Valencia has a very similar climate and feel to Barcelona, but it's much smaller. These Meditteranean cities have been a nice weather relief to us after northern Germany. We've had blue skies and high temperatures. Valencia is a very clean city for a beach town, most of the cities in the French and Italian Rivera seemed really dirty. We're getting a little tired of sightseeing so we only walk to sights that are very highly touted. Valencia has a huge park th...

We didn´t do any sightseeing in Genova, we just stopped for the night to break up the train ride between Florence and Valencia. However, I wanted to write a little bit about our train rides up the coast of Italy. The Tuscan coastline is a very beautiful train ride and it´s much more mountainous than I expected. The train ride reminded me a lot of our drive up Highway 1 in California, because it goes all along the coast in a mountainous region. So I ...

We´re on our way to Spain, but on the way we decided to stop at Pisa to see the Leaning Tower. Pisa, to my surprise, is actually a very nice city located in Tuscany. It´s about a 15 minute walk to the tower from the train station and our goal was to see the tower and get back on the train within two hours, which we fulfilled. Everybody´s seen a million pictures of the tower, so there wasn´t much left to imagination and it´s pretty much...

Okay, I´ve said it a million times so I´m not going to elaborate. This place is beautiful, see the Verona blog and just change the city name to Florence. Florence has Sean´s favorite cathedral in Europe, the Duomo, so I´ve at least got to mention that building. One thing that seperates the Duomo from other cathedrals in Europe is that it´s in a class of it´s own in Florence. If you look at the city of Florence from a hill it´...

Now to our dinner town of Bologna, which is known for it's bolognese sauce and ragu (not the brand of American pasta suace, but the type of pasta sauce called ragu), or in other words meat sauce. Bologna isn't really on the top of many tourist lists, it's more of a college town. Nevertheless, Bologna offered some nice plazas, palaces, and cathedrals. And the streets were fun to walk through at night. Bologna also has a leaning tower of it's own, like Pisa. N...