San Marino & Rimini
May 19, 2013 10:15

Today we made an excursion to the east coast of Italy to San Marino and Rimini. Given that San Marino is it's own little country, there isn't a direct train, so we ended up taking a train to Rimini, catching a bus from Rimini to San Marino and back before making our way back to Florence.

This evening, we learned another valuable lesson about the "reliable" Trenitalia. It turns out that making your own connections/layovers is not the best idea. Although the fact that we had to make one in the first place doesn't make any sense. Let me explain.

At this point, Ben and I have learned to deal with Trenitalia. It's really a terrible system – I could go on and on about the problems with it, but I'll save that vent for another day. Anyways, it was more cost effective for us to get two separate trains: one from Rimini to Bologna and another from Bologna to Florence. But, our train out of Rimini was late ten minutes, so we missed our train at Bologna. Unfortunately, there was only a high speed train out of Bologna left that evening, and rather than stay in Bologna overnight, we had to pay an extra €20. Not the end of the world, but we were pretty upset at the time.

Train saga aside, it was an incredible day.

Monte Titano San Marino May 19, 2013 10:00
Not long after arriving in Rimini this morning, we jumped on a bus to our primary destination, Monte Titano – the highest peak of San Marino. San Marino is a small country on the north-eastern side of the Apennine Mountains. The place is awesome – and not just because it's on top of a mountain (although, that definitely helps). As you can see from the photos, the surrounding landscape is absolutely...
A Beach Town Rimini May 19, 2013 16:00
We finally got back to Rimini a couple hours later than originally expected. By that time, it was a really nice day. Rimini is a medium-sized city on the north eastern coast of Italy. Apparently the city is known for its night life. Obviously, we weren't there at night, but I could see how the commercialized beaches would be the place to be for young crowds. While exploring the town, I stumbled across a...