in wave spray from a big one when she was down closer to the water. We sat watching the waves for a long time.

We then explored up more, stopping at another church. It was also open, and had a surprisingly modern wall sculpture for a small church in a small, traditional-feeling town. It was of the deposition of Jesus’ body, and had an angel and Mary and Mary lamenting over Jesus’ body. Meredith and I both liked it very much. The church also had a cedar of Lebanon log from about 1100 that had been used to house relics at some point. But at one point we had the church to ourselves, and so I encouraged Meredith to sing the Doxology to test the acoustics. They were superb, with her voice hanging in the space for two seconds or so after each note. It was beautiful.

We went along a path which culminated in the town cemetery and the town castle. The castle was closed, but the cemetery was open, so we explored that some. The small part of the grounds we covered had graves of a 100-year-old woman and a 113-year-old man. I guess sea air is good for you.

Once we verified that the castle was closed, we meandered down small alleyways of stairs to the main street again, where we picked up some focaccia for the four-hour train trip we have back to Milan tomorrow. We picked up some gelato for the four-minute walk to the benches by the sea, where we ate our ice cream in grand surroundings.

We got the bus back to La Spezia and got reorganized at the hotel before heading back out briefly to explore a small part of the town. We walked down the pedestrian shopping zone that had Christmas-style lights overhead with multiple messages in Italian that amounted to something like, “Paris and Rome and Milan are great, but La Spezia is okay by us!” It was fun and festive.

The pedestrian zone ended by the working harbor – fishing boats were moored next to pleasure craft, and we could look over to a shipping dock area of huge cranes. But the harbor also had a pretty pedestrian bridge over part of the harbor and had a palm-tree-lined paved path for people to enjoy. It’s clearly not a tourist-trap area, but it was certainly a pleasant place that I would use if I lived here.

We turned around and went back to the pedestrian shopping area to get supper at a local pizza place. From there, we took a slightly different way home to the hotel, which ended our exploration of the Italian Riviera for this trip. Tomorrow we head back to Milan in preparation to fly home on Saturday. But we’re not quite ready yet to wave goodbye to Italy. On to Milan!

According to Robert Frost, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” But, ooooo, how I love a wall! And today I knew I was getting a great one in Lucca. Imagine my surprise when I got a second unexpected one in Pisa!

Pisa and Florence used to be major rivals. To my eye, it looks as if Florence won. They have major world-famous art and architecture and are almost synonymous with the Renaissance. But, as Meredith pointed out, show one hundred Americans the most famous building in Florence and the most famous building in Pisa, and way more people will know what is in Pisa.

We got efficiently on a morning train from Florence to Pisa, a trip of about one hour. From the train station to the “Field of Miracles” is about one mile, but we broke that walk up with a much-needed bathroom break at a cafe/bakery that forced (forced, I say!) me to buy a hot chocolate and cream horn. From there, the walk was much more relaxed. The sun was out, the sky was blue, and there were a few puffy clouds in the sky. What a great day.

And so we arrived at the world famous “Crooked Tower of Pisa” (or something close to that). I’m pretty convinced the tower was leaning from the weight of the 217,000 people all crammed on one side of the Field of Miracles, all taking pictures of someone trying to hold the tower up, or, new to me, having the tower look as if it’s sitting in an ice cream cone. We took a couple of photos of the tower, and then fled west toward the front of the church and the baptistery, if only to get away from the crush of people. And this, again, is on a random Wednesday in March. What it must be like in July….

We got to the quieter space between the baptistery and church, and took time to admire both. They are very pretty buildings – simple compared to Milan’s cathedral (but really, what isn’t?), and less crammed-in than Florence’s Duomo. The tower gets all the love and attention, and it does lean noticeably and shockingly over, but the church complex deserves admiration too. And both the baptistery and church also clearly leaned during construction, but had better corrections made as they went up. Build heavy buildings in a marshy area, and you get some code problems.

As I was looking around the west end area, I noticed people up on the city wall behind the baptistery. One, I didn’t know people could get on the wall, and two, I didn’t know Pisa still had a wall, let alone one that was tourable. I sent Mer into the ticket area to ask about it, and she came out with directions to the wall tour – just beyond the baptistery. We set off in that direction, and as we approached the path to the front of the church, there was a commotion at the doors of the building. A bunch of people in various medieval costumes came out of the doors and lined up for the start of a parade. It was the celebration of Pisa’s new year (Florence has the same new year’s day), and we had, by sheer dumb luck, stumbled on it. There were officials and armored guards and drummers and trumpeters and flag bearers and crossbow soldiers. The group was mostly men, but there were a few women as flag bearers and one woman as a well-dressed noble. The pomp was much fun to see, and the parade walked right by where we were standing. Another happy win for travel experiences.

On to the wall! We got our surprisingly cheap (seven-dollar) tickets for the wall from a friendly woman, and up we went. The walls are by far the best place to see the sweep of the Field of Miracles – there was almost no one on the walls, and there was no one in our way, either for viewing or for taking pictures. The wall went all along the west side of the Field, where the wall ended and we had to turn around. But our tickets included the entire wall, which is about two miles in length. We walked about a quarter of that before we descended to start heading back to the train station. We stopped long enough to get this odd tradition of eating food between breakfast and supper. It was unusual, but I quite liked it. Maybe we’ll try it more often.

We got back to the station and took the thirty-minute train to Lucca. Our hotel is all of two hundred yards from the station, so that was nice. And our hotel is only about a half-mile walk to an entrance to the still-preserved Renaissance walls, where we could make our way into the old city. The city walls are fully intact, run over two miles, and are now a wide and well-used public park space for walking, running, biking, and relaxing on and along. The walls are not particularly high (I’m guessing about thirty feet in most places), but they are very thick. Cannons have a way of persuading wall builders to go wide.

The inside-of-the-walls part of Lucca is a wonderfully chaotic den of buildings. While I wanted to see a couple of buildings my brother had recommended, I also wanted simply to wander toward whatever caught my eye. The first stop, not terribly surprisingly, was a gelato store that also made crepes. Mer and I both got Nutella crepes with gelato. They were great, but I got laughed at for breaking not one, but two forks in eating mine. I guess I was enthusiastic.

I then trended toward strolling north to get to a church with a mosaic facade, but along the way got distracted by small alleyways and a large square and a big church that was still open, so we went inside. Further along north, I got distracted by the Palazzo Pfanner, which had a door open to a beautiful formal garden. Intrigued, I went in and got us tickets to the public part of the house and the garden. The Pfanners made their fortune as brewers, but also had a couple of generations of doctors in the family in the early twentieth century. So we got to see a kitchen, a formal dining room, a ballroom, a bedroom, and a room containing a bunch of original early-twentieth-century medical devices. Let’s say I’m very grateful for modern medicine. Yikes.

The gardens had a rose garden, lemon trees in pots that could be moved inside in the winter, a large fountain, about twenty statues, manicured lawns, and at least two kitties. I got to pet one. That’s worth the price of admission, right there. That ended the tour, as the upper rooms of the house are still lived in by the family.

From the Pfanner home, we made our way to the church with the mosaic on it. It’s the best outside mosaic I can recall seeing, and may be one of the best I’ve seen outside of Ravenna, Italy. It’s a huge mosaic of Jesus and two angels, with smaller depictions of the twelve disciples. It’s pretty great and worth seeing, and the church is next to an oval piazza that preserves the shape of the Roman arena that was here centuries ago. It’s lined with outdoor seating for restaurants, and it’s fun to be in an oval “square.”

We popped up on the walls for a section, covering about a half mile of the walk. We then came back down for supper at a pizza restaurant on the large square we had seen earlier. That ended my specific goals for the day, so Neuf mentioned she wanted to get some gelato, so we found an open store near the gate for our hotel street. The gelato was excellent, and Meredith went for the gusto by getting another crepe. Hey, it’s vacation.

That wrapped up Lucca for this trip. It would be fun to wander the center some more and climb a tower or two inside the walls. But it was a pretty great day to shout from the walls about how fun these places are.

Ahhh, Florence. What a city. I’m not sure there is anywhere that I know of that has more cultural bang for the buck per capita as this city. When, as one docent told me, “we have Leonardos in the basement because we have nowhere to put them,” then you have a wealth of cultural treasures.

The trip to Florence was fairly smooth. Money can buy time on vacation, so we sprang for the high-speed train to Florence from Verona, which cut ninety minutes off the travel time. We had a slight odd result on my travel phone that sent us to the wrong hotel, which delayed us, but we dumped our stuff at our real hotel and were ready to tour the town around 11:30.

Neuf had expressed a desire to go to the Uffizi art museum. None of us other than Meredith had been, so it was a strong plan to start with. In looking up information on the museum, I saw that the old Medici private walkway above the city was still intact and open to the public for an extra fee at the Uffizi. That locked it up for me since I had wanted to see that for some time. We needed to tour the place.

We walked from our hotel to the Uffizi by way of the Duomo, the magnificent cathedral of Florence. The place was a mad crush of people, but still impressive. I have no idea what was going on here today as far as drawing tourists in, but it was as crowded as I have ever seen in here in the center of the old city, and that includes being here in summertime. There were people everywhere.

We walked on through to the Piazza della Signoria, home to the Medici fortified palace and a huge square filled with tons of sculptures that are all impressive, including a replica of the David, which replaced the real thing back in the 1800s after the original was moved inside to protect it. The square is also the start of the line for the Uffizi.

Our wait wasn’t terrible – it was about forty minutes for us to get in. Meredith’s guidebook had said the Uffizi only allows six hundred guests into the museum at a time, so there are no pressing crowds inside. That was mistaken fact number one. The place was very crowded for most of the galleries, including some that were so full as to make moving through them difficult. Mistaken fact number two from the guidebook was that the museum is small in size and manageable. We flew through the rooms, just looking around and reading almost nothing about the art, and in the two hours we spent in the galleries, we still didn’t see everything. To do the museum real justice would take six to eight hours.

The Uffizi has multiple works from three of the four Ninja Turtles, and has the art mostly displayed in chronological order, starting in the late medieval period. Seeing the art progress, especially treating the same subject matter (there were many Jesuses, Marys, and John the Baptists represented), was very helpful. Painting took a huge leap forward for realism in a short amount of time in the 1400s and 1500s.

The building itself was also a star. The main corridor that connects the gallery rooms runs the length of the building on two sides and is open the whole way. There are huge glass windows down the hallways, and they afford views of the city. The entire hall is lined with sculpture and hard-to-see portraits hung very high up the wall.

We had a 3:15 entry time to the Vasari Corridor, which is the mile-long city-spanning elevated hallway that the very rich and powerful Medici family had built in just five months. It allowed the Medici to go from their home to the Pitti Palace across the river without ever having to go outside and risk being among crowds of people. It spans the top of the Ponte Vecchio bridge and weaves along the rooflines and around towers of the town. It also gave the Medici family a way to go to church privately, since the corridor has a window opening to the interior of a church along the way. This family had means.

Fun fact about the corridor – in World War II, the Germans blew up almost all the bridges across the Arno to slow the Allies down. The Germans couldn’t bring themselves to blow up the Ponte Vecchio, so they blew up buildings on either end to block it. The Allies just used the corridor to cross the river instead. The Germans blew up the ends of the corridor as a result, and it was finally restored and opened to the public in the 1970s.

The corridor spat us out in a corner of the Boboli Gardens of the Pitti Palace, which I still very much want to see. We got to see a very small part of the gardens and palace on the way out. That dumped us very near a small square my brother had recommended, and we walked there to get a very late lunch in the form of gelato. My hazelnut was quite excellent, but I found the chocolate to have a slightly weird taste. Not bad, but unusual.

From there, we walked back across the Ponte Vecchio like mere ordinary people, and headed back to the hotel to regroup and get more clothing. The evening was all about enjoying the city for itself, and getting supper. We walked over to the church of Santa Croce, which I find to be a lovely church. It has the same green and white marble as the Duomo, but on a more human scale. Then we went on to walk along the Arno to the Ponte Vecchio, crossed over, wandered the streets a bit and shopped a little, and then got an excellent supper at a restaurant Meredith had remembered from her school days here back in the 1990s.

After supper was much the same – across the bridge, along the river, but then going to the Medici square to see it uncrowded and lit up at night. From there, on to the floodlit Duomo, and then on home.

And so, after a long day of touring, I managed to knock two whole things to see from off my Florence list. That still leaves quite a few things yet to experience, but Florence is that kind of town.

Sometimes, when you travel, you get treated to perfect moments of beauty. Mer and I went downstairs for breakfast at the hotel this morning, and the sun was brilliant, and the sky was clear. The mountains and lake were breathtaking. Neuf and Susan weren’t downstairs yet, so I went out on the veranda to enjoy the cool air and unobstructed views of everything. After a couple of minutes, Meredith opened the door. I assumed it was to tell me the others had shown up, but she kindly let me know that Andrea Bocelli was on the sound system. So I went back inside and heard his flawless voice singing his famous version of “Con Te Partiro” which even I, an apathetic classical music listener, love. That music and that view. Perfect.

I got more mountain/lake time while the others finished their breakfast. I’m a fairly fast eater, and normally would hang out with the others, but the mountains called. What a place. All good things come to an end on this side of heaven, and so we checked out and walked down to the train station, where we found no way to get a ticket. Meredith asked around, and we were told to go to the tobacco place down the stairs. That was correct, and so we were off to Verona via Brescia.

One small hitch – we had somehow read the time table wrong, and in my case, that was even with Google’s help. We thought we would catch the 11:33 train, but it turns out that it only runs on weekends. So we had to wait for the very crowded 12:33 train and lost an hour of touring time (or extra sleep). This is the price we pay for my not wanting to drive on this vacation.

We got to Verona and got settled in our room and got headed out to tour around 2:00. The weather was perfect here, and we strolled along the fifteen minutes or so to the historic center, coming first upon Verona’s colosseum. My friend Dubbs very helpfully taught me that every oval arena all over Europe can just be referred to as a “colosseum,” except the one in Rome, which is “the arena in Rome.” (Note to non-Dubbs readers – this last sentence is one hundred percent bogus and one hundred percent sarcastic. It will cause Dubbs to have a fit.)

The arena isn’t open on the inside, but the structure is still intact and in use. In fact, it was recently used to close the winter Olympic games held here in northern Italy. We walked around to the far side into a pedestrian zone, and kept up our strolling pace until we got to Star-crossed Lovers’ Lane. We had come to see “Juliet’s house.”

Meredith and Neuf are both English teachers and both love Shakespeare. Back in the 1970s, a very smart tour guide started spreading the news that this balcony on the this house was the one Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote Romeo and Juliet. It’s a lie, of course, but the tale caught on, and now the tourist hordes come to look on the balcony and have a picture taken with a Juliet statue. Then they go into the thoughtfully tasteful library to hear lectures on Shakespeare and to buy leather-bound volumes of plays. No, silly! They buy magnets and t-shirts from the tourist trap store, of course. But – pilgrimage done.

We then walked on to the Piazza Erbe, a grand medieval square full of pretty buildings and a large market area. On the far end is the Palazzo Maffei, a former palace that is now a small but solid art museum with an eclectic collection of art organized by themes (like “women,” “men,” “landscapes,” etc.). We did the whole museum in about ninety minutes, and I liked the themed rooms very much. Some rooms had works separated by hundreds of years side by side because they treated the same theme. And, as part of the ticket, we were allowed up on the roof to look out over the piazza.

After the museum, we went and looked at the Roman gate of the city, and then went for a very late and light lunch (it was 4:00 or so). Thus refreshed, we just wandered. The Italians have a tradition of “passeggiata,” which is a see-and-be-seen evening walk. We did that, wandering around the pedestrian area, starting near the arena and up and around the Erbe area, and out to the river, and then stumbling into a cool palace courtyard on a whim, and then finding the same river on the other side of the old city center. We popped into a couple of stores as things caught our eyes, and we admired the finely dressed people and perfect window displays. The Italians do know something of style. We finished our evening walk at a pizza restaurant, and then we walked home, walking past an ornate brick castle we hadn’t seen yet.

Verona is a remarkable town. We saw everything Mer wanted to see today, and it was a great day, but we have left plenty of things to see and do the next time we’re in northern Italy. So much beauty, so little time.

Meredith and I have had the good fortune to travel a lot. In the last thirteen years, we’ve been to Europe twenty or more times, and had been several times even before that. We’ve been to well-traveled areas, like London, Paris, and Rome. We’ve been to less (American) touristed places, like Iceland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltics.  We’ve traveled by train and by car. We’ve stayed in hostels and beach resorts. We’ve seen and done a fair amount of things in Europe. We know what we’re doing.

Except when we don’t. That often corresponds to when I’m in charge.

Our hotel in Milan had a large breakfast spread, but it cost 15 euros per person (about eighteen dollars). That seemed really excessive to me for breakfast, and I figured we could do much better at a cafe or bakery. So we skipped breakfast and set off, using the Milan metro to go to the cathedral (the Duomo) in the old city center. We’d see a couple of quick sites, get some breakfast, and go to church in the Duomo, before going back to the hotel to then go on to Lake Iseo by train. A perfect touring plan.

We got to the Duomo square and had the wonderful pleasure of coming up out of the metro station to be facing the front of the church. That is always impressive to do that at a major site. Many pictures were taken, and we enjoyed the early-day sunshine. We had a little over an hour before church started, so we went into the Galleria, one of the first shopping malls in Europe (opened in 1877), and a high-end shopping area now. It’s gorgeous, with beautiful ironwork and glass and mosaics. The window displays are all immaculate, including one huge sculpture made all of chocolate. We ooohhed and ahhhed over the windows, and then walked a few blocks to the small Piazza Mercanti, which had a covered market area, some fancy facades, and an old covered well from the 1500s.

On to breakfast! I had seen a cafe on the Duomo square, and I knew we’d pay for the view, but it was worth it. Several tables outside were taken, so we sat at the far end of the line of tables, where our view of the Duomo was blocked by a double-decker tour bus. But, being a tour bus, it would move soon, so we ordered breakfast. I got a ham and cheese croissant and a medium hot chocolate. The hot chocolate was huge, and was quite good. I was very pleased to be sitting outside, in Milan, in the sun, drinking one of my favorite drinks.

And then the bill came. My hot chocolate alone was fifteen euros. The same as my buffet breakfast at the hotel would have cost. The total bill was forty-nine euros, and for all of us to eat at the hotel would have been sixty. Ooops.

The tour bus never moved.

We did get to the church service, walking in a couple of minutes late. The mass lasted about an hour. Meredith had forgotten that the service would be in Italian and not Latin, so she understood most of what went on. I didn’t, but we were worshipping in a pretty place, and the singing by the cantor was beautiful in the cathedral space. Meredith informed me that the homily was on Jesus rolling back the rock of Lazarus’ tomb and asking us what our rocks are that need to be rolled away so that we have life in Jesus again. Interesting take on that passage.

After church, we swung by McDonald’s for a much-needed bathroom break (European cities are not great at public restrooms), and then we did go back to the hotel. We gathered our luggage and made our way to the nearby Milano Centrale train station, which is huge and elegant, in a fascist sort of way (built in the 1930s). We had some small trouble with the machine to get our train tickets (it wouldn’t take our credit card, and we had to use all of our cash to pay for them), but we succeeded and got to ride a high-speed train to Brescia, and then a regional train to Sulzano on Lake Iseo, across from the island of Monte Isola. Monte Isola is a pretty island that I wanted to see and hike around, which is why we ended up here today.

We got off the train at the station, and started walking to the hotel. I had found a hotel slightly out of town, about a twenty-minute walk away. I think it’s because we’re here in off season, but it was the only hotel I could find for us when I booked it back in December. No big deal – twenty minutes with luggage isn’t great, but we can handle that.

And then we turned off the main road onto a side road that went up. And up. And then got steeper. And then turned onto a steep section. All while we pulled and pushed luggage up the hill. It seems I need to look at topographical maps now when I book places. We were all winded, and I was sweaty, when we got to the hotel, but the views were pretty great. I decided that we would eat at the hotel when we got back. We needed to enjoy the view (even in the dark, the lights off the water are pretty), and I didn’t want to add an extra climb back up that hill.

We got settled and went down the hill, back into town, back to within a hundred yards of the train station, to catch the ferry to the island. Sigh.

Susan, who has never been to Europe, had other firsts today. She had never been on a subway, and then we got her on a high-speed train, and then on a ferry, all in the same day. The ferry only took five minutes, but it was a scenic five minutes. The lake is surrounded by mountains, including the view of a snow-covered mountain to the north. Monte Isola is impressive in its own right, with an elevation of over nineteen hundred feet.

We docked in the village of Peschiera and disembarked. I had no set plan except to enjoy the sun and the scenery. We started walking along the small (car-free) road along the lakefront, but then I got distracted by a small alley that went up, so we followed that. It took us on a serpentine path up to the town church, which was built around 1500. The door was open, so we went in and had the place to ourselves. It’s not a touristically important church, but it was filled with good art and was of an impressive size. We liked it very much.

We kept following the road up, and it came to the town cemetery. We find cemeteries interesting, and this one was located in a gorgeous spot, with views of the lake and mountains. Island life seems to be good – there were numerous people who lived to be in their nineties. The cemetery was built vertically because of lack of open space, with family plots being more of family vaults built into walls. It was a peaceful spot.

The road kept going up, but I had wanted to stay along the shore, so we went back down to the shore road. We kept going west, with a small castle as the nominal destination. We stopped for gelato, of course, and ate it while looking over the water. We left the village behind, but there were frequent benches, and we used them once to rest. We stopped whenever we saw something that interested one of us, which included flowers, wild areas, changing views of the lake and mountains, and even an outdoor cat sanctuary. I suspect that a car-free island is a good place to be a cat.

We got to the next village and decided that the castle was a tad too high up to try to reach. That turned out to be a good decision, since the castle was another mile on and three hundred feet up. We turned around instead and walked back to the ferry, which only took about thirty minutes. We were tired, and it was well after 5:00, so we went back (up) to the hotel, resting a bit in our rooms before meeting for dinner at 7:00. After supper, we did go out and look at the lights on the water before retreating into the lobby to the welcome fire in the fireplace. March evenings are still chilly here.

It was a good (and mellow) itinerary for our first full day in Italy. Sometimes I do know a thing or two, but there’s always more to learn and see.

Late last summer, Meredith and I approached CVCA’s administration with the idea of planning and running a European trip for CVCA staff as a fellowship-building outing. We planned on going to London since there are direct flights out of nearby Pittsburgh airport, and the administrators gave us the go-ahead. We sent out an email, and there was some solid interest. When we needed to start collecting money for the trip, it ended up being our friends Meredith “Neuf” Neufeld and Susan Abramson. Susan had never been to Europe before, so that was exciting.

With a trip of just four people, it gave us some flexibility, such that when we found out that going to London was $750 and going to London and then on to Milan was $490, we asked Neuf and Susan if they minded changing the destination. They were game, and so our spring break Northern Italy trip was born.

Since Pittsburgh airport is only ninety minutes from our house, we decided to leave on Friday after work. That gained us an extra day of touring when compared to flying out of Toronto. We left the house at 4:30 and got to the airport around 6:00 and were in line around 6:30 before the counter opened at 7:00. And we saw two CVCA students and their parents who were on our flight to London, on their way to Spain. Of course.

We boarded the plane, and then we got delayed ninety minutes because of lightning in the area and then because of a malfunction in the pump of the fueling truck. That trickled down to our missing our scheduled Milan flight by about fifteen minutes, and we had to wait for four hours for the next flight. That all went smoothly, but did mean that by the time we got to our hotel, it was bedtime (around 9:00 pm). We were determined to do something Italian, so we got a gelato (ice cream) store recommendation from the hotel clerk and walked the three blocks to get Italian ice cream. Score one for the tourists.

This vacation ended up being ambitious, with our moving to a new location every day. There’s too much to see in Italy. Tomorrow, we’re off to the northern Lake District, but we hope to get some Milan touring in at the end of the trip. Now, we can finally get some sleep in a real bed after thirty-six hours with only some fitful naps on the plane.

Our last day of touring arrived today, and I woke up feeling pretty good, just in time for long travel days and work! Yay?

We have a very early flight tomorrow (Sunday), so I knew we needed to be in Lisbon by 6:00 or so to give us a chance at getting some rest before a long day. With the drive to Lisbon factored in, that gave us about five hours for sights and lunch. We started with the short and familiar drive back to the Lagos harbor area, to explore the old town using the Rick Steves guidebook walk as a guide.

We crossed the river/canal over to the far side, and walked to the main square of the old town to start the walk. The old town is a happy maze of black-and-white-tiled streets, and we enjoyed strolling down them. Mer even managed to get sucked into a demonstration of a small plate that has a rough surface used to grind things (like garlic). When she saw they had one that matched some plates we have, she actually bought something. Now we have something to declare to customs.

Our boat guide yesterday, George, had strongly recommended seeing St. Antony’s church in town, saying the gilded altar is a must-see. The only way to see the small church was to get a ticket to the town museum, which was an eclectic collection of weapons, portraits, landscapes, religious items, and more. We went in, and while we didn’t linger because of time constraints, we did enjoy seeing everything (and we made sure we saw it all).

The chapel was the highlight. It wasn’t very large, but that didn’t stop the decorators from covering every surface with decorations, and then covering all the decorations with gold color. I’m not sure if it was all gold leaf, but the altar was, and it was really impressive. It shone with a warm glow. It wasn’t subtle at all, but it did get the idea of “glory” across pretty well.

Back out on the street, we headed toward the bay. We wanted to see the inside of the newer church, St. Mary’s, but it was closed until noon for a private ceremony (we hoped it was a wedding). So we passed through the square that was being set up with Christmas decorations and fair booths, took a quick peek at the portico area that was where slaves were sold starting in the 1400s (and that was more recently turned into a museum dealing with slavery), and popped out of the old town to go see the old fort (from the 900s in part) and the new fort (1700s). The old fort was the city walls and the old Moorish gate, but you can’t climb up on them now. They were still striking. The new fort, which you can climb up on, was closed, sadly. So we walked down on to the beach.

The Lagos beach was as striking as many Algarve beaches – tons of sand, and even some pretty fun rock formations to see. We had to go through a couple of tunnels to get to sections of the beach, until we were blocked at a tunnel by the tide being too high. We turned around and plunged back into the old town and found St. Mary’s open.

In contrast to St. Antony’s altar, St. Mary’s is modern, colorful, and (if I’m allowed to say it) tasteful. There is a sculpture of a crucified Jesus, including blood running down the cross from his feet, and that wasn’t unusual in a Catholic church. The thing that caught my eye and made me sit down to contemplate it was that there were angels and the Holy Spirit painted behind Jesus in a subtle, modern, almost cartoonish way, and it really worked. There was nothing childish about it (maybe childlike), and I very much liked it.

After St. Mary’s, we got lunch outside at a cafe on a side street that looked down on the church. It was a great lunch, both for location and for the food – we were there on a Saturday, so we could get weekend-only cinnamon rolls. After lunch, we made the walk back to the car and bid a fond farewell to Lagos. It was a fun little town to be based out of.

The day was still too nice and too early just to head to Lisbon, so I decided to try to check out the Algar Seco rock formations in Carvoeiro, a smaller village right on the beach between two extended cliffs. We had seen some great rocks from the ocean yesterday, and I wanted to see if we could clamber about them.

Carvoeiro is sort of on the way back out of the Algarve if you are headed to Lisbon, so that worked well. I figured we would have an hour or more to explore. Of course, it ended up being closer to two.

We parked the car at the top of the cliff and saw the boardwalk running along it, so we headed that way. We found an entry, but it had a sign showing that it was only about four tenths of a mile long, so I thought we should go to the west end and walk east. Once we got to the west end, Mer said she thought the town below us was the cute town of Carvoeiro we’d seen from the boat, so I added that to the impromptu itinerary.

We walked down (and down) to the beach area, and walked out on the sand to admire the cliffs. We used the ever-convenient public restrooms Portugal has so thoughtfully provided, and then we went back up (and up) to the start of the boardwalk. We wanted to see what a little park-looking area in front of a chapel was (a closed children’s park, it turned out), but that helped us to find the beautiful paneled doors of the chapel – many colorful, somewhat-abstract sketches of scenes from the life of Jesus and Mary. It was a good sacred art day today.

The boardwalk started well, with wide walking platforms and grand views out to sea. There were side platforms where you could sit and contemplate the ocean. The walking wasn’t difficult, and I was pleased with the choice to come here.

And then the first major rock formation hove into view. With stairs leading down to it. And stairs and paths carved into the rock. I was giddy. Mer and I climbed down, having to go through a tunnel to get to the rocks, and then we scrambled all around, poking about in caves and on top of hollows that sometime will become chimney holes to the caverns below. We perched on top of high rock formations, and kept finding more stairs and more paths, and every new place had new views and fun places to explore. It was wonderful.

After we looked all about there for a long time, we finished off the boardwalk, which finished with another rock formation. We debated a bit on the time, and decided to check it out anyway. I’m glad we did. The stairs led to a tunnel that led to a small cave that had two small “windows” that looked out on the ocean. We got to wave to a tourist boat. It was like a small rock living room.

The other side of the rock formation didn’t have a cave, but it did have a collapsed chimney/canyon that let us see down to the low-tide ocean. It looked as if at high tide that the water might make the cave area look like a long and narrow pool.

And that finally wrapped up our tour. We headed north toward Lisbon, on an efficient but dull highway, getting to our hotel at 6:00 pm. We had a light supper here at the restaurant just for ease, and now we just need to get up in time to get to the airport by 5:30 am or so.

Other than my being sick for several days, this has been a great trip. We had great weather on six of seven days, and the one rainy day came in a town (Evora) where there were some good indoor options available. We were both very impressed by town walls and wide beaches and towering cliffs and friendly people and lots of kitties. Here’s to hoping we can come back to Portugal to finish off the country’s regions by seeing the north.