tuscany 2022: Day 2: 6/9/22, part 1

First, a shout out to daughter #2 who is (shh) years old today! Happy birthday, Honora! I am a terrible dad for not being around to give you presents and bring you a cake today.

One reason to do a pre-trip is to try to get our bio-clocks adjusted and it gets harder to do every year. After trying to sleep in the plane, we try to stay up until evening local time and catch up with "sleep of the dead". But we are old men, and getting a long, restorative, deep sleep is increasing elusive, even under the best of sleeping conditions.

So we started off our first full day feeling a little less than 100%.

For someone like me who loves breakfast, Europe is the place to to be. The European hotels do it right.

Here's Walter planning his attack.

This display below was worth a picture, although it turns out not to be local food. (We can probably get it at Wegman's, but it looks a little different before it is cut for display.)

We booked a walking tour with a local guide who was recommended by VBT. They have arrangements on the ground in all their destinations, so guests don't have to do their own research and take a chance with someone who might have fake reviews.

Jeff was in communication with a guide named Simone, a native of Florence. His tour was advertised in the VBT materials as "Simone's Glory of Tuscany: the Accademia Gallery and Florence City Walk". It turns out he is a super-guide in the sense that he not only leads tours, but he manages a list of certified tour guides. He was planning to be out of town the week that we needed a tour, so he arranged for someone us to give us our walking tour, but for family reasons, he had to cancel his trip, so we got him.

We were glad. I'm sure the other would have been great, but he was terrific, possibly the best guide I have ever had.

In this picture, we are outside a building with a market on the ground floor and food stands upstairs. Besides explaining sites of social and historical interest, he told us where to eat. Very important.

Here he is explaining the lumps on the seal.

We booked reservations for entry to the Galleria dell'Accademia, the museum home to Michelangelo's David and some of his other work. Reservations are essential because of the lines.

Here he is telling us to skip the line.

When we got to the entrance, the woman managing the lines told us to go back to the beginning of the line. Not looking good.

Fortunately, we just needed to talk to this guy who showed us to the correct line and we pretty much walked right in.

Moral of the story: book advanced reservations, hire a tour guide who not only speaks the language but knows the system and how to work it or spend a lot of time waiting in line and be prepared for a lot of frustration.

This when you see when you enter the gallery. These are all Michelango's work. It is hard to wrap your head around the enormity of his work when you consider how long it took to make each sculpture, how many he made, and how many he never even finished.

Here he is explaining what we're looking at. He was an art history major. He knows what he is talking about.

He often picked the slabs or marble he wanted from the quarries and to make sure no one else got it, he put his watermark on it.

And here is David. It really is an impressive statue, especially in person.

I won't pretend to talk about it like I know anything about art.

After the Accademia, we continued to walk around town and he'd point out not only famous landmarks but also local gems like good places to eat, best place for gelato, and shops. This one was particularly interesting. They made pictures out of stone. This guy in the back was using a hacksaw to cut a piece of stone to make a jigsaw puzzle piece that will eventually become a mosaic.

Here he is is pointing some things in a 3-D city map in the Piazza della Republicca.

We ended out tour on the Ponte Vecchio. It is wall-to-wall shops and a pedestrian walkway. It's also a tourist destination and it was packed. I put my mask back on.