Walking and gatecrashing

Today we walked. Again. This time north of the city for about 3k to the Stibbert Museum – an amazing collection of armour made by a very rich and very slightly bonkers Englishman in Florence in the 1800s. We’re not really into armour particularly, but Susannah’s daughter recommended it to us – and it really was extraordinary in scale – particularly the cavalcade of 14 full size horse models with riders in full body armour in the dining room… every home should have one.

Lovely coffee and hot choc in the café afterwards too – accompanied by the dulcet and very appropriate tones of ‘I Shot The Sherriff’ by Bob Marley… Then we spent a happy half hour in the park surrounding the museum watching ducks, turtles, butterflies, lizards and dragonflies on a little lake. There was one of those ‘fitness circuits’ of parallel bars, monkey bars, balance beams and so on in the park and I was going to give it a go, really I was. But then there were people sunbathing and watching and I wimped out… the walking will have to count as training…

We walked back into Florence again afterwards, pausing only to gatecrash the ‘International 2010 Powder Amalgam Conference’ at the main fort in Florence. We could probably have hung around a bit, but our trainers and backpack rather showed us up at tourists, and we didn’t really feel like joining in the ‘Open Meeting Amalgams Worldwide’ forum…

We also walked through most of Florence (again) and found the designer shopping district – Armani, Gucci, Bulgari, Prada et al. We very quickly learnt the following:

• If there are no prices in the window, we can’t afford it.
• If there’s a doorman, we can’t afford it.
• If we have to press a buzzer to get in, we can’t afford it.
• If the assistants stop what they’re doing and glare at us as we pause in the doorway, we can’t afford it.

Mostly we kept walking…

Ice-creams today were Biscotti and Raspberry (Guy) and Strawberry and Crème Caramel (me). No, mine wasn’t a good mixture…

We also passed lots of people running in Florence - or, rather, they passed us. Perhaps I should be trying harder?