The next stop for us was Italy. It has been a long few days as we traveled to Florence, Rome and Venice.

First stop was Florence which was a place that we didn’t really know what to expect. As we drove in we realised that it was a really beautiful place. As we only had one night there it was hard to know what to do and we were feeling particularly tired. After we settled into our campsite we walked with the whole group to a little Italian restaurant where we would have dinner. It was a bit of a walk down the hill to get into town but that mean’t that we got a lovely view of the city.

We both tried Florentine steak for dinner which was really interesting to compare to a good New Zealand steak. The steak itself was really big and tasted pretty similar to what you would get at home. After dinner we wondered around town with a few others and ate gelato – bliss.

We spent the next morning tracking down a pharmacy as Kate still had pretty bad swollen ankles – the language barrier was fun as the pharmacist kept bringing us different sorts of baby products haha.

Our next stop was Rome which we were so excited about and it did not disappoint. We arrived late in the afternoon and spent the evening doing a guided walking tour of Rome which was such a great way to see all the ain sites and hear about their history. We saw the colosseum, Trevi fountain and pantheon. One thing that was really cool about Rome was that all their fountains apart from the Trevi fountain are cooled and drinkable water.

The next day we had a tour of Vatican City booked in at 8am which turned out to be the perfect time as it got so busy and quickly turned into a 4 hour wait which we managed to escape. Not only that any later in the day and we would have melted even more than we did as that day got to a smoking 44 degrees. We really enjoyed walking around the Vatican although the amount of people did make it hard to see as much as we wanted to. The sistine chapel was beautiful but unfortunately after about 10 minutes we were cleared out as it was overfilled. As the tour finished we exited into St Peter’s Square which was like walking into an oven.

We spent the evening by the swimming pool and just relaxed which was exactly what we needed after such a hot day.

Next stop was Venice. The camp site we stayed at had good facilities but unfortunately the tent sites were on concrete which mean’t that no-one could get pegs in and flys wouldn’t stay up very well. These few factors would prove to be a disaster the next evening when we were hit by a thunder storm.

Venice itself was exactly what we imagined it would be – it was very beautiful and quite a cool looking place. We did a walking tour in the morning and then spent the afternoon wandering around by ourselves. Surprisingly Venice was not as expensive as we thought it would be. The locals definitely do not like tourists however as they had gone around changing the directions of signs to make it very confusing to get around. We caught the Vaporetto (Water Bus) around Venice which was a great way of seeing everything along the grand canal.

At about 10:30pm that night we were hit by a thunder storm and the torrential rain began. As I said before the tents were on concrete which mean’t that there was nowhere for the water to go which mean’t everyones tent got flooded by calf deep water so it was a long cold night. Jason and I sat in the bar for hours hoping the rain would clear however our tent was so underwater that we had to sleep in a kitchen with about 30 other people.

With all that said though as a whole we absolutely loved Italy! It was clean, the people were really friendly (mostly) and yes the food was pretty delicious. It is definitely a place that we would think about spending more time.