Italy day 14 - Arrival in Florence

It turns out that the strong suit of the spa's restaurant is actually breakfast, not dinner. I'm not a big breakfast fan, but put a spread of cured meats and some decent bread, and I"m a happy camper. After a snack, Kris and I headed back into the thermals to complete the process of turning ourselves into overcooked pasta. Too soon though it's time for us to take one last view of the amazing countryside and head back to the room to cleanup and head into Florence.

We go to checkout and the porters once again have all of our stuff moved and neatly loaded into the car in an amazing amount of time. We soon piled into the car as well and started for Florence. We picked our way through the countryside for a bit and then got onto the Autostrada A1. All of this was smooth sailing until we got to the exit for the Florence Airport. Here, traffic was just unbelievably awful, but somehow with Kris' excellent last-minute navigation work to correct my error for taking us to the airport instead of the rental car return area, we made it in one piece.

Now the last time I was in Florence, a hundred years ago, I came and left by train. I didn't realize that the Florence airport is basically Dayton, but since Europe is fairly small and they have a handful of flights to other countries, they can call it an 'international airport.' The rental car return area was a dirt lot with tents for the various companies. We unloaded the car (Where are those porters when you need them!) and completed the return process. Aside from a momentary snafu where the agent was trying to figure out how I put 25,000km on a car in a week (she somehow added an extra number to the mileage,) everything went smoothly. We were hoping we could grab a taxi into the city from the rental lot, but after waiting around for 30 minutes, it became apparent that wasn't going to happen.

We hopped on the next shuttle bus headed for the airport along and once there immediately found a cab. Pro tip, the rental car pick-up area is not the same spot as the drop-offs. If you are facing the front of the airport, head to the left and walk around the end of the airport. Once in the cab, we had less than 10km to go from the airport to our hotel in the heart of the city. To give you an idea of what Florence traffic is like, it took us almost 40 minutes to make the trip.

What our hotel lacks in luxury, it certainly makes up for in view. While lying in bed, you can see the dome of the Duomo. Amazingly, it's fairly quiet though, even in this busy area. I'm struck by the fact that window screens in Italy are pretty rare. It's fairly warm in Florence today, so we've opened the windows in the room and already I've got a ton of mosquito bites. :( This is very much like my last trip to Florence. It remains to be seen if I'll have to head to the pharmacia to ask for bug bite cream like I did the last time...