We're off to Florence

Today we said good-bye to Venice and headed to Florence on the train. We took the vaporetto to the train station, and then took a high speed train to Florence. At one point the train was going 299 km per hour!!

This was Jessica's first European train trip and she was quite thrilled. She didn't really like riding backwards... it "creeped her out".... so Uncle Steve switched seats with her 😀

This is how she looked when the train first started

Then she got really excited 😀

Then she fell asleep 😀

When we arrived in Florence we walked to our apartment to meet our hostess who gave us a very thorough introduction to Florence and the apartment. The apartment is beautiful! We thought our Venice apartment was good, but this one really outdoes it! We are also in an excellent location very close to the Duomo.

Jessica found a cute little reading spot right away on the "stairs to nowhere"!

After a rest and a happy hour, we headed out to have a look around and find some dinner. Look at this huge door (with huge door-knockers) that we found!

Steve navigated us to one of the restaurants our hostess recommended called "Alfredo's". It was quite delicious, and definitely inexpensive compared to Venice! Jessica really loved her first taste of risotto... 

After dinner we went for a walk to the Piazza della Signoria to look at the beautiful statues. The statues are located in an area called Loggia dei Lanzi. This is one of my favourite places in Florence to just sit and look at people, buildings, and of course statues!

Steve and Jessica wandered about looking closely at all the statues for quite some time 😀 I think this was Jessie's favourite.

Steve really LOVES the statues so took a bajillion photos of them 😀 (Is anyone surprised?!?)

It helps to have such a cute model 😀

While the rest of us were waiting for Steve and Jess, we sat down and enjoyed the music from the guy playing his guitar in the Piazza. I could have sat there for hours 😀

After Steve was done photographing the statues and his lovely niece, we headed out to find some gelato before going home. 

As we walked back to our apartment we made one quick pitstop in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio. It is an incredible building that has now been turned into a museum.

You can however look at the courtyard for free!

To end our day we watched a little Netflix back at the apartment. This is where poor Jessica had to suffer the indignity of her old Auntie falling asleep on her! Sorry Jessica 💖