The last trip

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After being up so late the night before hanging out with our new Belgian friends we slept late this morning and missed breakfast, which I'm still upset about! After the fabulous dinner the night before we were very angry at ourselves that we missed breakfast. Hopefully I'll get to come back here someday and try some more of the food 😊

We took a taxi into town to the bus station and caught our bus into Florence. We were staying at hostel here called Plus Florence that we had very high hopes for. They had a swimming pool (not that we brought our suits, but still) and a Turkish bath, but really we were more interested in the price, location, and good ratings that we read online. We checked in and had the room to ourselves for 3 of the 4 nights we were there, which was really great. One of the best parts, since we really were on a budget this trip, was the restaurant downstairs. We could get all-you-could-eat breakfast WITH EGGS (!!) for €5 every morning. Okay, it's nearly impossible to find what we think of as typical breakfast in Italy...they eat coffee and bread for breakfast. If you want breakfast with eggs you usually have to find a place that caters to tourists and then you're paying a fortune for one meal. Not so here...apparently they get a lot of British tourists at this hostel and offered an English breakfast on the buffet line. Yay! They also had cheap wine and cheap lunch and dinners so we ate here most of the time. Of course we still had gelato and wine outside of the hostel but we've both eaten in Italy enough times that we didn't need to eat at the expensive restaurants on this trip. We were there to shop!

We were only a few minutes walk from several of the open air markets where you could buy anything from cheesy Florence souvenirs to scarves and leather purses and coats. I was on the hunt for scarves since they're SO cheap there and ended up coming home with 8 of them, I think. Hillary wanted a new coat and a new purse. She ended up buying three of them and because she was buying so much stuff I was able to get a great price on a purse that I completely fell in love with 😊

Pretty much our entire trip was shopping, eating, and drinking wine. We did go to see Michaelangelo's David at the Accademia Gallery (he really is magnificent) and the sculptures at my favorite piazza, the Palazzo della Signoria. We also went to Ponte Vecchio (ponte means 'bridge' in Italian) where they're known for their gold. Any kind of gold jewelry you could ever want is there. Hillary was looking for jewelry for her Auntie as well as herself and I was being helpful by taking pictures of pieces that caught her eye as well as the signs over the doorways so she could find them again if she decided to buy anything.

This wasn't the usual jam-packed trip that I usually end up doing but a girl trip where we wandered around the city shopping and eating and just having fun. It was the last real time I was able to spend with her before I flew back to the States and I'm glad we were able to find the time and money to take off and do this.

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