Day Three in Cinque Terre – Moving on to Pisa

Our plan for today was was a simple one; to try and get up early, eat breakfast, pack our suitcases, check-out of the hotel, temporarily store our luggage at the hotel, walk to the Levanto train station,  take a train to Monterosso, buy a ferry boat ticket for the ride to Riomaggiore, ride the ferry boat, train back to Levanto, get our luggage from the hotel, walk back to the Levanto train station, take the train to La Spezia,  buy a ticket for the train to Pisa Centrale Station, ride an hour on the train to Pisa, walk to our hotel check in, and then walk to the Leaning Tower for pictures. Just wish we had a few more things to do so we were not so bored.

Actually, it all went according to plan.  We had wanted to see some of the Cinque Terrre towns form the Mediterranean Sea, so we thought  the ferry ride would be nice, if the weather was good.  It turned out to be a beautiful day, and the ride along the coast was really nice.  If you want to see how adventurous the ferry can be, just do a search on U-Tube for Cinque Terre ferry boats.  It is amazing how they can get the boats up to the pier, and tie off at the bow of the boats.

Everyone then takes a ramp from the boat to the dock, and it can be really amazing when the seas are rough.  Thankfully, it was a really calm day this morning, and we only had to get on once and off once. Overall, the ferry boat ride was about 40 minutes, and we stopped at all but one of the five towns.

We happened to make good train connections, and were on our way to Pisa by about 12:30 PM.  We arrived in Pisa at about 2:20 PM, after the ride and connection in La Spezia.  All we wanted to do in Pisa was visit the Leaning Tower, hoping that all of the scaffolding that was on it 2 years ago was gone.  Unfortunately, we had found out earlier today that there was still scaffolding near the top of the tower.  We found this out from an Australian couple that we chatted with at breakfast this morning at our hotel in Levanto.  They had been in Pisa the previous week and had visited the Leaning Tower.

We made it to the hotel in Pisa without incident, other than I now have a problem with one of the wheels on my rolling suitcase.  I attempted a small repair when we got to our hotel, we will see how it works out.  We will be shifting some of the item from my bag to Stephanie’s to make mine lighter, and hopefully, take  some of the load off of the bum wheel.  Our hotel in Pisa, the Hotel Bologna, was very nice.  The room was large, and the bathroom was also very spacious.  It almost had a full size shower, a rarity in Europe. There was also an adjoining small room with two twin beds, in addition to the main room.  I would guess this is for families with children, but it served as our baggage room for repacking the suitcases.

We walked over to the Leaning Tower, and it was very crowded.   As we had heard from the couple in Levanto, there was a section of scaffolding on the Tower near the top.  It is more visible up close, but tends to blend in a little from afar.  One day, we may actually see it without any scaffolding at all!   Our plan was to also visit the Cathedral and the Baptistery on this visit, two things we did not do last time we were here.  We were not going to climb up the tower again, that was done on our last trip to Pisa in 2008.

There were still a lot of tour groups in the Cathedral when we finally went inside around 3:45 PM.  It was pretty inside,  but certainly not as fancy as some of the other churches in Italy.  We lit a votive candle like we did in Notre Dame on one of our previous trips.  We then visited the Baptistery, and were amazed when a lady did a demonstration on the acoustics, specifically the echo inside.  There was probably about a 3-4 second delay in the real voice and the echo voice, it was pretty amazing.

We ate a small snack, and drank a little wine while we were waiting for the sun to set so we could take some pictures of the Tower in the sunset lighting, and to see if there was any night lighting photo opportunities.     While we were waiting for the sun to set, we did find a nearby grocery store and decided to buy some cheese, ham, bread and of course, another bottle of wine for our dinner tonight.  It was a very large grocery store called PAM, and we found a lot of fresh items for our “picnic”.

The sunset pictures ended up to be pretty nice, but we were a little disappointed that the Tower is not really lighted at night.  We headed back to the hotel about 7:30 PM, and had our picnic dinner in the room.  It was very good, the bread and cheeses were some of the best we have had.

We went ahead and repacked the suitcases, trying to lighten mine as much as possible.  We have a 6:30 AM wake up call tomorrow morning, and we need to get ready, eat breakfast at the hotel, and walk about 20 minutes to the train station for our 8:00 AM train to Florence.  Our plan is to make a brief stop over in Florence to visit a couple of the nicer churches in Florence before boarding our 2:30 PM train to continue on to Venice, which is where we will stay for the next three nights.  Yeah, and we hope to rest a little there…….and post some pictures.