We saw and did an amazing array of things in Italy in two weeks. It is dizzying to think on and hard to believe all the ground we covered. I tried to cover each day in its own blog entry, but I do have a collection of random thoughts and impressions from the trip as a whole. The thoughts are in no particular order.

Italians smoke too much. Happily, smoking on trains and in restaurants and other enclosed spaces is forbidden, but I saw a ton of Italians on the streets who were smoking. While I think smoking is expensive and harmful, I get especially sad when I see young people smoking, because I really feel they should know better. I saw kids who were clearly in their early teens smoking, and that was depressing.

Mer and I like to keep an eye on fashion in Europe in general, and in Italy in particular. We both feel that Italians have a fine sense of style, on the whole. On this trip, we noticed a few trends, a couple of which were really odd to us. Italian women and some men seemed to be really big into wearing scarves for fashion, even when it was really hot outside. People also wore a lot of shirts with either the colors or some form of the American flag on the shirt – it seemed pretty common. We also noticed that t-shirts with English words on them were big.

Christianity is a very old religion. We saw art from AD 220 and lists of bishops from AD 55, and we were in many many churches that were built in the twelfth century. It gives a strange and somber weight to a church when it has been around for seven or eight hundred years. I loved these reminders of the faith being passed on generation to generation for twenty centuries.

I know this is an odd thing to comment on, but Italian bathrooms in general and toilets in particular were always a minor adventure. Some sinks had handles and some had foot pedals. Most of the showers’ hot/cold directions were backwards to ours, but the sinks were the same direction as ours. The toilets all had various flushing mechanisms – one button, two buttons, on the tank, on the wall, on the floor, pull-mechanisms near the ceiling, and more. It is a minor thing, but a constant reminder that I was not at home. Public bathrooms had fully private stalls with full doors, like being in your own little bathroom; our mini-stalls must freak out Italians when then come to the States.

Italians are very casual about time at supper in restaurants. It is expected that patrons will want to linger over meals, which is wonderful in general, but can be frustrating to a tourist trying to maximize time. There were a few times we skipped sit-down restaurants because we knew getting the check and paying the bill would be a long process. It is considered rude for the waitstaff to bring you your check, so you have to request it. Then, you have to flag down the staff again to pay the bill. I approve of this as a cultural norm, but there were times where we spent twenty minutes just trying to get out of a restaurant when we had finished eating.

We saw a fair amount of construction going on in Italy. Oddly enough, for me, it was curious to see that Italian construction companies put up the huge skyscraper-style tower cranes for almost all jobs, even ones that were only two or three stories (in the States we would use small, truck-mounted cranes for smaller jobs). It always made for an interesting skyline, even in smaller towns.

English is everywhere in Italy, and is the common language when Italian can’t be used. Even store clerks would know some English, and we saw at least one occasion where an Italian and a continental European used English as the common language in which to communicate. Often, trains and buses had English translations after the Italian announcements. While I’m a bit worried about English/American cultural imperialism, I was not sad that so many people knew at least basic English.

Rome is old; there are ancient ruins and buildings everywhere. I was laughing with Meredith that you know you have lots of old stuff when you leave it lying around next to buildings, exposed to the elements. In places not quite so old, even pieces of columns are put in museums – in Rome they are just around everywhere you go.

Italy’s train system is excellent. We only regretted not having a car one time (when trying to get to Assisi), and even then it was not so bad. The trains are almost all electric, which makes them quiet, efficient, and fast. I loved traveling by train in Italy – we could see the country, and we met a lot of interesting people along the way.

Italy is expensive, especially food costs. Many of the restaurants we ate in had higher-end prices we would see in the States, but the prices were in euros, which made them roughly half-again as expensive. There were times we would eat a nice but smaller meal and it would cost us fifty dollars.

On the plus side, all Italian prices include taxes – there is no guessing what the final price of anything will be, and you end up dealing with a lot less change.

Italy has one- and two-euro coins. It was always difficult to process that a coin could be worth three dollars.

Dogs can go pretty much anywhere in Italy, including into malls and restaurants. That was pretty startling to me, but in general the dogs did behave.

Italy is full of astonishing beauty. I fell deeply in love with the Cinque Terre, Lake Como, and the Dolomites – they were all beautiful in ways I had not even imagined.

Mer likes to point out that travel is always either a good experience or a good story, and that was certainly true. One of the reasons I love Meredith is we can travel together for sixteen days, and while I was not always a paragon of grace and love, we still always wanted to be together. That is pretty great.

Travel in Italy is a good thing for my faith. Not only does Italy have reminders of Christianity everywhere, but also, travel in general teaches you that you are not in control, and in my case, you cannot always even communicate. Not even knowing how to work a sink can make you feel a long way from home, and that reminded me that we are not supposed to get too comfortable here on Earth since our real home is with God. In a sense, I’m on one long tourist trip. It is good to be shaken out of routine and comfort to be reminded of blessings at home and as a way to evaluate what is important.

This was a great trip, and I owe it entirely to Mer. She saved up money for the better part of a year so we could afford to go, and then she did ninety percent of the planning of the trip. It was expensive, and there were times I missed my home, but the trip was wonderful and worth it. Sometimes you just have to trust the wife, because she really knows what awaits. I am a very lucky man in many ways, not the least of which is being paired with a woman who loves me enough to share her dreams with me.

I slept soundly – only the second time that happened on the whole trip. I woke up and lounged in bed, but then a small voice in my head started nagging at me. Usually flights leaving from Europe leave in the morning and return in the evening. I got out of bed and looked at our itinerary; I had read the wrong line, and our flight was really leaving at 10:45 am, and not at 4:30 pm. I looked at the clock, and it was 9:00 am. For international flights you are supposed to be at the airport two hours early. I told Mer what was going on, and we scrambled to get everything ready – we had only slim hopes of making it, but we had to try.

We dashed out of the hotel, grateful that we had paid the night before. The bus to the airport was not leaving for twenty minutes, so we jumped on the train instead. Amazingly, we got to the airport at 10:00 am – not bad for waking up at 9:00. Sadly, it was all for naught – we were told the plane was boarding, and we would have to rebook. I knew that was not going to be cheap, but we had no other option. We headed over to the ticket counter, where we were told our best option was to get the same flight out the next day, and, oh, yes, that would be $1,200 please. Ouch. Sigh. That put a bit of a damper on the day, but I am a practical man, so I was determined to try to make a day of it in Rome. Mer was gracious enough to forgive me, but she was a tad subdued for much of the remainder of the day.

On the plus side, we took the train back to the station, and the hotel manager was sympathetic and was also able to give us our room back for another day. He also honored his breakfast voucher for a light breakfast at a cafe down the street, and he even gave us Monday’s voucher as well, since we would be leaving before the cafe opened. He was a very nice man.

We settled things back in the room, and then grabbed our breakfast, which was muffins. They were quite good, actually. We headed back to the room, where I planned our bonus day, with some input from Mer. I’m not sure we could get a thousand-dollar day out of things, but I was going to try. We headed out around 1:00 and went to the train station, where we picked up an all-day metro pass, and we headed to the bus station, where we took a bus away from the city center, out to the Catacombs of Priscilla.

I had never seen catacombs before, and I figured touring something underground would be wise in the Roman midday heat. We got to the convent above the catacombs a little before they opened at 2:30, and we struck up a conversation with a family of four from eastern Pennsylvania. The doors opened at 2:30, and we got our tickets, and waited for the tour to start (they have English-language tours when there are enough English speakers).
We had a good-sized group of over twenty people, which made viewing parts of the catacombs difficult sometimes. Our group leader was a pretty and charming young woman who I think was Germanic, based on her accent; her English was excellent. The catacombs were very impressive – there are over forty thousand graves in over ten miles of tunnels. Groups follow a well-defined tour path, and can only stay down in the catacombs for thirty minutes because the volcanic rock of the catacombs naturally gives off radioactive radon gas. In fact, our tour guide told Meredith that she can only work one day a week because of the exposure to the gas.

The catacombs date back to at least AD 220, and include some of the oldest Christian art still in existence, including the oldest-known portrayal of Mary and an infant Jesus, which is in a ceiling fresco dated to AD 220. There are depictions of the nativity scene dating to around 280, as well as a few other frescoes that still survive. The graves along the tour are all empty (except for two graves that are still sealed with marble) because, sadly, early tours of the tombs included people who would take bones as souvenirs. The catacombs away from the tour route still have bones in them, but in most of the catacombs the marble that was used to seal the graves has been largely looted over the last eighteen hundred years.

I loved the catacomb tour. I like tunnels to start with, and I found it interesting and informative to be in such an ancient site. I would have rather caught my flight back home, but it was a grand way to make use of the day.
Mer and I decided to continue our “day of the dead” tour by taking a bus to the Capuchin Crypt, and the family from Pennsylvania went with us. The Capuchins are an order of Franciscan monks who are still active worldwide today. The Capuchin order has an interesting museum and a unique crypt in and under the church of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception, a few blocks from the Spanish Steps. What most people come to see is the crypt, which has the bones and some bodies of former Capuchins arranged in six galleries. The bones are piled up and nailed to the walls to make decorations around the dried-out bodies of dead Capuchins who are still in robes, some standing and some lying down. As far as Mer and I could tell, no one seems to know who arranged the bones and bodies, or why, but they are quite sobering. I was very pleased that the Capuchins have used the attraction of the crypt to highlight the work they did and are doing around the world, and they also had at least two displays with a clear presentation of people’s need for Jesus; it was a great way for them to spread the good news of the Gospel, especially since you end up staring at a strong reminder that you too will die someday.

After the crypt, we said goodbye to the family from Pennsylvania, and Mer and I walked over to the church of Santa Maria del Popolo to see some artwork there. Along the way, we swung by the Spanish Steps, which is a popular tourist area and local hangout. We came at it form the top, and so we were able to go down the steps before continuing on our way to Santa Maria. The church has a chapel designed by Raphael, with two of Bernini’s statues in it, and the church has two paintings by our now-oft-seen Caravaggio – the Crucifixion of St. Peter and the Conversion on the Way to Damascus. Both are amazing paintings, but I think the Crucifixion of St. Peter is more striking and more focused. The church itself was a pretty church, and was located in a large square that had a crowd of people milling around, listening to a small band playing at one end. It was a nice little slice of social life in Rome.

We then headed back to the hotel to regroup and to check on cat-sitters back home. We still had not had supper, so we decided on heading to the Campo dei Fiori, which is a famous and popular square. Sadly, it is not easy to get to using public transportation, but we compensated for that by using the metro to get to the Colosseum. The interior was closed for the evening, but it is still impressive and iconic to see, and we walked from there to the square, which is a little over a mile.

Along the way, we got to see some of the ruins of the Roman Forum, and then we passed the huge memorial to Italy’s first king, Victor Emmanuel. From there we passed the Largo Argentina Ruins (ancient Roman ruins from around the time of Christ). The ruins were home to numerous feral cats – it was like a cat playground with all of the levels of columns and steps. We finally made it to the Campo, which was quite happening. I’m afraid at this point my two muffins had worn off, and I was pretty much a bear to be with. It took us a few tries to find a place to eat, but we finally settled on an outdoor pizza restaurant just off the main square. It was a very pleasant place to eat, and once I had eaten, I was more pleasant to be around.

We walked back to the Colosseum, which was a much shorter-seeming walk now that we knew where we were going. Even with its being about 10:00, the streets were still quite lively with people. Back at the hotel, Mer and I made sure our alarm was set for the next morning, and we got ready for bed. It was an expensive and unplanned-for day in Rome, but I was pleased we had made the best of a frustrating mistake.

Our hotel/apartment in Assisi overlooked a very cute square, which I thought was wonderfully charming – until I tried to go to bed. While I never got the feeling that anyone was drunk or out of control, there were waves of enthusiastic people coursing though the piazza until 2:30 am. Needless to say, I did not sleep very well. Then, in the morning, Mer confronted the fact that the “shower” was really the world’s smallest bathtub with no curtain. In addition, the hand shower sprayed in all directions, including at right angles to the showerhead. When Mer’s quick shower was done, the bathroom was swamped. I tried briefly to “shower,” but gave up and washed my hair in the kitchen sink.

We packed up and checked out and managed to catch the bus to the station quite efficiently. We were headed to Rome, and the next train did not leave for an hour and a half. So, after some quick deliberations, we checked our bags and walked the short walk to Mary of the Angels, a large church near the station. What I did not realize, but Mer did, was that this was a very important Francis of Assisi site, and I was deeply grateful to Mer that she got me to see it.

When Francis had a few followers, a benefactor gave him a very small church to use. Francis repaired the church, which was called the Porziuncola. Francis often lived in a hut nearby, and he died next to the church. Mary of the Angels church was built around these sites – literally. In the middle of the tenth biggest church in the world is the still-intact Porziuncola, all four walls and the roof. There are a small chapel and marker where Francis died, and a small memorial in the church complex to show where he lived. We walked through the whole site, and we really enjoyed the modern art paintings that told the story of St. Clare, a young woman who decided to become a nun, following the practices of Francis as closely as she could. The paintings were very striking.

We headed back to the station, where we caught our train to Rome. While on the platform for the train, a man asked me if I would help a woman with her bag because she had a bad back. I agreed, and thus Mer and I met Susan, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle, who had just wrapped up being in charge of a three-month student program in Italy. The students had gone home, and Susan had taken a week to relax, and she was headed to Rome to fly home on Sunday. We chatted much of the way to Rome, and she was quite interesting and funny.

Our hotel was right next to the train station, and we checked in around 3:00. I was “in charge” for Rome, so I did a little research in Mer’s Rick Steves tour book, and Mer pointed out a few things based on my itinerary (things along the way). So, we started our brief tour of Rome by heading over to some former Roman baths, one part of which was turned into Rome’s Mary of the Angels church. Along the way, we managed to run into the staging area for the Rome gay pride parade, which was quite a contrast with the church we entered. You could still hear the music from the parade inside the church, which I suspect broke the usual calm of the huge church.

We then headed a few blocks away to another church. Some time ago my brother had given me a DVD set called The Power of Art. This set is where I learned to appreciate Caravaggio as a painter, and it also introduced me to the astonishing sculptor Bernini. The program focused on his piece The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, and it is a moving piece. It turns out that the statue is in Rome, in a chapel of the church St. Mary of Victory. So, having seen Caravaggio paintings, we took the opportunity to see St. Teresa.

The sculpture is amazing, but I was most pleased to see the context of the work in the church. The program had lots of close-ups and angles we could not see from the floor, so it really showed off the statue to better effect than seeing it in person. What we could see in person was the whole church, which was elaborately decorated, but harmoniously so, with lots of gold coloring. The church itself is fairly small, and that made the space seem intimate.
By this time, around 5:00, I was fairly hungry and hoping to get chicken for the protein. Mer found Flann O’Brien’s pub, which is an Italian take on an Irish pub. The “Irish” pub had lots of pasta, and listed food in courses in the Italian way, but they did have chicken, which I was happy to order. I also got an order of potatoes, which managed to be Italian by being coated in olive oil and rosemary, but were excellent.

We went back to the hotel, where I rested about an hour. I found a little lie-down to be very helpful after the heat of Italy’s afternoons. We still had plenty of daylight, so I decided we should head over to the Vatican, and then walk back through the city. We took the Metro to near the Vatican and walked the four blocks there. We got there after the church and museum had closed, but the square around St. Peter’s is still impressive. It was being filled with tons of chairs, and we found out that Pope Francis was celebrating Mass the next morning. We looked and strolled around, and after a failed attempt on my part to find a nearby park, we headed down the main road leading to St. Peter’s, with my goal of crossing the Tiber and walking back to the station.

There were a ton of people out along the road, and an inordinate number of them were nuns. We could not quite figure out what was going on. We got to the end of the road, and some polite men offered us candles. Mer asked what was happening, and as near as she could make out, there was going to be a celebration that night, and the Pope might make an appearance. After some debate, I decided we should try to see the Pope, so we got our candles and stuck around. We waited about an hour, but the evening was cool, and it was a fun place to watch people.

A little after 9:00, some officials gave some speeches, some in Italian and some in English. We had trouble making out the particular words, but the speeches wound down, and people started moving toward the Vatican, so we did too. I have to admit it was a bit strange – here were two American Protestants walking with a couple thousand Catholics toward St. Peter’s, walking between barricades as tourists watched. We filed into the courtyard of St. Peter’s, and Mer and I ended up quite close to the stage. People spontaneously began singing a version of “Ave Maria” several times as people continued to pour in behind us.

Once people were more or less settled in, a small service of sorts began, with priests and nuns praying and saying the creeds and the Lord’s prayer. It turns out the march was a celebration-of-life march – for the unborn, for the sick, for the needy, and for justice. Sadly, the Pope never made an appearance, but it was a great experience of which to be a part, both on a cultural and spiritual level.

By now, it was 10:00, and so I gave up on my idea of walking home. We made our way back to the station (walking behind a priest and a cardinal). Once on the train, Mer saw we were passing close to the Trevi Fountain, so she wanted to go see it. I thought that sounded fun, so we got off at the stop. To our surprise, there were no signs, so we headed off as best we could. At one point we backtracked, and then went back down the hill again, and to our surprise and delight, we ran into Diana and Kate, the young women from the train to Florence. We were on the same street corner at the same time in Rome – it was quite bizarre. We were near their hotel, and Diana ducked in to get ready for bed while Kate walked us the two blocks to the fountain. She really saved us a ton of time – for a famous site, the Trevi Fountain is not easy to find. We thanked Kate, and we jumped into the tourist fray. We took a couple of pictures, and made our way to the edge of the fountain, where we threw in a coin together. Tradition holds that if you throw in a coin, you will return to Rome. We had done that the last time we were in Rome about eighteen years ago, so we’ll see if we are about sixty next time we get there.

We walked back to the hotel, going past a huge palace along the way (I think it is or was the presidential palace). We grabbed some pizza just before the hotel, and so we had a late and light supper back in our room. I had read the flight itinerary for the next day, and our flight was not until 4:30 pm, so we had an easy morning ahead of us to sleep in.

Three churches, a gay pride parade, a life-celebration march, a sculpture of an ecstatic nun, an Italian/Irish pub, finding two needle girls in Rome’s haystack, and a crowded public fountain. It was a bit of a surreal day in Rome.

Given the confusing nature of Siena’s streets, it was fitting that on trying to leave the city, we got lost by going exactly the wrong way. Happily, Siena is such a small city that we were able to recover the mistake without messing up our timing for our train (plus, in anticipation of this possibility, I had gotten us out of our hotel early).

Our next destination was Assisi. Sadly, there is no good way to get to Assisi. Even though we were leaving from the train station, the two-hour driving distance would take us five hours, using first a bus, and then two more trains. We (mostly Mer) helped out a woman from Iowa who thought she had a ticket for the bus, but only had an itinerary instead (as the very excitable driver told us in very emphatic Italian). To be fair, the driver did finally help the woman get a ticket, but it was tense for a few minutes, and the bus did leave about ten minutes late.

The bus ride was through absolutely beautiful hill country with picturesque farms everywhere. The beauty helped make up for the speed difference between bus and train, and the trip was pleasant. The train legs of the journey were fine, and we got to Assisi and checked in to our hotel about 3:00. The hotel was quite marvelous, with our “room” actually being a small apartment with a kitchen and separate bathroom. Mer and I were impressed, especially since the cost was very reasonable (I think it was the second-cheapest place, after the hostel in Ravenna).

I like to listen to college lectures produced by the Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company); I listen to them when I run, and it helps pass the time profitably. Recently I  bought three lecture series on Christianity that I thought would be informative without being irritating; I bought a lecture series on Francis of Assisi, a lecture series on great Christians (which covered Francis in one lecture), and a series on the history of the Catholic Church (which covered Francis in a lecture). With all of these talks on Francis, I really wanted to go to Assisi, and Mer humored me.

Assisi is really cute. The town is up on a hill about two miles from the train station, which connects to the town with a one-euro bus fare. Mer did not know exactly where our hotel was located, but wisely pointed out that if we rode the bus to the end of the line, the hotel would be downhill instead of up.

We found our hotel after wandering some wonderfully narrow streets, although shockingly, people still drove down them. I pointed out to Mer that people will go to rather ridiculous lengths to have a car nearby; some of these streets were really tight even for small cars.

The first order of business for the day was to visit the Basilica of St. Francis. The Basilica is huge, and was built shortly after Francis died, to honor him. At the lowest level is a crypt with the tomb of St. Francis; above is a church decorated with frescoes of the life of Jesus on one wall and of St. Francis on the other; on the main level is the basilica, which is gigantic and decorated, but not to the excess we found in some of the cathedrals we saw on this trip.

We walked down (and down and down) to the church, and we started in the lower church so we could visit the crypt first. I have a couple of Catholic friends, and I badly wanted to burn a candle for their families and pray for them, as an encouragement to their famlies. It turns out you can’t burn a candle yourself, but you can buy a candle and set it aside for a friar to light on the altar at a later time. Mer and I did find a quiet corner behind the altar/tomb to pray, and it was a peaceful time.

We popped back up to the “smaller” church, and wandered around looking at it. The art was grand, but we were both amused and horrified that small chapels had been added to the main church after it was built, and this required them to cut through the frescoes. That was a shame even as far as that goes, but it looks as if one of the frescoes must have been the resurrection of Jesus – the panel before it is of Jesus being put in the tomb. Who thought it was a good idea to remove the resurrection panel?

We popped up into the main level of the church. I actually do not have many impressions of it – my main purpose was to see the crypt and to pray for my friends, so the basilica impressed without leaving an impression. The outside of the church is simple and beautiful, with a wide green space and a modern sculpture of Francis riding his horse back from trying to go to war, when he had to go home because he was ill and because he felt God wanted him to go back. It was an interesting and striking piece to put outside the basilica.

We went up (and up and up) to the hotel so I could rest, but we swung by a small overlook and sat looking down on the basilica for a few minutes. The overlook was outside a small church that I would have loved to have gone in and looked around, but it seemed as if a small Mass was going on, which I did not want to disturb. I was really overheated, and I grabbed a Sprite for the sugar and water, and drank it back in the room; I napped a little as well, until about 7:00. I felt better for the rest, and so we headed out for supper at an amazing spot. Assisi has a restaurant that has balconies overlooking the entire plain and hills around Assisi. The food was fine, but the view was unbeatable.

I then decided we should just wander around town and enjoy the alleyways. I always tried to choose small streets that were car-free, and I liked taking stairs up anywhere they presented themselves.  We saw a sign pointing up, but it was in German, so we could not read it. We took the stairs anyway, and we stumbled on a small gathering of Germans sitting on benches in front of a shrine to Mary, getting ready for a small worship service. They were very friendly and offered us song sheets, but we don’t speak German, and we did not know how long the service would take, so we declined as graciously as we could. As we wandered off, we heard them singing – it was pretty nice.
We kept wandering up, and saw a kitty. Upon turning the corner where the kitty was, we discovered a courtyard with five kitties in it, at the feet of a woman speaking English to someone on the phone. She seemed amused as we fussed over the cats, and as we were leaving, she told us to come by anytime to see them.

We continued up and up, and finally reached the access road to the old castle overlooking all of Assisi. The castle itself is a tourist attraction and has hours of operation, and it was closed. However, the hill is accessible, and it has an amazing view, and it was sunset. There were only three of four other people around, and it was quite peaceful. We lingered for a fair amount of time, but I wanted to make sure we still had some daylight as we made our way back to the town. I was pleased by that decision, as the well-maintained-but-still-dirt path we took down brought us past a couple of unhappy dogs and dumped us out near what appeared to be a small, abandoned part of Assisi. It was a very short walk into the main town from there, but I was happy to have some light to see by.

Back at the hotel, I discovered I was out of range of the main hotel wi-fi signal (we were in another building), so Mer and I went into the square and sat outside a cafe. Mer read while I checked e-mail for any urgent messages (there were not any), and while I drank a hot chocolate. The evening had cooled down, and it was a pleasant place to sit. I have to agree with Assisi’s claim to be a “city of peace.”

Siena is a neighborhood town. There are seventeen neighborhoods that all have symbols (like the caterpillar, owl, panther, and so on), and the loyalty to each neighborhood seems pretty fierce. Ten of the seventeen neighborhoods race in a horse race in the main square in July and in August, and it is a REALLY big deal. We are still almost three weeks away from the first race, and we heard loud singing last night as we were going to bed. At eleven o’clock. On a Wednesday. There was one pope who came from the town of Siena, and I lost count of how many statues and paintings there were of him in the cathedral. This is one town that takes civic pride seriously.

It also is one easy town in which to get lost. The roads are narrow and the buildings are several stories tall, so you cannot see landmarks. Since the town was built on a hill, the streets are not laid out in any logical order, and many times we thought we were heading in the right directon, only to discover we were heading off the wrong way, and sometimes the opposite way. We used our map quite a lot, and even with that, we got turned around fairly often. We had to keep telling ourselves that the journey is a destination in itself, and this is all part of the experience.

We slept in, and so did not get out touring until about 11:00. We headed over to the cathedral, called the Duomo (“Dome”). We bought a ticket that let us into five different sights, but we started with the Duomo. If the Duomo in Florence is designed around clean lines and simplicity, the Duomo in Siena took the complete opposite approach. The outside of the church is ornate, with white and green marble and lots of decorations – it reminded me of Milan’s cathedral for elaborateness.

The cathedral’s interior takes this to a whole new level – it is a complete riot of art and sculpture. The floor alone took over two hundred years to decorate, and it seems as if every square inch of floor and wall and ceiling are used to show off art. It is a bit overwhelming. There are works by Michelangelo and Donatello in the church, and I suspect art lovers could spend whole days in the church and the museum.

My favorite room was the library. Not only did it have a highly decorated ceiling that was still bright and colorful after five hundred years, but it housed a large collection of huge (two feet by three feet) hymnals in Latin (generally from the 1500s, but a few in the church collection went back to the eighth century). The pages were decorated with Biblical stories, and were brightly colored. They were cheerful to me.

We made a circuit of the whole church, including a couple of small chapels. One held two statues by Bernini and a heavily gilded ceiling. I liked that room very much.

After we toured the cathedral, Mer wanted to walk back to the hotel to get her jacket, since she’d been cold in the church. I took that as a good sign to get lunch, so we stopped at a sandwich place after retrieving her jacket.
We recommenced our tour with the baptistery under the cathedral. Since the cathedral was built on top of a hill, the baptistery filled in under one end, and it too is highly decorated with art and sculpture. We asked the ticket taker, and she indicated that the baptistery is still used for baptisms, which is great.

We moved up the hill a bit to look in at the crypt. The “new” cathedral was built around 1300 over another church, and the frescoes from the first church remain in the crypt, although some are damaged or obscured by the foundations of the cathedral. They were all scenes from the life of Jesus, and they were interesting to see. As a huge bonus, the crypt had on loan Caravaggio’s painting of John the Baptist. Caravaggio is an artist I actually know about and like, and he is known for his realism and his dramatic use of light in his paintings. So I was pretty pleased to get to see my second Caravaggio on this trip (in the museum in Milan, we also saw a still life of decaying fruit he did).

We headed into the cathedral museum, where some of the art pieces are kept – ones that were fragile or were starting to erode. The museum is small and well done, but I have to admit I was starting to get “art fatigue.” The museum does have one non-art attraction – you can climb up to the top of a huge wall that was meant to be part of a bigger cathedral. The wall was built, but the cathedral was never built because of the plague hitting Siena. Naturally, I was excited about the climb up, and Mer was excited about the view. There were two levels – one was halfway up and protected by a high wall, and the other was all the way up, and had just a railing. I could not stay on top because of my fear of heights, so I went back to the halfway landing, which felt safer. Mer stayed at the top for a few minutes, and then joined me before we headed back into the museum to finish up the couple of rooms we had missed.

We grabbed some gelato as a pick-me-up, and we headed across town to San Francesco, a Franciscan church that is quite large. This was the last sight covered by our ticket – it had a small art museum in the old Oratory, and we checked it out. Even though I was a bit weary of art, the Oratoty only had six rooms, and both the art and the building were interesting.

After visiting the museum, we went into the church, with which I fell in love. In contrast with the busy cathedral, San Francesco is simple and clean, with some art around, but not an overwhelming amount. The art almost all had to do with Biblical stories or the lives of saints, and it felt intimate, which was strange in such a huge church. This may have been my favorite church of the trip because it was an unexpected joy to find it. Oh – should you wonder about neighborhood spirit, all seventeen flags of the neighborhood were displayed in the church, but the local flag (the caterpillar) had four flags, all near the altar.

We walked around the outside of the church and headed back to the room. The heat of the day had gotten to me, so I took a half-hour nap before our final push of tourism for the day. We headed off to find the fort on the northwest side of town, and it took forever. We wandered around streets, and checked the map a bunch of times. We discovered some fantastic views, including another huge church over by the fortress. We finally came across the fortress, but could not find a way in. We wandered around the entire fort before finding a way in by following a jogger; we had seen people running along the tops of the walls, so Mer suggested we follow this guy. It worked. The fortress is now a park, and the old fortifications are filled in and full of trees (and runners). It is a very pretty place with some amazing views of the older parts of Siena and the hills around. We walked around the whole thing.

We came out of the fortress after having walked around it, and headed back into Siena. We were not really trying to navigate too hard, and we stumbled across a chocolate store with chocolate on sale. We bought some to eat later in the square, and kept wandering down the road for all of about five minutes when we started to recognize stores and the local flags. Without trying, we had stumbled on a quick and easy way back to our hotel.
We swung by the room to wash up before heading out for supper. I headed off in a particular direction, but then picked a restaurant largely on whim. It felt fairly local to us, and the food was good. We ended the evening by heading back to il Campo to sit and eat chocolate and to people-watch. It had been a busy little day, but a very good one.

Mer officially “handed off the baton” last night, so I am in charge of the rest of the vacation. We started off this morning by checking out of the hostel and walking to the train station, just in time to miss the train to Florence pulling out of the station. The next train was around 11:30, so we suddenly had two hours to explore more of Ravenna.

We stowed the baggage in a storage place and headed off toward the church of San Francesco. I wanted to see the church again (it is a beautiful and simple Franciscan church), but along the way I had noticed the remains of a ruined palace that was free to the public. We swung in there, and in addition to the ruined walls that were still standing were about twenty partial stone mosaics that had decorated the palace. These were not so fine as the glass and gold mosaics we had seen yesterday, but they were still very pretty.

After the palace, we did stop in at the church of San Francesco. We looked in all of the small side chapels and looked at the length of the church from the back. At that point, I decided we should head back to the train station, which we did, where we caught the train to Bologna and then on to Florence.

The train to Bologna was a normal Italian train, but the train to Florence was a very spiffy express train. We shared our four seats with two American girls from Arizona who were over in Europe as a celebration of the older girl graduating college (she was on a five-week tour, while her friend was over here for two weeks). They were interesting people, and seemed genuinely amazed when Mer told them we were over here for our fifteenth wedding anniversary (they thought we were younger – happy, that!).

We were originally going to head right on to Siena, where our hotel was, but I could not skip Florence. Mer spent a semester of college living in Florence, and I had liked the city when we visited about eighteen years ago. So I decided we should spend a couple of hours in the city. We stashed the bags in storage, and headed in to the Duomo, with its famous dome.

The Duomo area was a madhouse of tourists, but we did get in line to get inside the church. We had to wait about five minutes to get in, but once in, I was amazed at how clean the church was, visually. The walls held few decorations, and there were very few tombs or statues about. It was harmonious and beautiful. We spent about ten or fifteen minutes looking around, mostly up at the ceiling and dome.

We then popped over to a restaurant to grab a sandwich. We ate inside because we had the small dining room to ourselves, and it was a peaceful break from the crazy streets outside. Thus energized, we tackled the big tourist sight of the day – the church bell tower.

The bell tower is right next to the church, and happily, Mer had never done the tower before – she had only climbed the Duomo stairs, which costs more and usually has a line. I rarely get to introduce Mer to new things, so I was pleased by that. The downside to the experience for Mer was that it required her to climb 414 narrow steps. The downside for me meant that the top was quite high up, and I am scared of heights.

The bell tower stairs have four huge landings for people to rest, with views from all four. The first and third levels were well protected, and I felt more or less okay. The second level had a huge hole in the floor, and although it was barricaded off, it did not make me feel very good. The last level led to the outside, with a narrow passage around the top of the tower. It is enclosed in a wire cage, but I could not handle it, and I stayed inside the bell tower while Mer checked it out. I liked the stairs, though.

We headed back to the train station to catch the 5:10 train to Siena. We will be in Siena for two nights, which will give us a chance to get a bit of rest while still seeing sights. Siena is built on several hills, but happily, there was a series of escalators and people-movers that took us from the at-the-bottom-of-the-hill train station up to the city. The walk to our hotel in the old city center was longer than I expected, but we found the hotel all right.  I was surprised that the city center was mostly pedestrian – there were still a handful of cars and a few mopeds; it was a bit irritating to have to move out of the way of a single car crawling its way though the foot traffic.

We headed out for supper once we had checked in. The clerk at the desk recommended a restaurant nearby, so we tried that. Siena has a pasta, pici, that is a regional specialty, so we got that with a simple, slightly spicy tomato sauce. It was excellent, and it was like a very thick spaghetti noodle.

After supper, we headed down to the main square, il Campo; it is best known for the somewhat insane horse race held in the square twice a year. The square is really small, and how they race horses around it is a bit of a mystery to me. The city is divided into seventeen neighborhoods, and each neighborhood is very loyal to its horse in the race. The race draws over sixty thousand spectators.

Il Campo was much quieter for us. There were a few hundred people about in the square and surrounding restaurants. The evening was cool and perfect, so we got gelato and sat down on the ground. Once we had finished eating, we followed the lead of some of the locals, and we lay down on the bricks. The whole square is sloped toward the huge and impressive town hall, so you still are looking at the building even when reclining. We spent over half an hour like that, and it was very relaxing.

After a day of heights, we should have more in store for tomorrow – Siena has towers to climb as well, and adds the bonus of being built on hills.

I awoke to the sound of cooing doves or pigeons, and I was not pleased about that. It was still pitch black out, and I needed the sleep. I tossed and turned for a little while, when to my shock Mer’s alarm went off; it was set for 7:30. The room was still pitch black. I investigated, and it turned out the farm house “shutters” were actually solid, so they blocked out all light.

We got ready and had a nice breakfast of rolls and very fresh scrambled eggs. While we were eating, the peacock called a few times, so I decided I wanted to go see it before we checked out. We walked around the back of the house to the pen where the peacock and peahens live, but we did not have a good view. As such, we worked our way around the adjacent goat pen so we could get a better angle. After we’d gotten most of the way around, we met a small horse that was untethered. He was cute and walked past me, right to Mer, whom he promptly headbutted in the arm and tried to bite. I shooed him off, but as soon as I walked a few paces away, he tried to get at Mer again. This happened a third time; we then decided discretion was the better part of valor, and we fled inside to check out. It turns out the small horse is very young, and likes to play, including biting. So noted. While Mer paid the bill, I sneaked outside to try to take some pictures of the peacock, which I managed to do. It is a bit of a strange thing to be “on the lookout” for an herbivore.

We headed back to the bus stop, where we were disappointed to find out that there were no buses to Padua, which was only ten to fifteen miles away. Instead, we had to get a bus back to Venice, which was about twenty miles away. At least we managed to get seats at the back, so that we could avoid the crush of people who eventually filled the bus.

When we got back to Venice, we schlepped our luggage over to the train station, where we found that the next available train to our next destination, Ravenna, was about an hour-and-a-half wait. That was the first time this whole trip we had to wait for more than thirty mintues. We took advantage of the time, even with luggage in tow, to head back out into the city. We immediately jumped down a back alley to get away from the crowds, and we emerged ten minutes later on a side canal that seemed to be used largely for commercial boating. We found some canal-side chairs at a restaurant, and we ordered a dessert to munch on while we waited for our train. It was a tremendously pleasant spot, and the food was very good.

Our train ride from Venice to Ferrara was easy and straightforward. The train system in Italy is, by and large, excellent. We were a bit surprised when we saw that the train to which we were transferring was a two-car train, driven by diesel engine instead of the usual electric engine. This little train never got going terribly fast, and it stopped at many small stations, but it did get us to Ravenna around 4:00. As an aside, we did amuse ourselves by watching a group of four Italian teenaged males, when they would check out pretty girls who walked by. Some stereotypes have some truths in them.

Our hostel, which turned out to be pretty basic, was a fifteen-minute walk from the train station. I have to admit I doubted Meredith a tad at this point. The entire fifteen-minute walk was very pedestrian and nondescript, and I could not think of why we were in Ravenna. There were no mountains, no lakes, no ocean – nothing I could see to make me think this was a place to see. Happily, it turned out I was very wrong.

Ravenna has lots of history, and much of it takes the form of religious art or architecture. Once we checked into the hostel, we walked back to the center of the city, which is mostly pedestrian-only (always a big plus in my book). On a tip from the receptionist at the hostel, we checked out the church of San Francesco. She told us to look for fish. Okay. We saw a door under the altar area, and it had a slot for money. I put a euro in the slot, and a dark area lit up – it was the access to the old Roman crypts, with some surviving mosaics on the floor. That was all cool enough, but in the fifteen-hundred-plus years since the crypts were built, the water level has risen, so the crypt is under three feet of water, and goldfish now swim around in there. It was quite cool. As an added bonus, the organist of the church was playing while we were there.

And if that were not enough, around the side of the church is the tomb of the Italian poet Dante. We wandered over to see that and the park next to the tomb where the people of Ravenna buried the body of Dante during World War 2 to protect it.

We proceeded on to the main sight of the town – the Basilica di San Vitale. It is an impressive church outside, but the inside was mind-blowing to me. I love religious art, and my favorite art forms are sculpture and mosaics. I had always thought old mosaics were always in pieces on floors of old buildings. Not here. Here, the mosaics are intact, on the floor and walls and ceiling, and they are the most spectacular mosaics I have ever seen. They are subtle and colorful and look as if they could have been painted on. They were brilliant. The church even had a prayer labyrinth, which Mer and I used to pray for some sick friends of ours. What a beautiful church.
In the back yard, so to speak, of the church is the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. The Roman woman for whom it is named is probably not buried inside, but the inside is completely covered in more impressive mosaics, and these are the oldest in Ravenna – probably from the fifth century. They were amazing.

We swung by another famous mosaic-rich church – the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. This church has rich mosaics down each side of the church, one side celebrating Mary and the other celebrating Jesus.

We were running out of time, since most sights close at 7:00, but we squeezed in one free sight that closed at 7:30 – the free Arian Baptistery. This small building was built by Arians (heretical Christians who claimed Jesus was created by God and was just human until infused with divinity at his baptism), and the ceiling still has a grand mosaic of the baptism of Jesus.

By now, most of the sights in town were closed down, so we headed off to supper. We dined outside, as is Mer’s preference, and sat next to some Germans on one side, with some American girls we had seen on the train sitting behind us. After supper, we grabbed some gelato from the pedestrian area, and we headed back to the hostel for the evening. What a pleasant surprise Ravenna has turned out to be.

Is is dark in the middle of the night in the Dolomites – really, really dark. At some point I woke up before sunrise, and I could not see a thing. I bet the stars up there are spectacular, although we could not see them last night because of the rain and clouds. We got ready efficiently this morning and had another huge breakfast spread, which included meats and granola and yogurt, since the area is very Germanic. After breakfast, we did take a thirty-minute walk in the meadows, since the rain had stopped overnight. The mountains were playing hide-and-seek with us, sometimes being visible and sometimes being shrouded in clouds and fog.

We checked out and did take time to go and pet the now-two-day-old goat babies. We then hauled our bags up a long hill of a couple of hundred feet in elevation to the chair lift. We took the chair lift down, and then we caught the bus after a twenty-minute wait. The bus took us to the cable car, which took us down to the main road, where we caught another bus right away, which took us down the winding mountain road to the train station. We just caught the train to Verona, where we transferred to a final train to the day’s destination, Venice.

Venice is overrun with tourists, but still maintains a magical atmosphere. We stored our luggage at the train station, and headed out into the city. As soon as I saw the Grand Canal, I got excited. Sadly, we only had about four hours to explore the city, since our hotel was on the mainland at the end of another bus run, but you can cover a lot of ground in Venice in four hours.

The best thing to do, by far, is to jump into the warren of roads and alleys in the city. Mer knew she wanted to get to a place on the eastern part of the Grand Canal, but she did not care how we got there, so we took whatever road or alley seemed best (usually the one with the fewest tourists). You can get quite alone once you are off the main paths of Venice, and sometimes you hit dead ends or a canal with no bridge. Sometimes you find or small churches, or cute squares, or beautiful apartments with pretty window boxes. The fun of Venice is Venice itself.
We did finally find the restaurant Mer wanted – it was located right on the Grand Canal with great views of the boat traffic. Since it was about 4:30, they were not serving any real food, so we ordered dessert and a hot chocolate, and we amused ourselves for over a half hour watching life go by in boats. We noticed tons of private taxi boats filled to the brim with Asian tourists taking pictures of everything. There were work boats steered by men who were more interested in their cigarettes than boat traffic. There were gondoliers who yelled conversations at each other, sometimes as many as five all at once. It was quite a spot.

We then plunged back into the maze of streets. If we had a specific destination, I did not know what it was until quite a bit later, when Mer announced that she wanted to get back to the train station so she could take a water bus to St. Mark’s and back. We actually found where we were on the map, which was more or less eighty percent of the way across Venice. We needed to go west and north, which seemed simple until you threw in the canals and dead ends. It took us a long, but very scenic, time to get back to the train station. By then, we did not have time to take the water taxi, so we walked along the Grand Canal and other main tourist streets for about twenty minutes before heading back to the train station to get our bags. From there we walked over to the bus station to catch a bus for the mainland.

What a bus it was – it was an “expando-bus,” a standard bus with an additional section put on the back to hold more passengers, and we still almost did not fit on. It was wall-to-wall passengers for over twenty minutes out of the forty-five-minute bus ride. We finally got seats for the last fifteen minutes or so.

Once we got to our bus station, Mer had to ask around for directions. Meanwhile, I saw a sign for our accommodations – a working farm/villa. With Mer’s directions and my confirmation, we walked to the farm, taking about ten minutes to do so. We were greeted and shown to our room, which was very serviceable, with a very cool wooden-beam ceiling. The mistress of the house made us an excellent supper of pasta, salad, and rolls. While we were eating, she had an argument with a drunk man outside, and he left. Then, we heard a peacock calling outside the window, and we found out the farm has a peacock. Peacocks have a distinctive call, which is slightly startling when you do not expect it. It made for an interesting dinner. The landlady was very kind to us and talked to both of us, even though my Italian is almost nonexistent.

So, at the end of a day involving three buses, two trains, two cable cars, and a lot of footwork, along with the loss of 6,700 feet of altitude, I am pretty beat. Here’s hoping the peacock is on my sleep schedule.

It has been a bit of a day of contrasts – city to country, hot to cold, dry to wet, high to really high, and trains to buses to cable cars. It is kind of hard to take it all in.

We started out this morning in Trento in our posh hotel. Trento is in a mountainous area, and our hotel had grand views from the patio where we ate breakfast. Poor Meredith – when I found a four-star hotel for a hundred euros a night (about 130 dollars), I was pleased. When we were upgraded to a two-hundred-euro suite for free, I was smug. When we saw the huge breakfast buffet with yogurts, four kinds of croissants, four kinds of breads, fruit, cereals, and five kinds of dessert, I was pretty much insufferable. In my defense, Mer had given me a slightly hard time when she saw I had booked a four-star hotel. She managed to put up with my ego by soothing herself with three kinds of croissants.

We left the hotel and caught a city bus down to the castle, where we got off and found Richard’s church. Its members welcomed us quite warmly, and told us to sit in the back where we could get an English translation of everything by listening to headphones. It turned out that on this Sunday, Richard was translating. The church was pretty full, with about eighty people or so, and a bunch of kids – it is a very young church. Two of the five songs sung during the service were songs to which Mer and I knew the English words, so we sang those while the others sang in Italian. The sermon was based on a passage in Galatians where Paul talks about faith in Jesus versus dependence on the law. The pastor applied that to modern life as well, and warned that even Christians have a tendency to fall back on making rules that add to the gospel, when we really need to depend on Jesus. He likened it to a sickness treated with drugs that mask the symptoms as opposed to going to the surgeon to have the sickness cured. He stressed that we need Jesus to cure the sickness, and we need to keep relying on him.
We ducked out of church just as a children’s presentation was starting for Sunday school – we wanted to catch a train that left around 12:50, and we were afraid we would miss it if we stayed much later. We got our tickets, and had about twenty minutes to lounge about, so we sat in Piazza Dante, where we enjoyed the breeze (church had been really hot for some reason).

We took the train north (and up) to Bolzano, which is a good-sized city at the start of the Dolomites, a rugged mountain area. We grabbed a bus that went up and up and up through some hair-raising turns on a mountain road, with some amazing vistas. We jumped off the bus up in the mountains near Castelrotto, where we got tickets for a long cable-car ride up through spectacular views. When we got to the top in Compatsch, we waited for another bus; the wait allowed us to soak it all in – we were surrounded by steep and often bare rock cliffs, some with snow still on them. It started to rain very lightly, on and off, but not enough to dampen our spirits. We got our last bus, which took us to our last cable car, which was really a fancy chair lift. We got lucky here – the lift was still running. It closed at 5:00, and it was 4:20, so that was okay. But once we got on it, it started raining harder, and when we were about three quarters of the way up, there were two flashes of lightning. Once we got off, they shut the lift down. We had passed isolated snow patches on the way up, and we were more or less eye-level with sides of mountains that still had good amounts of snow on them.

By now it was raining pretty hard, and we had a ten-minute walk to our hotel. Happily, we had only gone a minute or so when the lift operator drove by and gave us a lift to the hotel, which was very appreciated.
The hotel is a beautiful alpine structure with lots of exposed wood, located at 2054 meters (6700 feet). Since the temperature was only in the low forties when we arrived, they had the heat on, which was quite welcome. We checked in and dumped the bags, and went back to the bar for hot chocoalte. Once we were warmed up, I borrowed an umbrella (Mer has one), and, largely on Mer’s prompting, we went out on a ninety-minute walk along the dirt roads. We looked at some of the trails along the way, but they were either muddy, under water, or both. The dirt-road walk was fine, if wet. The views were breathtaking in all directions – there were mountains and rushing streams and lots of evergreen trees and moutain fields. It was such a pity it was raining, but it was still amazing. We found occational patches of snow on the side of the road, probably left over from piles made by the snow plow. Mer may have been hit by a snowball in June.

We got back to the hotel, slightly cold, slightly more wet, but quite happy. We stopped by the goat pen (containing goats with bells), where we were delighted to see one-day-old goats with their moms. They were tiny, and very cute. We popped up to our room, where we changed clothing, and went downstairs for supper, which was included in our stay. It was a four-course meal (Including dessert), and was excellent. The dessert, mille foglie, was perhaps the best non-chocolate dessert I have ever had.

Sadly, it was still raining after supper, so Mer and I decided to stay cozy and warm. We hope it will be dry tomorrow morning before we head out, but even if it not, the journey here was amazing and worth all the trouble.

Mer loves the travel writer Rick Steves, and her “bucket list” is to make sure she gets to all fifteen or so European countries about which he has books. She has read his stuff for years and years, and often makes travel itineraries based on his books just for fun, even when she does not have a trip coming up. So, it is a big deal when Mer goes “off Rick.” Today was one of those days – we headed off to Trento, in the north of Italy, which is a city Rick Steves does not mention. He may not be alone – when we checked into our quite posh hotel, our very nice receptionist found out we were from the United States, and she asked, “What are you doing here?” Trento (or Trent, in English) is not on many American tourist destinations, although it is a big skiing area for Europeans.

We left the lake district this morning, taking a train from Varenna to Milan, then a different train from Milan to Verona, then finally a third train from Verona to Trent. It took about four and a half hours, and then we still had to catch a bus to our hotel, which was on the edge of town. The happy result of the location is that the hotel is a four-star hotel, but costs more or less the same as hotels in the center of town. Then, for whatever reason, the nice receptionist gave us a free upgrade to a small suite. We were quite pleased.

We got into the hotel around 3:30 or so, dumped the luggage, and wandered the grounds. We skipped off to get a snack (an ice cream bar each), which we brought back and ate outside near a fountain. I then took a quick nap while Mer grabbed a book and sat outside looking at the mountains. She came back inside and woke me up just before 6:00 so that we would be in time to meet Mer’s friend, Richard.

Richard and his family are the reason Mer was willing to go “off Rick.” Richard is an Australian man who fell in love with an Italian woman and lives in Trent. Mer and Richard met about twenty years ago when Mer was living in Florence for college, and Richard was there learning Italian. Richard had long had a goal to be a missionary to Trent, and he came to Italy (without knowing how to speak Italian) to do just that. Mer and Richard met at an English Bible study in Florence, and have stayed in touch all this time.

Richard came with his five-year-old son to pick us up, and he drove us to his apartment on the other side of town, just over the Trent line. Shortly after we arrived, Richard’s wife, Pinuccia, arrived with their seven-year-old daughter. The children are fun – they speak Italian, but do understand English, and they are quite polite. Pinuccia speaks a small amount of English, and she is very hospitable. Richard hosted a very good dinner for us prepared by his wife, while we talked and watched the children. It was a lovely meal, and we managed through the language issues pretty well. We spent about three hours with the family, and then Richard drove us home. We are hoping to go to church with Richard and his family tomorrow, but that will be contingent on our figuring out the bus system.