Firenze

I just booked two nights in a fancy hotel in Florence for our trip to Italy in September. At this place.

It's a short trip -- a week in total -- mostly in Rome, where F is giving a talk at a conference, and then two days in Florence. It feels strangely overdue, like I'm embarrassed at the fact that despite spending 1972 - 1974 rolling around every then-open country in Europe, vaguely carsick in the back of the orange VW popup camper as my parents' marriage fell apart, I have rarely traveled off this continent as an adult. A few trips to Spain to see Janet, a few trips to the UK and Ireland, and that's it. Doesn't fit my picture of myself, to not be the sort of person who flies to Berlin for a long weekend.

So, Italy. Mid-September. One of the few places I really want to go to that neither F nor I has been. (I have an oddly fitting, completely misplaced grumpiness at the fact that he has a million stories in Paris, and I've never been there. Like it's something I Need to Rectify immediately, some basic task of life left unattended, like paying off student loans or something).

Want to run off and plan my wanderings, but need to sink myself back into Systems Theory.