July 12, 2015

We arrived in Florence on Saturday and immediately got to work checking out the city.  Our first stop after a quick train ride from Rome was to find some lunch!  We let Hayden pick and he chose Hard Rock Café.  I had to laugh since Courtney and I used to ALWAYS want to go to Hard Rock where ever we traveled!  Not surprisingly, he got Mac and Cheese and loved every bite of it, (especially the extra cheese).

Once we were all filled up and ready to go, we started the afternoon at the Duomo.  Unfortunately, the actual dome is closed for restoration, (which kind of stinks), but we still got to go into the Baptistery and climb up the tower to the battlements.  There were a TON of stairs, but it was a good way to work off all of the junk food that we just ate at the Hard Rock.  lol  The buildings in Florence are beautiful.  Inside of the Baptistery, there is a huge and stained glass window that was absolutely beautiful (the picture doesn’t do it justice).  The entire building, including the ceiling, was amazing.  We also climbed a ton of steps (Hayden counted 424, I counted 414) to the top of the tower to stand on the battlements.  From here, the view was awesome.  You could see the entire city.

We decided to get the Museum Pass so that we could go to all of the museums and just take our time looking at what we wanted on our own schedule.  It worked out good this way because we didn’t ever feel hurried and if we wanted to just spend a few minutes somewhere, it wasn’t a big deal.  That evening, the Piazza Vecchio was open late, so we took advantage of the late evening sunlight and toured through the apartments.  Talk about an amazing place to live!!  The sunset that evening was beautiful and if it hadn’t been for a wrong turn outside of the museum, we would have seen the actual sunset.  🙂

Sunday morning we started out early so that we would have plenty of time to hit everything we planned.  Hayden wanted to start at the Galileo Museum.  The museum was really cool, and he was really into the astromomy/physics exhibits.  Who knows, maybe that was his first step to becoming the next Sheldon Cooper.  It gave us a great chance to talk about physics and to show the importance of math in science.  (He hasn’t been loving math lately, it could be because I’m not the best teacher!).

There was also a Paleontology Museum and a Mineral Museum that we visited.  They were both pretty cool and a good way to spend a couple of hours.

In the afternoon, we made our way to the Galleria Accademia where “David” is located.  It’s pretty funny because the actually museum is tiny and the only thing that people really came for was the “David”.  The rest of the museum was just about empty.  We did all of the “touristy” stuff and pretended to pinch and touch his butt.  lol  In all seriousness, it really is an amazing statue.  To think that it was carved out of a single piece of marble and that it was done so perfectly is really crazy and goes to show how talented Michelangelo really was.

On the way back to our campsite, we stopped by the Boboli Gardens, but it was miserably HOT, so we didn’t stay long.  Adam and I enjoyed this because we read “Inferno” not long ago and there is a part of the book where Robert Langdon is trapped in the gardens.  We did find the little hidden pathways that he used to hide, so that was fun!

Back at camp, Hayden was in heaven because we found the Italian version of “lunchables” for dinner!  There is a grocery store right near our campsite which makes for great (and cheap) meals.  🙂  This has definitely been one of our biggest money saving tactics!

On Mondays, Florence pretty much shuts down because most of the museums and monuments are closed for the day.  We decided to take advantage and catch the train over to Pisa to see the Leaning Tower.  We have heard and read that Pisa isn’t much except for the tower, so we just went in the morning for a quick stop.  It worked out great, we left our bags at the train station, walked to the tower, clicked a few pictures (ate an ice cream, of course) and then came back to Florence before leaving for Venice.