After visiting The Mall outlet stores the previous day I decided to visit the McArthur Glen Barberino Designer Outlet for some discounted shopping today. I left the hostel a bit too late, at 9:45am.
The Barberino outlet has its own bus from outside the Bata shop, across the street from Florence S.M.N. train station.
The buses depart at: 10:00 am, 12:00 pm, 2:30 pm and 4:30 pm. A bus ticket price is 15 Euros for a return trip. There is a person selling tickets outside the pickup point about 15 minutes before departure for both CitySightseeing and the Barberino designer outlets.
I got to the train station 2 minutes before 10am but couldn’t see the ticketing officer. By the time I saw the Bata store the bus was already departing.
So close…
There’s a McDonald’s café next to the Bata store so I sat there with a hot chocolate and a doughnut using their internet until I got onto the 12pm bus.
In the bus they provide you with a map and “fashion passport” which gives you a further 10% discount on the tax-free goods (that are not on special). My first stop was the Hugo Boss outlet store.
It had some good items but I decided to return later after checking out more of the stores.
I ended up making quite a number of purchases that day at CK, Prada, and eventually Hugo Boss.
There were other stores like Adidas Style, Puma, Gas, Geox and Nike that had items which looked nice but I chose to spend time buying the higher quality fashion brands (which were priced well) instead.
I liked the layout at Barberino. There’s a nice river that runs through the open outlet store. In the distance you can see some of the beautiful hills of Tuscany. There’s also a nice self-service café and restaurant on site for lunch.
Buses depart from Barberino towards Florence at 11:00 am, 1:30 pm, 3:30 pm and 7:00 pm.
I actually took the bus on the last run back. Two buses arrived for the last run and one left at 06:40 pm. Since I was waiting in the queue from 06:20pm I got onto the first bus, luckily.
The bus reached Florence at 07:30 pm. I was exhausted. I returned to my hostel, had a shower and rested until 09:00 pm. I then walked to a nearby dodgy-looking but okay to eat halal restaurant for supper and returned to the hostel to start packing for Rome.
I had quite a fair of clothes to wash as I had last done a major washing of clothes on the 10 October (11 days prior) in Chamonix (and been wearing the new clothes I purchased in Germany since), so I visited the laundry room at Plus Florence Hostel.
At 11am I put my clothes to wash in the machine. It would take 44 minutes for the cycle to complete so I returned to my room to do more packing.
At midnight I returned to transfer the washing to the dryer. That would take another hour!
I waited till 1am to fold the clothes that came out of the dryer, returned to my room to pack the remainder of my clothes and only got to sleep at 01:45am. This was my last night in Florence and I was to check out early the next morning so I had to have myself sorted.
Shopping trip holidays are something I try to avoid. They’re truly exhausting
