After much stressing about heading to Venice with no plans and no place to stay and reading that it is so important to book hostels ahead of time, I managed to find a place so no sleeping on the streets, or should I say canals for me. I am meeting up with my old coworker Sarah from the bakery, it's going to be great!
I bid farewell to the parents and will head to Venice to test my canal smarts. It was great to be here and be spoiled by them. Though, I think I was just the tour guide they needed. We succesfully did the Cinque Terre (five cities) trek on the coast, surrounded amazing scenery, full of vineyards and plenty of gelato and wine to keep us going. We stopped in Pisa on our way to Florence to try and push the leaning tower straight, but once you lay eyes on it are laughing too hard to make an attempt. It is such a funny spectacle! The pictures are no exaggeration, it is completely leaning!!
Florence was a fun city to spend our days in. Everything is centrally located and it is easy to walk wherever you want, wandering narrow, curved streets to take a different route every time. We had our fill of pasta and pizza and after one scoop of gelato that put a Ben and Jerry's pint to shame... I was (I didn't think it was possible for me) gelato-ed out, I should never have finished the entire serving. But not having to make the gelato run every day left us plenty of time to see all the sites and hit up a few stops outside the city as well, Il Chianti - the wine country and the old capital of Tuscany Sienna, and an awesome little village San Gigagnamo... so there was no chance of getting museum-ed out in the city too. We managed to convince my mom to get an a bike and managed to get her from being afraid of bikes, to loving bikes, to HATING bikes in a matter of 2 days. We finished out Italy by going to an amazing classical music performance last night... so good! It was also a celebration of my parents 36th anniversary. Congrats old farts!! Kidding, hope you made it home safe and thanks for everything!
Gotta train to catch!