4 days in Tuscany
Taking two friends of mine on a short trip to Tuscany, where we visited Pisa, Monterosso in Il Cinque Terra and Firenze. You can never go wrong in Italy, although August, when most shops and restaurants are closed and there really are too many tourists, is probably not the very best time to go.
We started our trip in Brussels, flying RyanAir to keep the trip affordable. And it also meant we would have a decent night out on the town in the European capital
Brussels
Since we were flying with RyanAir, one of the cheapest airlines in the world, we first had to drive down to Brussels, or more exactly, Charlerois, to catch the early airborne bus to Pisa. Since I wanted to make this short holiday an eventful trip, I decided we would drive down to Brussels the night before flying out, stay in some hostel over there, get up early and then drive down to the airport. Ofcourse, even this simple task almost went wrong.
For one, we only went to bed around 3am. Not bad, but considering we had to get up before 7am, this was going to be a short night. In addtion, we wanted to wait till 7:30am for breakfast to be served at the hostel. This was not a good choice, for two reasons. One, the breakfast was of meagre quality. Second, we had to drive like crazy to get to the airport in time. Driving down to Charlerois airport from Brussels takes upto 45 minutes or an hour, depending on traffic. If we had arrived only 5 minutes later, we would not have been allowed to board.
Anyway, we had made it. We hadn't bought any whisky yet, and we had planned to do this at the airport, something we had done before on numerous occasions. Not, however, flying for the first time with RyanAir to another Schengen country, it turned out that we were not allowed to buy anything at all at the airport,. That is, tax free. We had to wait for the whisky until after arrival. The flight was uneventful if not quiet. Not all seats were taken and I got to take a nap on three seats for an hour or so, the flight taking no more than 80 minutes.