While in Rome we visited all the must see sites, joined the queue to get into St Peters Basilica in Vatican City, travelled to Orvieto, experienced a huge concert on "May Day", scoped out the prize winning Italian gelataria, ate at a fancy pasta restaurant and knocked back some rosso vino. Our accommodation was a very nice hotel with a huge double bed, lounge room and dining space, not to mention an incredible buffet breakfast, fitness room (if you're that way ...

We didn't have very high opinions of Venice after half a day there and decided to cut our stay short although this could have been influenced by the miserable weather. Most of the place is either incredibly touristy or full of overpriced brand name shops for the rich and famous, not really for the lower budget crowd, such as us. We finally managed to get off the tourist trail and find some lovely back alleys and canals worth seeing, but for all the hype that we h...

Explore the beautiful sites of Florence on a Saturday with lovely weather - how perfect does that sound? Apparently half the world thought so too, so we spent our first day in Italy crushed from crowd to crowd. When 9 out of 10 people on a very busy street (not even an exaggeration) are clearly tourists it's hard to not let that detract from your impression of a destination, particularly when we had just come from a quiet town in Slovenia. It did become a bit l...

We headed to Bled based on a tip from one of our Hungarian buddies who mentioned it was a common holiday destination for them. It turned out to be one of the most picturesque places we've been, with beautiful lakes, churches and castles in dramatic settings. While there, we did a few walks, visited some nearby towns and lakes and soaked up the atmosphere of beautiful, relaxed country towns. We recommend Slovenia as must see for any trip to Europe and we didn't ev...

We almost didn't bother visiting Slovenia as we knew nothing about it and, out of ignorance, assumed that meant it had little to offer, but we couldn't have been more wrong. The countryside that we saw from the trains is very pretty, with cute little villages dotted everywhere. Ljubljana, the capital city, is the first place we've visited that we've thought it would be nice to settle and live in. The city is just the right mix of beautiful old buildings, nature a...