Florence, Venice, and saying goodbye to Rome...

This morning we took an early train to Florence.  We took the high speed train which was comfortable and had air-conditioning which was far different from the hot boxes with windows that I remembered taking in high school.  We got there in just 2 hours and I was so excited to see how beautiful Florence was!  I remember Florence being one of my most favorite cities the last time I was in Europe.  However, I don't remember what was so fun about it because there wasn't that much to do once we got there.  David and Kevin went to the museums to see the David and see Da Vinci's Grey's Anatomy but again, lines were FOREVER long and I had already seen that stuff before.  Will, Velma, and Jessica were over lines at this point and museum admissions so we left the boys to go to the museums while we walked around.  There's not a ton to do apparently so we walked around the markers and just explored the city.  It was actually a nice break that there wasn't so much to do because at this point our legs were happy just to sit on a bench.  Then we had dinner at the worst restaurant ever and took a late night train to Venice! (*with the exception of Kevin who decided to head back to Rome so he'd have an extra day there).

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When we got to Venice, it was around 11:30pm, we were tired, and we had no real idea on how to get to our hotel.  We figured it would be fine though because we could read a map and we knew it was in a neighborhood called the Jewish Ghetto.  Well, we couldn't have been more wrong.  We literally walked the entire island of Venice for 2 hours in the dark!!!!!!!  Good thing the city was safe because we were walking between all of these alleys and over and over and over bridges and could not find our hotel.  We finally found the right street but all of a sudden the numbers just fell off by a couple of hundred numbers in the address.  Eventually, after lots of walking, and phone calls to the hotel, the hotel concierge walked outside and waved his arms in the air until we found him.  Now, we made the trips to Florence and Venice as a last minute decision just 2 days ago when we were at the Roman travel agent.  Since it was so last minute and hotel prices were insane, we gambled and bid on a 5 star hotel on Priceline.com.  The hotel was fine but let's just say that what the Italians consider 5 star is probably more like a 3 star hotel in America.  And we still paid a lot for it!  Since it was so expensive, we decided that the 5 of us would just share one room, hoping that maybe there'd be 2 beds.  We were being adventurous at this point and figured some people could sleep on the floor or on a chair, whatever, we didn't care.  Well when we finally got there we found one bed which was a queen, with a thin blanket.  We slept that night totally sardines style, all 5 of us, flat on our backs, thigh to thigh.  There wasn't even a blanket really so we shared a large sheet and my brother used a towel (damp from his shower) as his blanket.  It was the most ridiculous thing ever but it was so memorable and we laughed for about an hour.

When we got up this morning, we had the entire day to explore Venice.  There were tons of shops and the city just looked beautiful with all of the canals everywhere!  We went into a lot of little shops and even had lunch at this Italian version of Luby's (cafeteria style).  I had clam pasta and branzino!! I had been on the search for branzino and finally found it which made sense because now we were on the water!  We also went on a Gondola ride.  I had passed on the opportunity on my high school trip because it's such a rip-off but it was on Velma's bucket list so we all decided to just do it!  I'm glad we did.  Even though it's a total touristy activity, it was fun and our gondola driver/steerer was actually really knowledgeable and gave us a little tour which was a huge bonus because none of the other guys talked to their people!

After spending the day in Venice, we then took the high-speed train back to Rome to meet up with Kevin for our last dinner.  We decided to go to Francesco's again which is where we had that amazing meal the other night.  We knew maybe we should have tried somewhere else but we didn't want to risk ending our trip with a bad meal and we all loved this place.  The waiter recognized us and we had more appetizers and pasta AND pizza.  Everything was delicious!!!!!!!!!!!  We then had our final taste of gelato (at this point it was gelato #8) and then headed home to get packed up.