Pisa, part 4

Oct 12, 2005

We didn’t plan to do too much on Sunday. There was a boat trip that we could book from the hotel down the Arno through Pisa. It wasn’t a really early start – about 10.00 so we thought we could manage that.

The tour started at the other end of the town so we got a taxi to the river. The boat was basically a raft with walls and a motor, there weren’t many other people on board and the guy running it told us lots of interesting facts about buildings as we passed them. We heard the bells ringing for Sunday service, though of course they were motorised not rung by hand. The tour went right down through the town and a little out into the countryside, and then turned around and headed back again – with information on buildings on the other side of the river. It was very relaxing and a nice way to enjoy the heat and scenery.

After the boat trip we walked through bits of town we’d not visited before back to the tower, and got some lunch there. We walked around again, looked in a few of the open shops, took some more photos and eventually headed back to the hotel. In the evening we took a taxi to the tower to see it lit up at night, unfortunately it wasn’t as impressive as we’d expected with not many lights on it. I took a few photos anyway. We had a very nice evening meal and a few drinks round there.

The plane left quite early on Monday – we had to be at the airport for 8.30. So we had a quick breakfast and got there. The airport was very busy but we managed to find time to go in all the shops (about 4) and catch the plane on time.

The breakfasts in the hotel were amazing, there was a large table in the centre of the room with tea and coffee, juices, milk, champagne(!), croissants, pasties, some sort of sticky cakes, bread rolls, preserves, nutella, cheese spread, cheese, ham, scrambled egg, bacon and toast. I think we completely stuffed ourselves every morning. It meant we could go quite a while till needing anything else to eat.