Europe 2006 - Florence to Barcelona

We headed to the San Francisco airport for our 2pm flight to Frankfurt. Lufthansa's business class was nice, we were up in the nose of the plane which felt much cozier than a 747 normally does... We slept for about 4 hours of the 10 hour flight. After a 3 hour layover we had a 1 hour flight to Florence. We picked up our car for the week, a very cute (and tiny) Mercedes A160. We had previously purchased a Garmin Nüvi portable navigation system (we nicknamed it "Linguo") which we set on the dashboard and powered up. We selected the Hotel Savoy as our destination and it plotted a route into the city. Off we went!

The streets got smaller and smaller as we got closer to the hotel. At one point we were instructed to turn down what looked like a pedestrian walkway! Fortunately, there was a cab driver behind us and he drove around us and cleared a path through the people. We found later that people just walk in the streets and you have to "push" them out of the way. After that we quickly arrived at the hotel which turned out to be very centrally located, about 1 block from the duomo and across from a cute little plaza.

We checked in, grabbed the cameras and set out to explore. We walked past the duomo, then down to the river and over the Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge). We had a cocktail at the hotel, then a quick dinner in the plaza and were back in the room by 9pm. It had been a long day!