Having a sound sleep and recovered from the travelling the day before, we set out about 9.00am in search of breakfast. Apparently, this is a little early for most café's, so we had to endure croissant and apple strudel… again… Locating the hop on / off bus stop about 75m from home was an after breakfast bonus. Needing to put in some time with the forward planning part of the trip (we had nothing after Florence) meant a few hours on the Lappy to sort out accommodation etc.

That done, we headed out about 2.00pm, grabbing the next bus, we headed back to Florence central station. The day before we had purchased a SIM card from a forex kiosk at the station. It came with some very convoluted instructions on how to activate the SIM, with warnings of catastrophic failure as a consequence of failing to follow instructions… Normally. This is where I would hand it over to Brad. Lauren had worked her way through most of the tech stuff, but we were hesitant to press the "GO" button, finally deciding to return to the kiosk, confused look on the dial and ask for assistance. The lovely Lady behind the inch thick glass must have felt sorry for us and proceeded to dismantle our phone, installing both SIM's (we have data and phone) and setting our passwords before sending us on our way. What a champion !

Her face lit up and she let out a little squeal when we returned about 5 minutes later with a small packet of M&M's that we could slide through the security tray as a thank you

Jumping back on the bus, we weaved our way through the narrow streets of Florence. We managed to score the two front seats upstairs, which gives us the best view of the pedestrians as they seem to disappear under the bus!

Taking the full route around the city, we circled back to Ponte Vecchio, which happens to be a 5 minute walk from home. Gobsmacked by the amount of jewellery available from the goldsmiths on the bridge, we stopped on the southern side for an ice cream. Lucky for Dad, we had managed to locate the most expensive ice cream on the planet! 1 x cone and 1 x bucket (I always end up with ice cream on my shirt with the cones) thanks… I pulled out 10 euro thinking that would be plenty as we had been paying 80 Kuna (about $4.00) in Croatia. The smug ass of a cashier gestured to the receipt he had just printed…. 18.5 euro ($25.00)!! Are you freakin joking! They were nice, but not that nice, in fact they were exactly the same as the stuff in Croatia. That's our ice cream budget blown for the next week or so..

Wandering up towards the Uffizi Gallery, we came across the Musee Da Vinci, a temporary display installation of everything Da Vinci. This included a 5D experience, which didn't make much sense to either of us and a Virtual Reality tour of his works and inventions (very cool).

It was cooling down and threatening rain towards the end of the day, so we decided to head home for a break and change into some warmer clothes before heading out to dinner.

We stumbled across a classic car display in a small piazza not far from home, which rounded my afternoon off with a little drooling and Lauren with a little arm crossing and bored blank looks…

Dinner out was rated a 6/10 (we rate all of our meals now) and that was us done for the day.