Chocolate icecream for breakfast to use up the remaining groceries seemed like a great idea as we don't like to waste good icecream and we couldn't take it with us. A leisurely walk down the road after a sleep in, had us picking up the rental car and heading off mid morning into the Tuscany region. It turned out shortly afterwards however, that chocolate icecream for breakfast wasn't such a good idea, as Scott's reappeared - fortunately out the window (thank go...

Lucca is made for biking, and our accomodation had bikes available for us to use, one of which was a tandem. We'd planned a day of biking so with Scott on the back of that with Darryl (initially Darryl thought Scott might go in front - until he realised that would involve Scott doing the steering! ) and the rest of us on individual bikes we headed off. It would be rude to complain when the bikes were free, but the brakes were marginal and the tires rather soft,...

Our departure from Venice involved our first and only highspeed train. Very luxurious - especially after the jam packed vaporetti (water ferries) of Venice. We had the whole carriage to ourselves when we left. There were electric blinds on the train windows and Wifi - though the connectivity wasn't great.According to the monitors in the carriage we reached 246 km/h. We arrived in Firenze (Florence) for a quick stop. Time to see a museum (one of the few open on a...

The next morning we walked along the Grand Canal and saw the bridge of Sighs, then took a ferry over to Lido - the only island with a beach as Scott was keen for a swim. Darryl was on navigation, but clearly not paying enough attention as we ended up walking up the side of the island that didn't have a beach (his excuse was that none of the streets showed up on the map). We crossed over to the other side of the island (fortunately it's not very wide) and found a...

We headed off on foot to the ferry terminal passing through San Marco piazza- and seeing the hundreds of people queued to go in to the Basillica. We'd already decided we didn't need to see the inside that badly, so not an issue for us. The island of Murano a 20min ferry from our base, reknown for its glass blowing, was our first stop. We saw a quick demonstration before walking through the shopping area lining the main canal. With dozens of shops lining the...