Italy with the Campbells - Venice to Rome

Now that we have no more guests in the foreseeable future, I have time to update the blog again!  Since the Campbells were here, we've had 4 groups of visitors, but I'll keep things going in order so that I don't jump around too much and forget something!

On Wednesday, after a day in Venice, we made our way to Rome by way of Florence.  The car rides were pretty uneventful and it was nice to be able to stop in Florence around lunch time.  We had to eat at McDonald's so that we could count Italy into our list of countries where we have eaten in McDonald's.  Laura had been to Florence before, so she knew what were the most impressive things to see and became our tour guide for the day.  We first went to the Duomo which is a big church with a tower in the center of town.  This church was quite impressive!

After going inside the Duomo and deciding that the line to go up in the dome was too long for the amount of time we had in Florence, we decided to check out a few more churches.  We then went to the Medici church and library.  Of course, I had to take a picture by the library sign!  This church was fun for me because I had listened to a history podcast of the Medici family and could now picture where the things had happened that were talked about in the podcast.  We then saw another church, but I don't remember which one it was.

After a quick tour of Florence, we headed the rest of the way to Rome, but by the time we arrived it was raining quite hard.  We were supposed to be camping in a tent while we were in Rome, but none of us wanted to set up the tent in the rain and then sleep on the wet ground.  Brian went to talk to the guy in charge of the campground and discovered that they have trailers that you can rent out to stay in.  We ended up getting 2 rooms each with a bathroom to stay in while we were in Rome.  It was nice to be inside out of the rain and to have our own bathrooms.  The campground was very nice complete with its own restaurant!