Actually, we started our day traveling from Florence to Pisa to see the leaning tower of Pisa! We took lots of funny pictures. That thing looks like it could fall over any minute! I think the tilt is 55 arc minutes which makes the top of the tower overhand the base by 5.5 yards! That's half a first down!

The tower was really the only thing in Pisa that we really got into. We did get a phone card to call our hotel in Cannes, France to tell them we would be a little late and we had a half-hour left on the card, so we called home! We spoke with both Hilary's parents, her Mom-mom, my Mom and Dick, and Nan and Pop! We really used that half-hour! I couldn't call Daniel, and or Norma because of the extra 3 hour time difference. It would have been 4:00 AM there!

Then ... the journey from Hell began. The train to Cannes started off nice enough. We met an Italian guy who collected coins! He didn't speak any English, but we all spoke a little French to communicate! It was incredible!

Then the conductor comes in to check our reservations for the train. He says that we're in first class and had first class reservations, but we had second class Euro rail tickets. When we checked ... he was right! We were sitting in first class! He told us to move to second class, but that was five cars away, while the train was moving and we were already three hours into a four hour journey. We ended up staying on the train anyway and nobody bothered us. It turns out, the guy who booked the reservations put us is first class for the second half of the trip1 We have to re-book all our trains for second class now!

Ah well, no big deal. Just a quick stop-0over in "Ventimiglia Station" just outside of Paris and we should be fine. Wrong! The train we had reservations for was missing a car! .... OUR car, so we waiting another 1.5 hours until another train to Cannes came along. No one was helping us! Everyone who spoke English was saying things like, "not *my* problem!". We finally caught the other train and made it to Cannes to check in at 1:00 AM!

Day 1/Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Day 10 Day 11 Day 12 Day 13 Day 14 Day 15 Day 16 Day 17 Day 18 Day 19 Epilogue