After waking up in Venice (and sad to be leaving the beautiful city ... I am in love with it), we took a short 2 hour train to Florence. We stayed at the Hotel Cestelli, recommended by the Lonely Planet and the owners Allysio and Asumi could not have been nicer. They gave us tons of recommendations of places to eat and so we headed out to explore. First we walked to the Plazza Michalangelo, which is actually across the river from Florence but has spectacular view...

We left Avignon early, and started our long day of travel ... Avignon > Lyon > Geneva > Milan > Venice. Such is life with Eurorail. Luckily, we hadn't slept much the night before so we took the long train journey as an opportunity to catch up on missed sleep. I was surprised that in Geneva we walked right by customs officials and they didn't ask for our passports! I was pretty disappointed, because let's be honest, collecting passport stamps is one ...

After taking an easy train ride from Heidelburg, we arrived in Paris mid-afternoon and easily found our hotel. We had picked a cute little place called "Hotel Du Lys" on Rue Serpente, which I think was recommended by our Lonely Planet. It turned out to be a great location, as we were very central and only a short walk to Notre Dame. Shortly after arriving in Paris, both Gordon and I fell in love with the food. We discovered crepes on one of our first days, and s...

Gordon and I hopped a train from Paris to our next stop, Avignon. Avignon is a little town in the south of france that we picked because the guidebook said it was "picturesque" and we wanted a taste of the south of france. We showed up at our hotel and the rooms weren't ready yet, so we just dropped our bags off and wandered through the town. We toured the Palace des Papes, which is where some of the popes lived for a time (I am forgetting why they left R...