Day 13 & 14 - Pisa

Pisa

Day 13, Aug 13.
Driving from Venice to Pisa was interesting. Italian drivers are not as courteous as German drivers and it’s a bit more of a free for all than we are used to. The traffic was pretty heavy too because it was a holiday weekend in Italy. We had to drive through the Appennino mountains that run down the middle of Italy to get to Pisa on the western coast from Venice. The drive felt like forever even though it was only a few hours. We arrived in Pisa in the late afternoon and it’s a funny little place. It is not a huge city, just a nice size town and really not too much there. The old town has several hotels mostly in a one block stretch and at the end of that stretch there are loads of souvenir shops and then the street dead ends smack into The Leaning Tower. It almost doesn’t look real because you have old, run down city and touristy hotels, then boom…green grass, large open protected area and massive marble structures come out of nowhere. Despite their age they look so clean and pretty compared to the city. Our hotel balcony had a view of the Tower from it and if I didn’t physically stand there and take the picture and see it with my own eyes I would believe it was a photoshop job, it doesn’t look real!

We got our stuff organized and headed down to the Tower and Duomo area for some pictures since it was a nice sunny afternoon. The funniest thing was seeing all the people posing for their silly Leaning Tower pictures. Some pretending to hold it up, some pretending to lean against it, some pretending to touch the top…you name it, people were trying it. It was hilarious just to lay in the grass and people watch at all the tourists attempting to get the perfect picture.
After getting our pictures out of the way and letting Colin run off some energy in the grass we headed to a restaurant that was recommended by one of our travel books for the Tuscany region. They were right, food and wine were excellent. Apparently many, many famous people have come to eat there as the owner is an older man, and pictures of him in his restaurant with celebrities line the walls. Most of them are Italian stars I didn’t recognize, but there were quite a few people I did know in the photos. We had an excellent meal with more fresh seafood and delicious dessert before walking back to the hotel to call it a night.

Day 14, Aug 14.
Today we took advantage of some down time and headed to Livorno, where the Army base Camp Darby is located. We forgot the GPS in the hotel room but Shelby said he thought he could remember how to get there from looking at Google maps earlier, it was a pretty straight and easy shot from Pisa. Wrong. We got lost, almost gave up, then finally got lucky. From what we were led to believe Camp Darby is a decent sized base, we were seriously misled! They didn’t have much of anything and most all of what they did have was closed on Sunday. Poop. We were not able to get some of the snacks and pick up items we had hoped from the base that day. There was no haircut for Colin as the barber shop is closed on Sundays and Mondays. We did get some useful information about where to leave our car tomorrow and catching a train to Rome for our cruise though, so it wasn’t a total wasted trip. We attempted to head down to “The American Beach” in Livorno, which is an American beach run by the military. We were a little put off that you had to pay to enter and pay to park at this military beach, but decided it would be worth it to take Colin to the beach. When we got there the man informed us the parking lot was full and there was nowhere to park so we would have to either wait for someone to leave (he then noted the lady over there had been waiting on someone to leave for over 20 minutes) or just go park on the street in the city and walk. There are not that many Americans on that base for the lot to be full, and ALL the cars and mopeds in the parking lot looked like they belonged to Italians. So my guess is “The American Beach” is not just for Americans. We decided to just head back to the hotel in Pisa after the beach was a bust because parking on the city street was a joke, it was bumper to bumper with no open spots and even if there was one it wouldn’t be Dodge sized anyway. We weren’t too disappointed about it. We found a nice place for dinner and then I had to take on the task of packing us for the cruise and determining what to bring on the boat and what to leave behind with the car. I hate packing!