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Euro Tour Part 11 Castello in Florence

The Castello is at the top of a hill, and in every direction you look, there are lush green hills; it is incredible. The Castello itself does look like an old stone castle. Not a massive fortress a king might live in, but an old greyish brick building a lord might sit in overlooking his countryside. It looks like it has ramparts running around it, but I am not sure, as we never got up that high. When you come in through the iron gate, you step into a large and open courtyard. A few trees, different doors headed off in different directions, but not much else. We were greeted by the host for the evening, who told us the tale of the Pazzi, also pointing out that this courtyard is home to the only remaining legitimate Pazzi coat of arms. Then he started the tour of the Castello. One of the first rooms is the "conspiracy room," where all the planning of the failed plot was done. See my last blog for details of what I mean. The failed Pazzi plot. It is a large, drafty, old wooden r...

Euro Tour Pt 10 Vatican & Florence

 So this is another entry in a long series of travel blogs. We went to Paris, then Italy and Greece. All these entries are about that. You may wanna read the others first but up to you. This one is a bit shorter, I didnt really have a good place to break things off that made sense. So I am going to wrap up Rome and get us to our hotel in Florence.                                                                    Where Caesar met his end I don't know how bus drivers manage to wedge themselves in, down by Vatican City, but they do. The lane ways are very narrow; you can tell they were made hundreds of years ago, or at least laid out before tour buses were invented. Here, we need to make things large enough for oversized trucks to maneuver; however, it does not seem that was a concern wh...

January 1 random thoughts!

I lied, it is clear I wont have a chance to get back to a travel blog this year 2025. Hell it might be 2026 before this is even up! So ending on some more random thoughts. Mostly unedited and well for real last one like this I am doing for a month. At least. New goal for 2026 travel blog out every 2 weeks until last trip is done. Want it to be done before I go to Spain this year!! Oh I am posting this January 2nd. A big chunk right in the middle is Stranger Things with some massive spoilers if you haven't watched final season be warned.  Hockey ended shitty. We finished 3rd in our div. For once it felt like the right div, winning as much as losing. We got a wild card round Bye, then quarter final single game elimination we played a team with only 2 wins. One we handled easily BUT no one showed up. Not figuratively, really. We had a tiny bench and they beat us. The legit season we could have made a good playoff run we lost. I can't say much, I didn't play I was working. I mi...