Wedding Blog

Part 1: The New Mrs. Toucan Gets In Trouble with THE MAN
Part 2: The Toucans Go to Venice

After our stay in Venice, we hopped onto a EuroStar train and headed to Florence!

You know you are a tourist when you take pictures on the train

A few hours and one short cab ride later, we arrived at our hotel, The Hermitage Hotel. The Hermitage Hotel was probably our favorite hotel on our whole trip. It was the best value (and the cheapest hotel we stayed at), and the only place where we got upgraded for free!
Our upgraded room- two things of note: 1. See our complimentary bottle of wine on the window sill? And 2. You can just barely see it, but our view was of the Arno River.

Another good point of the hotel - the rooftop terrace:

The view from the roof top terrace where we had breakfast every morning.

Perhaps Mr. Toucan’s favorite part of the hotel - the cappuccinos we had at breakfast.

Happy cappuccinos! The reason why I know this was probably Mr. T’s favorite part of the hotel - we have about 3497234 pictures of happy little cups of cappuccino.

Anyway, enough about our hotel. It’s on to some of the sights of Florence!

The Duomo:

Here, we are climbing the steps to get up to the top of the Duomo dome.

Up at the top of the dome! We could see all of Florence!

Mr. Toucan in front of the Baptistery doors

Pitti Palace:The Uffizi gallery:
We also went to the Accademia Gallery, where Michelango’s “David” is located. Unfortunately, the outside of the Uffizi is all I can show you! In many of art galleries and churches, photography is strictly prohibited!

As in Venice, we also went to a lot of great restaurants in Florence. One thing we made sure to do was to try some of the local specialties:

Mrs. Toucan with wine and a very, very large t-bone steak (Bistecca all Fiorentina).
I should also note that I did, in fact, eat that entire thing!

After I do my recap on Rome, I plan to do some follow-up food posts of where we ate and what we had. Because, apparently, food makes me really happy:
Or maybe I was just really, really hungry. I think Mr. Toucan was pretty hungry, too:
It’s entirely possible since the Italians tend to eat dinner later than Americans (8pm or later) that we probably were starving…but more on that later!

Stay tuned for our adventures in Rome next!