Our trip to Florence

We took a quick weekend trip to Florence during our first month here.  We really wanted to take advantage of Joseph's light work load those first couple of weeks and we both really wanted to go to Florence.  Luckily, it is only a hour and a half train ride, which made everything really easy.

We weren't sure we were going to be able to go until Friday evening at about six.  Joseph got the okay that no work would be happening over the weekend, so we packed quickly and went to bed early.  We had booked tickets on the 6:30am train out of town.

We arrived in Florence by eight in the morning, and walked to our hotel room.  Our hotel was in a great location, close to everything.  It was fun to walk through the city in the morning when it was practically empty and still quite.  By the afternoon it was like a whole new place with so many people.

We dropped our bags off, freshened up, and hit the ground running.  We only had two days so we wanted to see as much as possible.  We went first to Ponte Vecchio, grabbed some tickets for the Uffizi the next morning, bought a tour book off of a street vendor and got to learning.  There is so much history and art in Florence, it really was amazing.

We walked around a bit, and then got in the longest line in history to try to go to the top of the dome in the Duomo, after waiting for 45 minutes and realizing it would be at least another hour, we ditched that plan and went to the Baptistry, that bonus, had no line.

After that we went in search of lunch.  We had our minds set on eating Florentine steaks in Florence.  I had read about a place online that had good reviews so off we went.  Through the city and across the bridge to steaks.  It was so much meat.  We shared a kilo of steak.  They basically just sear the meat, it was hilarious, but we ate it.  Luckily Jasper napped in his stroller for almost the whole time we ate, which is the best.  Eating with a very active baby is always a challenge.

The last thing on our itinerary for the day was to hit up Boboli gardens.  I had read they were really beautiful and they did not disappoint.  They gave you a great view of the down town area and the gardens themselves were really beautiful.  It was fun to walk around.  Although they were much more hilly than we had expected so Joseph got quite the workout pushing the stroller all around.

After lounging about for a while we were still so full from our lunch we decided that a gelato would be perfect for dinner. And gelato never disappoints.

We headed back to the hotel to relax and put Jasper to bed.  We felt really old though as we heard all the people out on the streets partying and we were tucked in our bed reading quietly so we didn't wake up the boy.

The next day we woke up bright and early and went straight to the bell tower.  I strapped Jasper in the Bjorn and we headed up the stairs.  There were a lot of stairs.  It was a good thing we got there early and there was no one else behind us because I was walking slow and breathing hard.  I am going to blame it on Jasper just all around :) The views from the top of the bell tower were really beautiful. You could see over all of the red roofs of the city and into the countryside.  I wanted to stay up there all day and take in the scenery.

But, we couldn't we then ran over to the Uffizi gallery.  We had early tickets to try and beat the crowds.  It was still really crowded and we ended up having to stop and feed Jasper once we got inside anyways, everything always takes longer than expected with the boy.  The museum was good, we were both a little bit frustrated because it was really crowded with big tour groups.  Tour groups really mess up the natural flow of people.

After the Uffizi we walked around, found some lunch.  Stumbled upon an awesome flea market, where we found some cool prints that we are going to put in Jaspers room. Then we found some gelato.  Joseph felt the need to order the largest size, that was literally a tub of gelato.

Then sadly we had to head to the train.  We went back to the hotel, grabbed our things, made a pit stop to see the Berlusconi arches and then headed to the train.

It was such a fun and busy weekend.  We were able to see a lot while also taking some time to really enjoy it.  I can see why Florence is so popular.  Although, I would never go in the summer.  It was crowded when we were there I can't imagine how crowded it would be in the peak of the tourist season.