Florence - Shelby

Hello again!
So two days ago I had a stomach bug which forced me to stay in bed all day - too bad for our last day in Croatia (or so we thought... more on that in a moment), but luckily by the evening I had puked all there was to puke and by the morning I was feeling much better, though a little weak from the day of no food. Ah, the blessing of the 24 hour bug is that its gone in 24 hours. The next morning we had a Catamaran (fast ferry) reservation for 6am, and Mladan got us there just in time. We boarded the ship and got to Split, Croatia by 8:30am, which left us time to buy tickets for the 10am ferry to Ancona, Italy. Problem was, the time table that we were using was last years, and that ferry was no longer running... so the next available ferry was at 8:30pm. So we had to other option but to wait, and we had an unexpected extra day in Croatia. I watched the bags in a shady spot while Anders scouted out a restaurant other than cheap tourist food, and he found a lovely shaded cafe called the Black Cat with delicious food at inexpensive prices. We ended up staying there for about 4.5 hours! We then found another shady spot on a sidewalk and parked it there for a couple of hours, reading, playing cards, writing, people watching. We walked around a little bit to the old city, but it was soooo hot and we had to carry our bags, which was an added 25-30 pnds each, so we went back to the black cat for dinner (which was also delicious) and waited for our ferry.
It was a nice ferry, we got a sleeper cabin which was comfortable, and got to take showers! That was worth it alone!
This morning we woke up in Ancona at 7am, and took a train a couple of trains to get to Florence, where we arrived around 2. We found our hostel, which is nice, and we just got our first meal - which was more difficult that we thought since most restaurants close during the heat of the day for the siesta.
We'll explore more tonight once the sun goes down.
Love to all and hope everything is great at home -
Shelby