October 18

Arreve-derci Venezia, buon jorno Firenze.

Woke early today and packed ready for our departure. Venice has been great. We boarded a Vaporetto from San Marco and headed back up the Grand Canal 'S' to Pl. Roma. Everybody else was heading in the opposite direction towards the centre of town so we were relieved from the hassle of fighting our way through the crowds with our backpacks.

We drove back down the A13 to Florence. On the freeway, just on the outskirts of the centre of the city, we stopped at a tourist office and for a small fee they found us a 3-star hotel for four nights. Great service, and a lot easier than telephoning the 150 or so Florence hotels yourself. Using Sean's pigeon-like homing sense we found the hotel, Hotel Albion, even after getting lost. I think Sean got lost on purpose just to give himself more of a challenge. The hotel is nice. Artwork decorates the halls and stairs. From the outside it looks like the hotel is in a converted church.

Our first introduction to Florence was rain, heavy rain, really heavy rain with lightning and thunder - the works! It really poured so we took it as an opportunity to duck into a ristorante and get some food and have a drink. There was water flooding over the streets. In the part of town we were in there was a great flood in 1966 that swamped the streets under 4m! Sean noticed that they had marked the height of the water on the walls.

Last night I decided that Florence was going to be my last stop on this trip. I've seen some great cities in Europe. Paris, Cannes, Venice and now Florence. Not forgetting to mention the peacefulness that we found in Cinque Terre. I feel its now time to head back to jolly ol' England and see some great friends. Given that Sean and I didn't take any photographs today I came up with this one. I'm no Michelangelo, but it is from the heart and so we both have that in common ;-)

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