Free Travel #3 (Part 2)

(I have added photos to earlier posts as far as back as the entry on Assisi.)

On Saturday we drove into Florence with Jenny Towns, who was souvenir shopping. I wanted to give Vickie another dose of the city because she had had little exposure to it up to that point. Arriving in town shortly before 11:00 a.m., we managed to park along the Arno in a metered space about half a mile upstream from the Ponte Vecchio. Jenny left us to do her shopping, and we went to the Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace. Our tickets included admission to the costume gallery and special exhibit on the Medici and science, but not to the main part of the palace. We enjoyed what we had paid to see, and we ate a picnic lunch near the "Isoletta" at the bottom of the gardens. After leaving the gardens, we spent another couple of hours walking the streets between the palace and the Duomo, paying a visit to the "piggy market" so Vickie could get some gifts. We finally made it into the Duomo, which had had long lines on our previous visits. We didn't have to wait to go inside this time, but I still could not believe how crowded the piazza in front of the church was or how busy the pedestrianized streets were between the Duomo and the Piazza della Signoria. I guess there is no off season in Florence anymore. It's saddening.

On Sunday we returned to Florence but did not go downtown. Instead, we drove up to Fiesole, a small town sporting nice Etruscan ruins on a hill overlooking Florence. We spent about an hour there, and then drove back to the opposite side of Florence via the autostrada to the HUF villa, where we met Robbie and Mona Shackelford for lunch. We spent almost three hours with them and had a very nice visit. The HUF students were all in Rome, so we had the villa to ourselves. We actually had to cut our time short so that we could get back to Citerna for the worship service we had scheduled for 5:00 p.m. As the only male present, I ended up doing the whole service myself. Afterwards we had pizza and were rejoined by Dr. Gardner, who had ended his own travels early so as to return before a 24-hour train strike went into effect at 9:00 p.m. that evening. That night we enjoyed watching The Philadelphia Story with Jenny (we had watched It Happened One Night Saturday evening); the students were too philistine in their tastes to join us, unfortunately.