Europe 2015: Day Eleven

Friday, June 26, 2015 (Day 11)

Florence, Italy

In the morning, as a group, we did a walking tour of Florence.  

Our first stop was the Duomo but we did not take the time to climb its heights.  

Next stop was Dante's house.  

The next stop on the tour was the Palazzo Vecchio with its magnificent statuary.  

After the tour, the relatives all decided this was a good time to go shopping.  I decided this was a good time to do a personal walkabout and get to know Florence.  I thought I was going to go up the Duomo but the wait was two hours.  Same thing for the David.  But Florence is so rich that it did not matter because I did a lot on my walk.  

The irony was that as I walked around I decided I had to see this old Roman ruin only to discover it was the Roman ruin right in front of our hotel.  The good news is I could use the bathroom in my room.  Below there are two views from our hotel restaurant's window.  

That night, after dinner, we walked the streets of Florence again, mining its richness on our last night there.  

Florence has left the building.  

Wreaths Over America

On Saturday, December 12th, Denice and I joined my Mommy, sister Barb and brother-in-law Bob met at The Wisconsin Veterans Home at King for the Wreaths Across America event.

The staff of King has 5,500 wreaths to lay in one hour.  We had enough volunteers to get it done in fifteen minutes.

Our family made sure that we got a wreath on graves of my Mommy's parents, Ray and Louise Dionne.  Ray served in WWI and participated as a civilian in WWII.

My father, Warren Niebuhr, served in WWII in the Pacific and is buried at King.  We had a few minutes at his grave site in remembrance of his life.

After the wreath laying I had time to visit with the other volunteers and participants before the memorial service that started at 11:00 a.m. CST to match all the other ceremonies in all the other cemeteries nationally.