Florence is a pretty noisy city. It's all huge wooden doors that slam theatrically and cars, motorbikes and sirens. I'm sure it wasn't my snoring that kept Tony awake... Breakfast doesn't start until 8.30 so we didn't hurry ourselves this morning. After a nice breakfast which included croissants with cherry jam, we wandered down to the railway station to board a train to Pisa. The station is VERY busy and confusing so we asked a uniformed woman for help. She dire...

We set off really early this morning (just after 6.00am) trying not to wake Geoff and Lynn until we realised that we couldn't lock the door from the outside. It was only after we'd already woken them that Lynn mentioned we could have locked the door then posted the key back through the letterbox - silly us. We're just not used to having a letterbox in the front door! It was a good job Geoff told us to leave early to miss the rush hour. We managed to get to ou...

Dragged my poor aunt out again today! We went to Covent Garden and listened to an opera singer - amazing breath/voice control. We had a look around some of the shops there and went to China town too. Nice sweet shop at Covent Garden - I got some Catherine Wheels which are liquorice straps wrapped around those squishy lollies that have the little round candy balls on them that you get in liquorice allsorts - yum! Lynn is a diabetic so she only ate two of those (we...

Dear Readers, Firstly, my apologies for the first blog entry - I can only plead jet-laggedness and a brain still trying to catch up! So, for a more detailed version of our first couple of days... We arrived slightly early into Heathrow and thought we'd be standing in the queue for aliens for hours.How wrong we were!Must have been all Brits coming home on our flight because we were in the queue at passport control for a whole five minutes.Tony asked for a stamp...

Hi everyone, Well, it's a bit hard to believe that we're actually here! Big excitement this morning when Tony and I were watching a squirrel race up and down in the tree just outside the bedroom window. So cute! Anyway, my cousin Geoff met us at the airport and I wasn't expecting him so that was a lovely surprise. Today we hopped on the bus with my auntie Lynn down at Clapham Junction and went to St. Paul's cathedral - very impressive. We strolled along th...