A mere hour on the train and we arrived in Florence! After a short walk, we found our little B&B - 6th floor with a lovely roof terrace with some pretty good views. As we were both super hungry (and slightly hungover) we headed out for a late lunch - pasta seemed to be the order of the day - to fuel us on a wander around the town. Unfortunately, after about half an hour, the camera (or more precisely, the lens) packs up…great. Both feeling a bit tired and grumpy, we opted to head back to the room for an early night…tomorrow, we'd go and explore. That evening we had a few beers on the roof terrace (seemed everyone else in the B&B had the same idea!) and got talking to an older Aussie couple who were spending 6 weeks in Italy. Had a lovely chat about places we'd been and plans for the future. They seemed hopeful about our business plan of an old English country pub in New Zealand!

Up early, feeling a bit more refreshed and armed with a list of places to visit, we went out and up to the Piazzale Michelagelo (by bus!) which offered some stunning views over the whole of Florence. Walking back down the hill we then headed up the steepest hill in the world and visited the Fort Di Belvedere (free entry!) and had a coffee, then back into town over the Ponte Vecchio (lots of shiny shiny things in the windows of the shops!). As much as we tried to avoid to enormous tour groups, we constantly seemed to be either behind or in the middle of one! We followed the 'tourist route' into the centre of the town in search of a street food place for lunch that had been recommended. True to form, we wandered up and down the streets where we thought it should be…obviously we weren't looking hard enough! However, this gave us the opportunity to pass the camera shop Podge had found…how lucky it was that they had a nice shiny new lens to replace the broken one! Upon leaving after having spent a few day's budget, we found said place for lunch…nice and cheap and yummy paninis.

Excited by the new toy to play with, we headed back to the B&B to make sure the lens worked in the camera…phew, it did! It was an upgrade on the last one (which we will send off to Nikon to be fixed for free - apparently, there was an issue with some of the lenses, which they are happy to repair and send back - a good thing really though as the new lens doesn't really allow for taking pictures of things that are close up! For those camera buffs, the old one was a 10mm-30mm lens, the new one is a 30mm-110mm…so a better zoom, so not all bad!!)

After a bit of a chill sitting in the sun (Podge) and snoozing (James), we went for dinner courtesy of trip advisor again. Down a little back street, we found a nice restaurant and doing simple food and not too pricey (well, for the area anyway!).

Before we knew it, our time in Florence was over, Venice tomorrow.