The Ewings, Drinkies and Pilisi hit Florence.

There was a bit of anxiety about turning up in Florence with accomodation booked. So it was seen as somewhat of a blessing that when we arrived at the train station and went to make enquiries, there was a guy standing outside the info office who offered us cheap accomodation, with a shower in our room, breakfast and transport to our hotel.

The shower wasn't exactly what we expected as that was exactly all it was. A shower in our room. If you're not shy about that kind of thing then no worries but for us more modest people we called upon the others to leave the room so we could shower in peace.

The good thing about being a tourist is that when these kinds of things happen, it's easier to shrug it off by putting it under the 'it's all part of the experience' category.

Happily, our place was only about 10 minutes walk to the city centre. The Uffizi was top of the list as it wasn't open Mondays. We had to queue for over an hour and had a bit of a grumble to ourselves about some queue jumpers who sneaked in front of us.

However we felt that our honesty and patience was richly rewarded when it came time to enter. One of the rules of queuing was that the whole group had to queue together. No-one was allowed to just hold the place.

Well our 'friends' didn't do that and ended up almost getting cut off as it took time for them to come up to the head of the queue from where they were. When the guard asked how many were in the group, they hadn't all arrived yet. So naturally he wanted to know if they'd all been there the whole time or if they had jumped the queue.

We were quick to pipe up that yes they had been queue jumpers which did not impress the guard. He waved us politer queuers through was set the queue jumpers off. They were a bit rude to the guard which then gave us a good display of Italian hand waving as the guard then decided they could blimin' well go to the back of the queue.

Later on we came across our 'friends', but we all just pretended to not see each other.