Florence

With the end of the train strike, we made our way to the Levanto train station where we caught a train to Florence via Pisa. Florence (large, busy, hordes of tourists) was a bit of a shock after Levanto (small, quiet, local) but we did our best to adjust quickly. The main campground in the city is on a hill high above the city center, so we immediately got an appetizer of the Tuscan hills. We only had one afternoon before we were to start cycling, so we planned to see as many of the big tourist attractions as we could. However, line-ups are a ubiquitous part of the Florence experience - even in low-season, the wait to enter the Galleria dell'Accademia was over 5 hours. We had been warned about this before we left, but with an unpredictable schedule (due to weather, train strikes, uncertain distances) we couldn't make reservations (even with reservations, we heard the wait was three hours). Instead of waiting in line, we spent the afternoon walking through the city and seeing some of the smaller sights.

Our campground was only a few hundred meteres from the Plaza Michelangelo, one of the best places to see the city.



We took some good pictures from here, before descending to explore the city.



One really neat thing was that our campsite was in a historic olive grove, so we were surrounded by olive trees as you can see in the bottom picture below.