The Adventures of Doug and Bec: Florence

After a 5 hour bus ride we arrived in Florence and had what seemed to be pretty good instructions on how to get to the place we were staying… or so it seemed. We stopped the so called Florence stop which was actually the Florence exit from the highway… in the middle of nowhere… and according to the map about 10km from actual Florence. By this stage it was starting to get a little dark but we managed to find another bus stop up the road and asked the first bus to stop if they went into Florence… At about 9:30pm we got to the central station in Florence where we thought we would have got off the bus, but unfortunately the frequent bus from there to our camp site finished at 9pm, so after another 45 minutes we managed to get a bus to the Michelangelo Camp site across the river from the Centre of Florence.

Despite the effort in getting to the camp area we were met by very nice staff and found our way to our permanent tent which we would stay in for three nights. The camp site was well equipped with a fair few tents, shower, washing facilities, shop, restaurant and bar. The only thing missing between this camp site and the one we had stayed in at Venice was the pool! To make up for that though we were pleasantly surprised to find that check out was 1pm.

The next morning we managed to sleep in to about 9am thank to the excellent tree blocking the first of the morning sun, and had breakfast at the communal table area which had an excellent view over the city. Our first day in Florence consisted of sitting around the common area readying and catching up on a few things, and having a couple of Ciders followed by a pizza dinner at the camp site’s restaurant, Ti Amo.

Day two and we headed into the city for most of the day and visited Michel Angelo’s David and various other statues and had a bit of a look around the shops before walking back in the scorching head to our camp site to continue our relaxing time in Florence which turned out the b a very nice city around the river with some awesome old buildings and cobbled streets.

On our last day in Florence we walked up to the Michelangelo lookout area near our camp site and found an excellent view over the city which would perhaps have been even better at sunset. From here we caught the bus back into town to the train station to continue our trip through Italy with the next stop being Pisa.