A Day in Florence

Tues 15th. Today is the halfway mark of our holiday. The time has gone both fast and slow, as it seems ages since we boarded the plane in Auckland and we have fitted much into our journey so far, but we are also conscious that we are racing thru our destinations and are closing in on the finish line. We marked this point with a trip into Florence on the bus. The thought of trying to find a car park in Florence and then finding where we left the car at the end of the day was going to be too much for The Chauffeur. The bus picked us up outside our front gate and we headed into the big smoke at 8.00am. We wandered the narrow alleyways, walked around the Duomo and across the Ponte Vecchio bridge, all the main touristy things. The girls also found time to look at leather jackets - as you would expect. Theay also had a good look at some of the statues, also as you would expect. Lunch was a pizza in ristorante sitting in the sun in one of the piazzo then we did a 2 hour tour of Florence on an open topped bus, which gave us a great perspective of this city. There is beauty, there is drab, there is opulence, there is poverty - but over riding it all is the feeling that this is one of the great cities this world has seen in history.