Month: June 2019

[As I write this, we’re sitting in Amsterdam airport, awaiting our flight to Frankfurt, where we’ll catch the flight to Denver. I hope to have time to share stories and photos from our 3½ days here, over the next day or so, but be patient, it may take longer than that.]

The first thing we noticed when we arrived on Saturday night, the 22nd, was that we were bringing the heat with us from Italy. Ugh! The forecast was for highs in the high 80s to mid 90s. Oh well…

Mallory’s cousin’s daughter (a “first cousin once removed”), Marley, is living in Amsterdam while studying for a masters degree. She’s very close with Rosy & Louisa, and Mal’s extended family is all very tight, so it was great to be able to see her here and have her give us somewhat of the ‘locals’ tour.

Sunday morning, we went out for breakfast and I had the most amazing fried chicken, scrambled eggs and waffle plate:

I’m going to post this now, since our flight boards in a few minutes. We’ll probably see some of you before I have a chance to do another post!

I’ve just been going through my photos of the time we spent in Florence before flying to Amsterdam on Saturday evening. It’s almost overwhelming, even for me. So much art! [And spoiler alert; I’m writing this on Monday evening, and we’ve seen even more world-class art in the last two days here in Amsterdam. 😳]

I think it might a little over the top to bombard you with a lot of this art, world-class as it is, so I’ll try to just give you the highlights. Contact me directly if you want to see more, I’m sure it can be arranged. 😁

Just so you know, here’s the list of museums, galleries & gardens we visited in Florence:

• The Galileo Museum
• The Uffizi Galleries
• Galleria del’Accademia (aka “The Academy”)
• Boboli Gardens and a tiny bit of the Pitti Palace
• The Leonardo da Vince Museum
• Giardino dei Semplici (aka the Florence Botanical Garden)

Phew, what a shocking amount of phenomenal art, architecture & landscapes in one relatively small city! I highly recommend a visit, if you’ve never been. Yes, the tourists have almost overrun the place, but we were able to skirt the hordes pretty well over the course of our three days.

Okay, on to the highlight reel of photos…

In between long stretches in museums and delicious Italian meals, I did manage to capture a couple of nice street scenes…

The next day began with a tour of Boboli Gardens, next to the Pitti Palace, across the River Arno to the south…

Then it was on to the “Academy”…

Lastly, we managed to squeeze in a visit to the Botanical Gardens, aka the Giardino dei Semplici, or “Garden of Samples”…

It wouldn’t be right if I didn’t post some flower shots too…

I’m getting further and further behind, I’m afraid, so you’ll just have to keep coming back to check for updates…

This will be a (relatively 😜) short post, as it will only cover the morning of the day we left Orvieto and trained to Florence in the afternoon. We had decided the night before that Orvieto’s cathedral was worth a visit inside, and if we went fairly early, we might beat the crowds. It really is quite the exquisite piece of ecclesiastical architecture, from the amazing mosaics on the facade to the stunning frescoes & stained glass windows, with their thin slices of marble in their lower sections (which I’d never seen before)…

There was a anteroom off the main part of the cathedral with breathtaking frescoes covering every square centimeter…

Still reeling from seeing all that beauty, we were glad to head back to our hotel, pick up our bags, and head to the train station. One last fun detail: we got to take a funicular down from the top of rock to the station at the bottom. Here’s a shot of that, looking back up from the bottom:

After we arrived in Florence, we found our hotel and settled in for three days of museums and galleries. Get ready for a lot of photos of art, coming right up!