This is my contribution to this week’s Photo Friday Challenge: Cloudy.

So here’s my contribution to the Photo Friday photo challenge for this week – Curvature. I took this photo in Pisa, Italy, during our 25th-anniversary trip there in 2009. This is the arch over the main entry door to the Pisa Baptistery, with a statue of the Madonna and child.

This is my entry in the weekly photo challenge at Photo Friday. Last week’s topic was Breathtaking (yeah, I’m late posting again).

This week’s Photo Friday challenge is Travels, and those of you who know us know we love to travel. So for this challenge, I went back to the photos from our 25th anniversary trip to Europe in 2009. We had purchased train tickets for traveling from Rome to Florence and then from Florence to Zurich to Frankfurt to go home, and we had an extra day of travel on the tickets. So while we were in Florence, we took a side trip to Pisa.

This is when you find out how important prior planning is Since the tower isn’t stable (it’s leaning, after all), they limit the number of people who can climb it at one time, and you have to buy tickets in advance. We had no tickets, so we spent a beautiful afternoon wandering the grounds and taking pictures of the tower, the cathedral and the baptistery.

I was hungry after we traveled to Pisa and walked several blocks from the train station to the grounds, so I bought a local specialty as a snack – marinated seafood salad – and ate that as we sat and admired the beautiful marble that comprised the buildings.

Marinated seafood salad and Pisa guidebook

The popular thing to do in Pisa, apparently, is to hold your arms as if you’re preventing the tower from falling over. I can’t tell you how funny it was to see dozens of people from all over the world all posing the same way.

“Holding up" the Leaning Tower of Pisa

The tower *is* leaning to a frightening degree. It was definitely worth the side trip to see it again (for me – Dan had never seen it before).

This is my contribution to the weekly photo challenge at PhotoFriday.com.

This is part of the cemetery around Corcomroe Abbey in County Clare. It was a misty, overcast day, as it tends to be in Ireland. Of course, the benefit is the brilliantly green grass. We had a great time there and would love to go back.

A few years ago, Dan and I spent a weekend in Jim Thorpe, Penn. We took our bikes and kayaks, and the plan was to go kayaking the first day and bike down a railroad bed converted to a bike trail the second day.

We had car trouble on the DelMarVa Peninsula, so weren’t able to kayak, but we did the bike trip, and had a great time.

Jim Thorpe is a beautifully restored Victorian-era town with gorgeous Painted Ladies and fabulous views of the mountains. It’s an old coal-mining town that is now a tourist attraction for the history as well as the outdoor activities available. And they have amazingly delicious pierogies stuffed with mashed potatoes served with caramelized onions. Yum.

As we were wandering around downtown, we came across this giant lump of coal, aka anthracite. According to the plaque in front of it, it weighs 15,100 pounds and consists of 99 percent carbon.

Really heavy lump of coal

Plaque in front of lump of anthracite

The tour guide told us that these symbols – a heart, a woman’s face, and a footprint – carved into the street, pointed the way to the town brothel. One’s foot had to be at least as large as the footprint in order to be admitted to the brothel. More Turkey pix are here: Turkey 2001

This is my entry in the Photo Friday Challenge. This week’s theme is Symbols.

As I was getting ready to leave, the sky started to fill with clouds, so I drove the circuit again and this is one of the photos I took that day:

This is my entry into the Photo Friday weekly photo challenge. This week’s topic is Overcast.