In our week in Tuscany we visited Volterra, San Gimignano, Siena and Pisa. Though Tim and I had climbed the leaning tower before of course the children hadn't. Tim wasn't keen (in case it collapsed while we were in it!) but after persuading him we told the children I would take them up. However when we arrived we found children under 8 weren't allowed up at all so that ruled Kennedy out and those under 12 (Jonty) had to hold an adult's hand the entire way. Worse however was that the admission cost was 15E per person ($30 NZ) with no reduction at all for children. Faced with an overall cost for 3 of us of $90 NZ we decided to give it a miss and made do with photos of it from the bottom instead.

We all loved the Italian gelato and usually had one cone each a day. We also sampled the local wines and cheeses and of course pasta and pizza.

The drivers in Italy were some of the scariest we have encountered. They tend not to indicate, overtake in very dangerous circumstances and drive very very fast. Despite all that we were safe on the road but ended up having two minor accidents in two days. The first was in an underground carpark and the side panel of the passenger door got scraped rather badly (a case of too tight a car park and too big a car) and the next day Tim reversed into a tree breaking the rear brake light. He did however do a super job of glueing the many broken bits of red and clear plastic back together! That same day we got a 35E ($70NZ) parking ticket. We're not sure why as we can't read Italian but we have temporarily discarded it....