If you add it all up, it worked out to about 18 hours real time between the time we left home and our arrival at Granduomo.  All of us agreed, the prospect of sitting on something that didn’t have a seatbelt, and where we couldn’t kick our feet out and touch the person or wall in front of us, sounded really great.  Thankfully, Marinella, the wonderful manager and incredible hostess, was there on our arrival at Granduomo (English version). This really turned out to be a home away from home and we can’t imagine staying elsewhere when we return. Introduction Why Florence? Getting to Florence on Points and Miles Air France Flight 333 to Paris Transiting CDG and Getting to Florence Granduomo Review Granduomo Location and First Impressions Getting here [...]

Going into this trip, we’d heard some horror stories about connecting through Paris Charles de Gaulle (CDG) airport.  While it’s not the world’s most convenient airport to have a connection, it’s really not as bad as people make it out to be.  If you have some idea going in of where your arriving flight is going to land and your outbound flight will take off, you can get a pretty clear understanding of what to do and where to go before you even get there.  Plus, lack of working French is not a barrier, as the airport employs a great deal of multilingual staff whose job is to point people in the right direction. Introduction Why Florence? Getting to Florence on Points and Miles Air France Flight 333 to Paris [...]

With our luggage swapped for boarding passes, we were ready for departure.  I consider us seasoned travelers, my daughter included, but there’s still something exciting for us about being in the international terminal of a major airport.  It’s probably a combination of the departures board reading like a list of places I want to visit and the tail logos of carriers I rarely see on planes larger than I normally fly, but there was that subtle excitement as we waited to board Air France flight 333 to Paris. Introduction Why Florence? Getting to Florence on Points and Miles Air France Flight 333 to Paris Check In:  Air France at Boston Logan Airport Our flight was scheduled for a 7:50PM departure. Boston Terminal E is where most international flights depart from, [...]

Florence is well-served by both Star Alliance and SkyTeam.  This opens up some options on the miles and points front for getting there. As promised, this will be the only portion of this series where we spend any time on points and miles.  While we weren’t making decisions based on anything having to do with loyalty programs once we got to Italy, I did manage to drain most of my Membership Rewards stash to get us there.  Quick links to the previous parts of this series are listed below, or read on to learn how to get to Florence on points and miles. Introduction Why Florence? Getting to Florence on Points and Miles Getting to Florence on Points and Miles Covering all of your points and miles options from all [...]

I’ve read elsewhere that the true challenge in traveling with children starts when they’re toddlers.  Particularly, 18 months to 3 years are supposed to be pretty hard.  Fortunately I hadn’t read that until after we returned from Italy, or we might have been discouraged from taking the trip and missing out on a great experience!  This past February, we packed up and took our then-18 month old daughter to Florence for 9 days and had an incredible time.  We hope to inspire the same sense of adventure in all of you parents of toddlers out there! Introduction Why Florence? Getting to Florence on Points and Miles We took an 18 month old to Italy and not only was it a smooth experience, we all had a great time. With some planning [...]