The usual scramble to get up and ready the next day as we tried to get down for breakfast before the rest of the locusts and not miss the bus. It didn’t help that most nights we would have a few vino’s and wake up with a sore head. My son and I were starting to get into a routine at this point and he would tell me what time he was getting up and I would get up an hour earlier to make myself beautiful.
We didn’t get the front seat of the bus this day as it was shared around even though the bus was only half full due to the cancellations due to the volcano eruption we mentioned in an earlier post. We left the French Riviera and went onto the Italian Riviera going around the winding coast roads through Genova to Pisa to see the famous tower. On the way we saw the mountains where they mine the famous Carrara marble.
This post continues on the journey I took with my son in 2010 around the world. If you would like to see the story so far you can start it all here.
LINK: My First World Trip : Where It All Started
The trip also had a million little tunnels through the mountains along the coast. The roads in a lot of places when following the coast road only one lane each way with nowhere to pull over if there was a problem. It was not unusual to have other trucks and busses to come barrelling around the corner over the line on the tight turns on the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean.
While we almost shat ourselves the first time it happened the bus driver took it all in his stride not even bursting into a sweat. He just blared the horn and gave a sharp yank on the steering wheel. The joys of an Italian only speaking bus driver. Probably for the best as we may not have wanted to know what he was saying anyway to the other drivers.
When you are new to travel you always take millions of photos and we got into the habit of taking a photo of the town name wherever we were. This helped us split the photos up into folders for the places we were later and also as a reminder of where we were up to on the trip.
On the way we saw a nice little estate on the hill I would not have minded owning that must have had a great view of the ocean and surrounding areas. All I need now is a rich, tall, good looking, generous, well travelled, english speaking Italian man with a great sense of humour and sense of style that dotes on me to buy it for me. Lol I am not asking for much am I?
We arrived in Pisa amid a flurry of activity and buses where they were allowed to park near the Leaning Tower of much renown. It was exactly at this point we saw the other tour we were thinking about before we chose this one.
We were told by the travel agent when booking, that Trafalgar was for the not so upwardly mobile. We now realised we had picked the right tour when we saw they all had walkers and needed help. It is great that there is a tour that caters for people that need help but my son would have been bouncing off the walls so to speak.
We were warned by Trush (still don’t know how to spell it she was our Dutch tour guide) that here with all the crowds to watch our purses as there were a lot of pick-pockets around. This is basic safety for any travel which I forgot on a later trip to Mexico where there they steal phones that are waved around in the air as they come shooting past on motor bikes. More on that later in the Mexico trip.
On the walk to the Tower we passed lovely gardens with wisteria in flower so of course I had to take a couple of snaps. This had now become a thing between me and my son that he would cringe every time I stopped to smell the roses, for what he considered no reason at all.
We finally made it to the leaning Tower of Pisa which came as a surprise as we thought we would see it from a distance and instead turned a corner and it was right in front of us. The build up of seeing it destroyed in so many Hollywood movies by aliens, gangsters, Bond villains or bank robbers did not prepare us for how small it really is.
You just have to admire the person that after a complete disaster of engineering turned the tower into a major tourist attraction. It takes a particular type of marketing mind for that one. I wasn’t brave enough to stand on the leaning side of the tower just in case. It is quite comical seeing heaps of people standing around with their hands in the air trying to hold up the tower for their photo but from your angle just a bunch of strange people with their hands in the air.
We didn’t get to spend a lot of time here, but of course there is always a toilet stop. This is not normally a thing of note but it reminded me of the problems they were having with the toilets at the time there. When you flushed it just came out all over the floor due to a blockage or something.
It did mean a bit of maneuvering and not letting your pants hit the floor or you would have come out wetter than when you went in. I couldn’t work out why women were shaking their shoes, they should have supplied rubber boots. Needless to say it is the same in most major tourist attractions so it is always good to go beforehand so as to avoid the lines and the mess.
We did a bit of rushed souvenir shopping and as we headed back to the bus I saw a Chinese Restaurant, which was a little bit strange. We are used to seeing Chinatown in most major cities and in Australia we have every known Asian country restaurant being so close to Asia but in the middle of Pisa made me chuckle. I do like my westernised chinese though ;o)
Another strange thing was this street water fountain, I didn’t think I’d be filling my water bottle up there. I know the water in Italy is good but putting a new brass fitting on this old tap did not increase the chances of me using it though. I am guessing the pipes are many years old.
We were all bundled back on the bus and we were off again to where we were going to stay for the night which was near Lucca. This was a great little town where you go up on a funicular (Funicolare in Italiano) to the fort on the top of the hill and can see for miles. Please excuse the poor night photo but you get the point.
It must have been raining as you can see I am both excited to be on the funicular and also wearing basically a trench coat. Black is so my colour. We went up the hill to where we were going to dinner at this quaint little restaurant below.
Then we all climbed back into the bus to go to a nearby town where we were staying at a very fancy little hotel where we got a 2 bedroom unit. Being on tours the places you stay can range from barely a bedroom near major cities to luxurious places in the smaller towns. It had an antique italian charm that I liked and definitely not the modern look my son prefers.
This was the last of this part of the trip and we were off to Florence the next day.