Snickers crunch with mint - Day 4

I won't repeat what I wrote down for the beginning of this day, but I have edited a gentler version so you can understand what happened.

7.15 breakfast today so up at 6.15 only 6 hours sleep, more beautiful views and more yummy breakfast.

We rushed off to the train station, confusion over the ticket machine, got help from a nice Italian, but he left, then machine wouldn't except our money, so had to try the whole process again on a different machine, no change given you get given a receipt instead that you can cash in at a maned booth only there isn't any at this station, only to miss our train JUST. So we sat and waited an hour for the next. We sat next to a lovely American woman (I thought it was funny that she kept laughing at some of the things we said) who sold everything and started a new in Italy, but due to a lovely grand daughter was now in the process off going back home.

We arrived safely at Florence station, it's quite big but very organised. In brief we did a walking tour, no museums, or galleries or shops (well some). From the station we started our journey towards San Lorenzo church along the streets with the biggest markets selling cheap leather goods, towards the Duomo square where we saw the Duomo and the golden doors of paradise. And grapped some fancy Icecream.

A short walk and we stopped at Piazza Della Repubblica (we think) to eat our cafe style pizza aubergine (and mushroom for Jo), before we continued on to find the Town Halls medieval building in Palazzo Vecchio.

Here we saw a replica of David and many beautiful statues like this one -

Although we were next to the Uffizi we didn't get to get close as we took a diversion towards the WC and from there we rested again at Piazza di Santa Croce outside of the church listening to a man cheerily paying some drumming type string instrument, while writing more postcards, and watching an empty square quickly fill up with groups of tourists following umbrella's and sticks of all shapes and sizes.

We then ventured off to find the Piazzale Michelanglo across the river Arno, and climbed streets and steps to reach the top and boy was it worth it. The views were amazing over seeing Florence with no sky scrapers you could clearly see the old buildings like the Duomo below.

With views like this we sat at an over priced cafe and drank cold coffee topped with Ice cream, before we leisurely walked to Giardino di Baboli through to Piazzo dei Pitti, but with another climb up behind us we found the gardens closed or maybe we reached the forte di Belvedre by mistake which was closed so we couldn't get access to the gardens. So we went to admire the Ponte Veccio loaded with it's many (now ) jewelry shops (they were butcher shops but some mayor or something said they were to smelly) as the sun began to set.


Of course we saw a lot lot more along the way, too much to remember.

A quick light dinner before returning home looking into a nice square by the station cafe style for risotto pomedorro and Gnochi pesto, both just what we needed. We knew the train was on platform 12 and it was (not like Britain) so it didn't need us to ask at least two people. A safe journey easy get off the train and into the car and easily home for an early night of 11.00.