The Terrific3 travel blog

We left Rome this morning. I managed a morning run!

We took the subway to the train station and so we all got to navigate how to buy tickets etc.

And look at these studs carrying their own luggage down dozens of stairs at the subway. I’m so glad we only packed carry ons!

We arrived 1.5 hours early to the Rome termini station. My motto with travel, especially in a foreign country, is to leave plenty of time. I bought the kids a couple of nice Italian clothes, we got lunch, fruit and used the 1 Euro bathrooms. We learned how to look the train gate signs and figure out where our train was. We got family tickets (which I bought a few months ago as cheaper) for 25 euros for the almost 2 hour ride to Florence, on the fast train. Pretty good deal, way cheaper than Amtrak, and the Italian railroad system seems better than the US one, in my experience.

We got to Firenze station, took a 10 minute taxi to our apartment in Santa Croce, picked up groceries, and then were taking a selfie in front of basilica de Santa Croce when an Asian woman started photobombing us. Then we realized they were the family we did our Rome tours with the past 2 days! So we went into the church with them to tour it too.

I love travel stories like that!

The basilica is grand and beautiful and a different style than the Rome churches. And many famous Italian artists, etc had tombs there—Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo, to name a few.

We were then hungry for an early dinner, and it was cool and rainy, so we walked around the piazza and ate at a nearby restaurant. The most delicious truffle risotto, and 4 cheese gnocchi, which we had to order seconds of, and cheesecake!!

The food was delicious!

But the best and funniest part of the evening? We walked outside and it was drizzling and a crowd of people walked by with umbrellas. I couldn’t tell if they were tourists or locals. But my kids thought it was hilarious that people had their umbrellas out in such little rain. And they made me take a photo. We laughed about it for a while.

Then one last photo to head home and hope we sleep well. Last night we all slept through the night, though Z woke up at 5am. He tends to do that a lot, which makes it difficult for us to do later activities, as many of the restaurants have 7pm starts for dinner. We are doing so well with jet lag though. 3 days in and totally adjusted and overall jet lag was mild. I highly recommend the Timeshifter app. Makes it more enjoyable to not feel jet lagged while traveling.