On Saturday morning after a delightful few days in Pisa I went to meet my friend Andrew in Florence. The train was a breeze – direct, on time and took only a hour. I arrived just after lunch and in time to meet another mutual friend, Mark, who was flying back to London that day. Also joining us for the weekend was Andrew’s doctor friend, Yasmin. Andrew had booked the hotel, The Social Hub, which while slightly out of the centre of Florence, was close to the train station and had the big bonus of an amazing rooftop pool overlooking the magnificent Florentine skyline.

As soon as we had checked in we all headed straight to the pool, we then very quickly got on the drinks. The bar was shockingly out of Aperol, so instead of our usual spritzes we went for a similar local Aperol alternative called Select, which was actually equally as lovely and dangerously easy to drink, and we got very merry by the pool enjoying them. I almost feel a bit sorry for the other people at the pool as we were extremely excitable and possibly a little loud as we caught up with each other after not seeing each other in years. It was a lovely afternoon, but we may have slightly overindulged. I had booked a special restaurant that evening to celebrate our first night and we were pretty refreshed by the time we got to dinner and very so by the time dinner had ended! We had a couple of post dinner drinks afterwards, but we were knackered by that point, so we got an Uber back to the hotel and crashed. Yasmin stayed with us to til the end of the weekend, before she has to return to the UK and sadly back to work. We spent a bit of time sightseeing around Florence, but mainly we relaxing by the pool til Tuesday when we got the train down to Naples.