Friday 20th September
AirBnB Apartment: link
Address: Via del Sole 11, Florence.
The last time I was in Florence was with Mark, Annabelle and Tom in 2007. It took me a whole day to get here, one that started at 3 am, but I’m glad to be back and about to catch up again with the boys.
My journey to Florence from Copenhagen involved a tram, a flight, a bus, a train and then a bit of walking and it took just over 8 hours. This is why I keep advising the kids when they make travel plans to try and cut down the number of venues so as to limit time wasted with travel. I should heed my own advice!
Our Florence apartment is ideally located a short walk from the train station and just off the beautiful Piazza Santa Maria Novella. The two bathrooms and kitchen are a bit small but we are not here for long and so that won’t be a problem. The ear plugs by the beds is a bit of a worry though 😦 There are two sets of shutters on the windows and so we might need to use exercise both! There is also a chemist and grocery store just around the corner and within 200 m so, so far so good.
I am here alone for the first two nights until the boys get back from their bike riding tour on Sunday at lunch time. We have just the one night together with David heading back home on Monday and mark and I head to Munich. What was that about travel???
It was about 6.30 pm by the time I ventured out to find somewhere local for dinner. Most places don’t open until 7 pm so I killed some time having an Aperol Spritz at the Piazza di Santa Maria Novella, just downstairs. This came with a generous serving of bite size pieces of pizzas of which, later, I would end up being quite grateful. I headed down to check out the Arno before trying a few places for dinner. It seems that solo diners are discriminated against here as, even though there were some empty tables, the three restaurants I tried said they couldn’t fit me in. So, now thankful for the pizza, I headed home to have a squashy banana and a glass of wine.
McNamara Travel Blog 