While we can
Today is a travel day, we will be traveling by car back to Florence, dropping off our rental car and swapping to train travel again. Google maps guided us to the rental car drop off point without incident. The main train station in Florence was about a 7 minute walk from the drop off point so we gave that a go again.
Today we are heading out to San Gimignano & Siena. Driving takes full concentration there are so many things that are different when you are driving on the other side of the road. I don’t know how many times I reached for the door handle rather than the gear stick. You have to remember which way to look for traffic when you come to intersections. Anyway we headed off to San Gimignano first, it took about 30 minutes or so.
Had breakfast at a small cafe at the end of the Pontevecchio bridge and then spent the morning looking around the shops and around Florence, there are quite a lot of works of art (statues) everywhere.
Florence, capital of Italy’s Tuscany region and birthplace of the Renaissance, is home to masterpieces of art and architecture. One of its most iconic sites is the Florence Cathedral, with its terra-cotta-tiled dome, when you get up close it is absolutely huge.
I write this as we travel by train from Orvieto to Florence passing through some of the most beautiful countryside you could hope to see. We have just passed the hilltop town of Cortona where the movie “Under the Tuscan Sun” was filmed. It’s a journey of some 2 hours 20 minutes so I have time to reflect on our visit to Orvieto.
I write this post hoping that no Athenians are looking over my shoulder as I sit in this street side cafe. Athens the city is dirty and absolutely covered in graffiti. I can sort of sympathise I guess because there is no money available for maintenance and graffiti cleaning. The people seem to take this all in their stride, no one batted an eyelid as Di and I walked home from dinner last night and there was a small group of young men busily defacing buildings with their spray cans, the thing was they weren’t hiding it at all, there were people everywhere.
What a day! Santorini is essentially what remains after an enormous volcanic eruption that destroyed the earliest settlements on a formerly single island, and created the current geological caldera. A giant central, rectangular lagoon, which measures about 12 by 7 km, is surrounded by 300 m high, steep cliffs on three sides, it really is stunning. We arrived shrouded in fog, but that soon burned off to reveal the customary cloudless sky’s with little to no wind, another hot one.
Today was a day I was looking forward to Kusadasi in Turkey. It was from here that we would be going on the only tour that we booked on the Cruise. Ephesus! The day was as all the others so far Hot, no wind and cloudless. We were pleasantly surprised by the port town of Kusadasi. The Turkish People were friendly although the sellers were a bit pushy for our liking.
Today I had some work to do so had to forgo any tours. Fortunately the boat docked very close to the main street of Heraklion. Took the bus to the taxi stand and it was only 5 euros to take us to the main drag. At least we knew where to go on the way back as it was close enough to walk. I found a cafe that had free wifi overlooking the harbour, a cool breeze and plenty of good table service, the owner was sprooking for customers, he was actually very entertaining.
Today is the second sea day and boy do we need a rest after all the walking we did in Dubrovnik yesterday. The weather is still sunny with no or very little wind and we are heading to Heraklion the capital of the island of Crete. We have decided that we won’t do a tour here I have some work I need to catch up on so we will just find a cafe somewhere with free wifi.
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