September 16th - Roma to Florence

September 16th, 2006
Roma – Florence (Firenze)

This morning we woke up at 7:30 to a knocking on our bungalow door. Meghan had come to say goodbye. We all said our farewells and then B walked her down to the bus stop. I got back up around 9:00 and quickly packed my things and took a shower.

We all made it down to the bus stop for the 10:00 bus to the train station. As has been the case lately, it was raining very hard and the bus was late. Nonetheless, we made it to the train station in time for our train to Florence. As we were hustling to make our train Tom Storm yelled at us and told us he would meet us at our next hostel (a campsite just out of town).

Once we settled into our train compartment we all fell asleep rather quickly. We woke up to the ticket collector pounding on our window. He informed us that we did not have the appropriate stamp on our tickets and that we had to pay a 25 Euro fine! Apparently, the tickets that we purchased for the trip had to be validated before boarding the train. Another lesson learned…

It seemed to take forever to get to Florence (about 3.5 hours) and (from what I saw) it was not a scenic ride. When we finally arrived we were all famished. We grabbed some food at the train station and then jumped on a bus to Campo Michelangelo (about a 20 minute ride).

After checking we jumped on the internet and waited for our new buddy Tom Storm to arrive. Once we found him we cruised to dinner with him and this girl named Jacqueline (no not my Jackie). We hiked through the rain down into town and eventually found a nice restaurant for dinner. The food was amazing but the wine was not…(ohh and B ordered 2 desserts)

After dinner we hiked back to the camp and were totally soaked by the time we got there. We spent the remainder of the evening chilling out with some of the other campers. The coolest people we met were this couple from Australia. They had just gotten engaged and told us a bunch of cool stuff to do when we get to Australia.

As we all headed to bed it started pouring and the entire camp became a giant mud pit. No one fell but there were several close calls. I was sharing a tent with Tom and he did not come to bed until much later in the evening (apparently he was making out with some girl that plans on hiking the PCT)…

It rained hard very hard throughout the night and we all regretted not getting a hostel in town…Ohh well.

NOTE: sorry there are no pictures but i didnt get my camera out all day because of the rain...