Wednesday, June 29, 2022

A leaning tower, the beach, and a goodbye

Even though Cristina and I were sleeping in, I was awake by 7:30. Cristina got up around 8 and we had breakfast with the Hines. They headed out with Bella towards Pisa.

While I was taking my shower, the power went out. Cristina checked with Lucia and Lucia checked with the neighbors. It seemed to be out throughout the neighborhood. No power meant no wifi, and the laptop was almost dead also. So blogging was on hold.

Once the Hines were finishing at Pisa (and had acquired the obligatory photo where they were pretending to hold the tower) Cristina and I drive to a pizza place at the beach that Jacoby had picked out. The pizza was...different. Not terrible, but not as good as the other pizza we've had in Italy.

Many of the beaches here are the kind where you pay for access and you get a little umbrella area with a couple of chairs. I would assume you also get food/drink service. I'm not sure how much that kind of beach access costs, but the idea of sitting within a big grid of umbrellas is not my idea of a beach trip. I'm not really a beach person anyway. I'm more of a sunrise/sunset beach person, walking in the surf. We drove a few minutes to a free beach. The walk to the actual beach was longer than I expected. Bella didn't bring flip flips and left her shoes in the car. She didn't realize how hot the sand was going to be, so she burned her feet and finally had to run to get to the water. The Mediterranean was beautiful. Jeremy liked the sand better than Florida beaches (less shelly).


We didn't stay long, because it was the hottest, sunniest part of the day and the Hines had a long drive ahead. We said our goodbyes and the three of us headed back to Corsanico, for the first time in Europe a triplet instead of six. It will be weird not having the Hines with us!

We accidentally took the long way home. Cristina hadn't been feeling great all day, and she accidentally let me miss a couple of turns. We tried to go the way Waze redirected us, but it got very steep, very narrow, and after an awkward backing up on a teeny crooked hill, I went back down and we started over.

Nap time at home. The power came back on around 4 pm.

I finally got some blogging. Cris was still not feeling well. I found a thermometer in the bathroom, an old-school mercury thermometer. The cool thing about it is it came with a case that you swing around on a stick to force the mercury back down into the tip. I've never seen that before! She did indeed have a  slight temp of 100. I made her some chamomile tea and turned on some mindless Italian reality shows (there weren't many options on the TV). I sat in the downstairs salon (living room? foyer?) and blogged while she lay on the couch and rested. Bella and I had leftover pizza for dinner. I made Cristina some avocado toast, but she didn't have an appetite.

Rather than pack up tonight, we went to bed relatively early (10 pm) and saved the packing for the morning.

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