We have done a fair amount of traveling since moving to Europe and the kids have gone on most of the trips with us...but they had missed out in Italy. Now Italy is like the home of gelato and for all the ice cream / gelato that we eat, they should get to experience the best :).
We left early Saturday morning and drove down to Bologna. What was supposed to be an 11 hours drive took us closer to 14 with traffic and stops. We are fortunate to have two kids that travel really well. Plus we got to experience some awesome tunnels, beautiful surrounding and some funny fake traffic guys. One of our stops was at McDonalds in Switzerland. It is interesting that each country serves a slightly different variation of the happy meal. This time when we asked from apple juice we got carbonated apple juice (think martinelli's sparkling cider). The kids were not impressed.
After getting checked into the hotel, we went to find some pizza. We found the perfect place where we got 3 great tasting pizzas for 12 euros AND it was just down the street from a playground. Win Win.
In the morning we drove one more hour down to Florence and walked around. Thankfully we'd been told ahead of time that you can get fined for driving in a very poorly marked downtown zone so we parked a little ways out and were going to take the bus in, but instead walked. We walked around, got some gelato, got some wiggles out in a huge open square, had Kherington navigate for us, found a pharmacy to get eye drops for Kevin's pussy eyes and bought some really gross pizza for lunch. Kevin fell asleep on the floor of the pizza place...like as we were walking in here just laid down in the middle of the walkway and was out.
Next up was Pisa. Aside from the leaning tower that had tons of tourists flooding the grounds, the surrounding areas didn't look very safe. We only stayed long enough to snap the standard pictures of each of us.
I am very happy that I decided to find a hotel a little ways away. It ended up being in a cute little beach town. That evening we went down to the pier, played around in the sand then topped the fun off with gelato for dinner :). Back at our hotel, the kids got to get the rest of their wiggles out on the little playground in the back of the hotel.
Monday morning we were all packed and ready to start driving to the cruise ship before we realize that would get us there really early. Instead we detoured to one the five Cinque Terre cities. After lots of narrow two way windy mountainous, gaurdrail free roads, we made it ;). It was beautiful there. I could definitely see why people stay there for the hiking, beach, sun, playgrounds. and general relaxing. We were only there for a couple hours but it was awesome.
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