Aussie in Sweden (and other places)

Hello again.

Last time we left you in Florence and we’ve traveled a fair way since then. The car has just clocked over 2000 km today. This is what we’ve done.

We caught the bus into the centre of Florence from just outside our hostel’s gates and it turned out to be very cheap, we couldn’t figure out how to buy a ticket since we don’t speak Italian so we hopped on and then off at our destination without paying. The driver didn’t seem to care. It was a bit of a rainy day and we were getting hassled to buy umbrellas for a while and eventually we bought one each. Sam’s lasted about 10 minutes before falling apart .

We decided to climb the Tower next to the Cathedral which cost us €6, we had to go up the 414 steps to the top. Here’s a photo from the top of the tower looking out over the city.

We then made our way across the river to the Piazza of Michaelangelo which sits on top of a hill that took about 10 minutes to climb. The view from here was amazing, it made the tower we had just climbed look small. You can see the tower next to the dome of the cathedral in this photo.

The next day we headed off early to Venice. We parked the car at Tronchetto and caught the Vaporetta down the canal to San Marco. Here we found an abundance of pigeons and masks. We walked the skinny alleys and eventually found our hotel which was really nice. Then after getting a map we headed out to explore. We bargained our way to a more reasonably priced (€50) Gondola ride down the Grand Canal, under the Rialto Bridge and through some narrow back-canals for 35 minutes. Here’s a photo of us at the end of the ride with our driver. The plastic bag next to Soph contains the carefully packaged mask that she had just purchased.

We took our Gondola ride at low tide but here is a photo from the next morning when it was high-tide. The water is actually inside the doorway.

We were a little bit sad to leave Venice since it was such a lovely city despite the expensive hot chocolate and parking.

On our way to Milan we stopped briefly in Verona where we saw the cathedral and the supposed house and balcony of Juliet. Here it is.

Next stop was Milan, we would have arrived at about 5:30pm but instead sat in traffic where it took 3 hours to travel 10km on the highway. The only cause we can think of was a football match that may have been on in Milan at the time, had I known that, we would have been in Milan hours earlier and I would have been at the game.

The next morning we took the Metro into the centre of Milan and had a brief look around. This, we think, would have to be the nicest exterior to a cathedral that we have seen so far (and we have seen so many over the past week).

Soph would have liked to shop for longer but we didn’t have the time to spare (because we need to keep moving to get to Barcelona by the 9th to watch a football match). Sophie did however manage buy some leather boots before we left Italy.

That afternoon we drove across the border to France and managed to get through the non-existent border control very easily. We got to Nice late afternoon after getting slightly lost on our way to the hostel. Today we drove to Monaco along a picturesque road past a medieval town called Eze and arrived at Monaco’s Palace just in time for the changing of the guard, which occurs at 11:55am each day. Here is a video of the changing of the guard, it goes for about 5 minutes and is quite repetitive but was still great to see.

This is a photo of the view from in-front of the Palace looking down on the Mariner. You can also see a small part of the Formula 1 track, which we later drove on.

We stayed in Monaco for a couple hours wandering the streets while listening to Christmas Carols which were playing. Unfortunately most of the stores (of which nearly all were designer) were closed for some reason but Sam was having a ball looking at the massive number of incredible cars. Ferraris, Maseratis, Bentleys, Porsches, Aston Martins, Maybachs and many others. It was harder to find a car that wasn’t luxurious. Most of these were parked close by to the Casino Monte Carlo. We went inside the casino and Sam lost €1 on the pokies but we didn’t pay the €10 to see the actual tables. Here is a photo of the front of the casino.

And that brings us to tonight. We are staying in the same hostel as last night in Nice. We are heading off very early in the morning to travel the 800km to Barcelona so Sam and Lachlan can make an 8:00pm game between FC Barcelona and Real Sociedad at Camp Nou (Sam’s most anticipated part of the trip).

Thanks again for all the comments, keep them coming because we love seeing who’s been reading.

We are having a fantastic time. We can’t believe we’re finished in Italy, it was an amazing country with so many different regions, great food and nice people, we loved it all. It doesn’t feel like we’ve been traveling for almost 2 weeks now.

As you can see we are deviating from the itinerary a bit but from now it should be pretty similar.

Talk to you soon.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 9th, 2006 at 3:00 am and is filed under Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.