Post-cruise photos of Florence and Venice:

Florence:
Duomo



Ponte Vecchio



With our headphones on doing the Rick Steves Renaissance audio walking tour:



I had bought tickets on-line for the Uffizi gallery for Thursday at 3:00 pm thinking that would give us time to get to Florence, check into our hotel, and get to the museum. We managed that fine. In fact, we heard there would be a strike on Friday. So, after the Uffizi, we went to the Academia (where the real David is). I had also bought on-line tickets for that for Friday at 8:30 a.m. I asked them if we could get in then (it was about 5:30pm Thursday) rather than risk not getting in on Friday due to the strike. It all worked out great!! We were thrilled. Except my Rick Steves audio tour wouldn't work, I think it didn't fully download when I did all the downloads at home. So we ended up paying 10 euros for the museum's audio guide. Oh well.. that goes in the bucket with the 10 euros I spent in Naples to buy an umbrella since I was too dumb to take one from the ship. At least I got the umbrella home though! And the guide was good. Didn't know the David was carved from a single piece of marble that two other sculptors had failed to be able to carve anything from.