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-template: double
-point: 43.76987122050593,11.254618042254865
-location: Firenze (Florence),Tuscany,Italy
-image: 2011/florenceh.jpg
-desc: There's no way around it; Florence is crowded. Fortunately less well know museums like La Specola, rarely see visitors. By Scott Gilbertson
-dek: There's no way around it; Florence is crowded. It may well be that Naples is the only Italian city that isn't overrun with tourists in the summer, but after three days of hardly seeing another traveler, I wasn't prepared for the crowds. Luckily it isn't hard to avoid the tourist hordes, just get up early and then when everyone else is starting to stir, head for obscure museums like La Specola, part of the Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze.
-pub_date: 2011-06-10T20:54:00
-slug: natural-science
-title: Natural  Science
----
+The America family road trip -- immortalized so well by [Chevy Chase](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHThGmVfE3A) -- a pretty miserable experience in my view. Pack the kids in the car to drive all day and half the night to Disney World? No thanks. 
 
-<div class="col">
+Driving long distances is pretty awful. Our rule in the bus has always been no more than 200 miles a day. There are plenty of days when we don't even hit triple digit mileage. When you do this full time there's no reason to hurry anywhere. The only time we've ever hurried anywhere was because we were meeting someone.
 
-<p>There's no way around it; Florence is crowded. It may well be that <a href="http://luxagraf.net/2011/jun/06/new-pollution/" title="Naples the only Italian city without tourists">Naples is the only Italian city that isn't overrun with tourists</a> in the summer, but after three days of hardly seeing another traveler, I wasn't really prepared for the crowds in Florence.</p>
+One reason we didn't immediately head west out of Texas for spots more to our liking was that we knew we'd be heading east to Georgia at the end of summer. Corrinne's parents came up from Mexico for a couple weeks and we wanted to see them. We knew we were going to drive and less driving the better.
 
-<p>Florence is, admittedly, more of what tourists expect Italy to be. There's no graffiti, the streets are free of trash and the city looks like something out of a fairy tale cliché -- narrow, winding streets, beautiful river walks and plenty of English-speaking waiters. And so they come.</p>
+Visiting family and friends in Athens sounded like a whole lot more fun than Wally World or Disney World or any other fake world. We're awfully fond of the world we have, so why not try a good old fashioned road trip to Athens, GA? 
 
-</div>
+We left the bus in Texas, but there was still no way we were going to drive 12 hours straight through. Jackson Mississippi is roughly the halfway point, so we set about finding something fun to do in Jackson. Something better than [wrecking our health or making a big fool of ourselves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGhCsznO0S8). 
 
-<img class="picwide" src="[[base_url]]2011/florence-river.jpg" alt="Afternoon light on the river, Firenze (Florence), Italy" />
+Corrine discovered that the natural history museum was hosting a dinosaur exhibit complete with huge animatronic dinosaurs. Sold. We set out early Saturday morning and made Jackson by afternoon. The dinosaurs were a hit and the crowds weren't too bad considering it was a weekend. 
 
-<p><img class="postpicright" src="[[base_url]]2011/florence-emptystreets.jpg" alt="Early morning streets, Firenze (Florence), Italy" /><span class="drop-small">L</span>uckily it's never that hard to dodge crowds. Sometimes you head out to <a href="http://luxagraf.net/2006/mar/21/angkor-wat/">Angkor Wat in the sweltering midday heat</a>. In Florence you just need to get up early and the streets will be deserted. Once everyone else is up, head over to "La Specola", the Museum of Zoology, which is part of the Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze. Zoology isn't something near the top of most must-see lists and in my experience, you'll pretty much have the place to yourself.</p>
+<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_150842_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2072" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_151011_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2071" class="picwide" />
 
-<p>Of course how much you'll enjoy La Specola depends a little bit on how much you enjoy wandering through rooms filled with dead animals. My father taught biology and zoology for many years, so I grew up around dead animals, but clearly, La Specola is not for everyone. </p>
+The rest of the museum wasn't quite a nice as the traveling exhibit. It had a semi-broken down feeling to it and many of the stuffed specimens were old and ratty, but not really in a charming or understandable way like [La Specula](/jrnl/2011/06/natural-science) in Italy. 
 
-<p>Part of the appeal of the museum is simply the antique wooden cabinets used to house the various lions, leopards, monkeys, birds and butterflies. The old, uneven and warped glass ripples as you pass, distorts the view from the corner of your eye, giving all the animals a shimmering hint of movement, as if there were still a bit of life left somewhere behind the glass.</p>
+<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_154250_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2069" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_152640_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2070" class="picwide caption" />
 
-<p><img class="picfull" src="[[base_url]]2011/florence-museum-birds.jpg" alt="Birds at La Specola, Firenze (Florence), Italy" /></p>
+When it doubt, more dinosaurs.
 
-<p>Beautiful glass aside, what makes La Specola special is how amazingly old the specimens are. La Specola records the very beginnings of natural science as we know it. The visible specimen tags I could read ranged from the early 1700s up through the late 1800s and into the 1900s. A few specimens come from the Medici family's private collection and are even older. That means the vast majority of the animals in La Specola date from well before Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, and some were brought to Florence even before Linnaeus had come up with the means of organizing them. </p>
+<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_160722_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2068" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_160853_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2067" class="picwide" />
 
-<p><img class="picfull" src="[[base_url]]2011/florence-museum-cats.jpg" alt="Big cats at La Specola, Firenze (Florence), Italy" /></p>
+After we'd had our fill of animatronic dinosaurs we had a mediocre dinner and crashed out in a hotel room.
 
-<p>Of course stuffed specimens from 300 years ago aren't going to be in the best of shape. Feathers have fallen off many of the birds, scales have dropped from the fish, the large mammals have badly dried and cracked hides and the natural coloring has long since faded from many. </p>
+You might think, after years on the road, that we'd be super-organized, super-efficient packers, but no, we're not. It's pretty much a chaotic sprawl of bags, clothes, and toys.
 
-<p>What's fascinating isn't so much the specimens themselves, but the glimpse they offer into the curious minds of the time. When La Specola was founded in 1771, western culture was just beginning to shrug off thousands of years of religious dogma, dropping a vision of the world where everything was the province of god, for a vision of the world in which the human mind could explore on its own. La Specola hails from the very beginning of that yearning to know more about the world, to reject doctrine and discover first hand the creatures that share our planet. </p>
+<img src="images/2019/2019-08-25_064853_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2066" class="picwide" />
 
-<p>In the late 17th and early 18th century there was an explosion of exploration, travel and discovery. The "age of discovery" as it's commonly called in hindsight, was the age of people like you and me, curious about the world and determined to see it for themselves, stumbling around, finding what they found. In the case of zoologists much of what they found was sent back here, to La Specola. It was a unique time, there were no professional scientists yet, no authorities or academic review boards, everything was new, everything was a discovery. </p>
+The next day we drove the rest of the way into Athens. Overall not to bad. Are we there yet did not reach cliche road trip fever pitch and no one got too grumpy. 
 
-<p>Yes, there's something perverse about heading out into the world, discovering exotic and fascinating animals and then killing, gutting and stuffing them. It's gruesome business if you go into the details. There's no reason to do it now, but circa 1700 it was the only link between those who could go into the field and those who stayed behind to make sense of it all.</p>
+Our AirBnB in Athens was a strange place. We found and unplugged 15 air fresheners. No joke. Who lives that way? I suspect that many air fresheners put out enough petro chemicals to shorten your life by a measurable amount. Even without them, the place still smelled like someone was trying to cover up something awful.
 
-<p>La Specola is a link between then and now. A record of the conversation between those who discovered and those who took discoveries and turned them into something meaningful. Stuffed carcasses are not particularly meaningful in and of themselves. Colorful perhaps, exotic and even alien in some cases, but finding and recording is only half of what creates the store of human understanding. La Specola lays that conversation open for anyone to walk through and experience.</p>
+At least the view across the street was good, some neighbor had a 1970ish Crown school bus at least partly converted to an RV. If we ever do the school bus conversion thing, the 60s and 70s Crown school buses would be high on my list. The mid-body diesel engine is awkward though, eats up all the room for your tanks. Not that I've put a lot of thought into this or anything.
 
-<p>If stuffed and canned dead animals aren't enough to keep the tourists at bay, then the last two rooms certainly are. The last section of La Specola is nothing but wax models of dissected human bodies, flayed open to varying degrees to show muscle structure, viens, organs and even nerves. The models were created in the 1800s from real human bodies and were used to teach anatomy to medical students. The models are remarkably life-like and cover the entire spectrum of human existence from stillborn, syphilis-riddled fetuses to otherwise healthy adults and even larger-than-life skeletons.</p>
+<img src="images/2019/2019-08-26_150054_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2065" class="picwide" />
 
-<p><img class="picfull" src="[[base_url]]2011/florence-museum-meat.jpg" alt="Wax model of human innards at La Specola, Firenze (Florence), Italy" /></p>
+I first came to Athens in 1999, moved here on a whim. I've never really felt at home anywhere except the wilderness, but Athens is probably as close as I come to having a home town at this point. Whatever the case, it's always fun to come back for a visit. We wandered around, went to some of our old haunts, took the kids places they claim not to remember, ate some good food, even managed to put together a huge cousins sleepover party. 
 
-<p>At first glance the wax models are a touch disturbing, not necessarily because they're life-like, but because they put us on the same shelves, in the same warped glass cases. Otherwise, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? We are after all just one more animal roaming the planet. But a curious, inquisitive animal that can dream anything it wants, including a natural science to explain how curious inquisitive animals can dream anything they want... just remember, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Turtle" title="Wikipedia entry on the World Turtle">it's turtles all the way down</a>.</p>
+<div class="cluster">
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2019/2019-08-28_161235_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2084" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2019/2019-08-30_161235_trip-to-athens_ZY6qFv3.jpg" id="image-2087" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+<img src="images/2019/2019-08-26_151313_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2064" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2019/2019-08-29_161235_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2085" class="cluster picwide" />
+</div>
 
+Around the time we were getting ready to head back, an opportunity to stay presented itself. Well, not stay in Athens, but hang around the area for a few months. After thinking it over for about five minutes, we said sure, why not? The next day I got in the rental car, drove it back to Texas and returned it, grabbed our stuff out of the bus, threw it in the Volvo, said goodbye to the bus and headed back to Athens.