After spending the past week in Florence and Milan, we’re leaving Italy and traveling to a killer 2-bedroom suite in the heart of Paris. By train. That takes 7 hours. And gets us into the city late enough that we’ll be cramming into a temporary room for the night and completing our journey about 24 hours from now. Will this trip feel like a scenic and relaxing journey through the French countryside? Or a never-ending trek with eight bags and couple of tired and hungry kids? We’re about to find out.

After sweating our way through countless tropical destinations across the globe this year, we decided to break out the long-sleeves and brave some chilly December weather to experience the world-famous outdoor Christmas markets of Europe.

This week, we’ve retraced Leonardo da Vinci’s steps from nearly 550 years ago as we’ve left Tuscany’s Florence and trekked north to the finance, fashion, food and design Mecca of Milan in Italy’s Lombardy region.