From Summer to Winter in One Easy Border Crossing

Our days exploring San Gimignano and Siena were bookended by two days at the pool. It’s really hard to express just how incredible this campsite was. Minigolf, Tennis, Soccer, Archery, Kids Concerts at night, Aqua Aerobics in the morning, a pool bar, three restaurants, a lagoon an river ride at one end, 3 pools and a water slide at the other. A night club, an arcade, a hairdresser, a gym, a spa, saunas. All free, except the hairdresser and the mini golf. And the food of course.

We swam a lot, and lazed on the loungers that crowded around the pools. Courtney finally got his hair cut, something he’s wanted since before we left home, and I got my hair coloured. 40 Euros for both of us – cheaper than home but still a splurge. I’m growing out black hair dye and had very faded auburn and very apparent blond roots all in the mix so I was very happy to have my hair sorted out. We used the 10 foot spa in the gym a lot – there was hardly ever anyone else in there, so we could laze around in the luke-warm water, floating on our backs and being pushed around by the jets. I gave the sauna a go, the first time I’d been in one in my life. I couldn’t decide whether it was the most luxurious or the most uncomfortable thing I’d ever experienced.

On our final day in Tuscany, we went back to Greve, because Courtney still hadn’t been inside his Salami shop, the one he saw on TV. He wasn’t disappointed. The 300 year old shop was more like 5 shops with doors between them and every meat product you could imagine. We were down to the last 5 or so Euros we had budgeted for the Tuscan leg of our trip, so he got a couple of packs of Salami and was in heaven.

We had 400-odd Euros left for the last week before we went back to England and then home, and we attempted to get it all out at an ATM in Greve. Of course, being the very last of our money, the ATM decided to pull it’s little rejection trick again. Once again, the transaction didn’t go through and once again, the money got deducted from our account. Good old Kiwibank. Luckily, we had the forethought to have coming-home funds in our New Zealand (non-Kiwibank) accounts, enough money to pay the bond on a new house and keep us afloat until our first paydays. It was rather painful when the travel card rejected the next morning, checking out of camp, and I had to put 160 Euros on my debit card from home. Seeing over $NZ300 go in one foul swoop sucked the big one.

We headed off on the bike and, squashed between Courtney and our ever increasing tower of luggage, I texted Mum to get onto Kiwibank as quickly as possible.

The ride that day was long, from Tuscany to Cannes, France via Monaco. We rode out of crisp, warm, sun drenched Tuscany and felt summer speed away behind us as we rode into horrible fog and occasional rain. Most of the ride was along highways not far in from the ocean so the views were amazing when we could actually see them.

It felt good riding back into France. France is the country we best picked up the language in and the country we most enjoyed riding through. We didn’t spend any longer in France than any other country, 3 weeks, same as Spain and Italy, but because those three weeks were broken up into three separate visits to the country, returning felt almost like going home. I always thought of Tuscany as our last real stop on the trip anyway, so  it really felt like we were speeding towards home and we both got quite excited at the prospect.

Our lunchtime stop in Monaco was awesome. Such a tiny country, such a rich country. We rode down to the marina and saw the huge cruise ship in the harbour, surrounded by the sails of hundreds of yachts. The buildings were ornate, almost Victorian looking, and crowned by the castle. Our actual lunch wasn’t so great – the Croque Monsieur was just a ham toasted sandwich with so little cheese I had to add mayonnaise so it wouldn’t be so dry. The coffee cup was so dirty Courts refused to pay for his drink, and our requests for help with the wifi were met by extremely rude customer non-service. Overall though, there was a certain air of magic around Monaco. When I win the lottery one day, I’ll go back on one of those yachts.

We eventually made it to Cannes. Well, not quite Cannes - Auribeau sur-Saigne, 10 minutes away. The campsite backed onto a river with overhanging trees and an old aqueduct-looking bridge. The pool looked promising, and it was nice to pitch the tent on grass, not dust for a change. We had been reminded 6 times we were definitely in France by all the toll booths along the way, and we were reminded once again of the fact when we realized toilet paper was BYO.

A trip to find a supermarket about 7.30pm produced no results. Everything was closed and we returned to camp toilet paperless, with food from a patisserie for dinner. Who cares though right? Cause we were on our way home.

When Awesomeness Becomes Normalness

I never intended to blog every day. I wanted to write like a ‘real’ travel writer, finding angles and stories and carving a niche for myself. Angles don’t come naturally to me though, and it wasn’t fun trying to find them just so I could document something we did. This is my blog and at the end of the day it’s my trip memories and so I wrote every day.

When I travelled America, I wrote a travel diary for 2 or 3 weeks of the month. The last leg of the trip though, I never put pen to paper. I guess I’ve dropped the ball here too, because we are sitting on a ferry to England, hours away from dropping the bike off, and you’re still bloggily stuck in Tuscany, two stops ago in travel land.

After our day in Pisa and Lucca, we spent a day at San Gimignano. Kim and Richard had told us they should have seen some of the other walled cities in the area before San Gimignano, because it was the best and so seeing lesser ones afterwards made them seem somewhat lackluster in comparison. We understood once we saw it, but for a different reason – Once you’ve seen Carcassonne, as we did early on in our trip, all walled cities are ruined for life because it’s just that good.

San Gimignano was lovely, the views over the rolling Tuscan landscape were incredible, and the world-champion gelato was quite literally second to none. As we walked through the gates and onto the main street, there were cute souvenir shops, Courtney-enticing sword and knife shops, salami shops, and way more Museums of Torture than one tiny city actually needs. None of the shops kept our attention for long though because, while they were very cool, we’d seen them before.

We sat in the piazza under the shadow of the medieval Town Hall, eating our eccentrically flavoured gelato and people watching (actually, dog watching, they’re far cuter and more interesting). We wandered the streets looking for something more but just ended up getting lost in a maze of quiet back streets, at one point finding ourselves on the outside of the city walls and having to find a new way back in. It was this new way back in that led us to a small trattoria for lunch, where we tried Italian Cola called Chino – it tasted like ear wax, no kidding. We explored the courtyards of the town hall with their flaking frescoes and rooftop views and then headed back to Figline Val D’Arno.

The following day, we left early(ish) to go to Siena. There was a market on Wednesday mornings that we had planned our week around attending and we weren’t disappointed. The market was huge and sold everything you could think of. There were clothes for 3 Euro right up to leather jackets for 100. There were beauty products, kitchen appliances, souvenirs, shoes and bric a brac. The highlight for me was 5 Euro knitted slippers. They’re like boots, with souls, almost like ugg boots, except knitted and amazing and cheap.

Courtney’s highlight was predictably food related – he relished all the attention he got from gaping strangers as he sat on a rock eating the huge roasted leg of some poor farm animal. He is telling me it was lamb but when I asked he couldn’t even remember Siena so don’t trust him. No lamb I’ve ever seen has had a leg that big, I think it was pork from memory. I had deep fried cheese and potato croquettes and followed them up with Lavender Honey from a little old man selling jars he had farmed himself.

When the stallholders began packing up, we headed over to the town of Siena. I found out quickly that I actually had no knowledge of Siena at all, despite all my planning. The GPS lead us on a wild goose chase that took us back to the place we had originally been parked for the market, and it was then we realized that Siena is basically just a huge walled city. There are very few cars and most traffic is on foot, so we wandered on in and immersed ourselves in the alleys and cobblestones we’ve become accustomed to.

We wandered the main streets, found the Piazza that hosts Il Palio, the annual horse race, and then wandered further in to find the Duomo. The Cathedral and duomo were amazing, even if they did look like a tacky and over the top wedding cake. The exterior was white and pink with other pastel accents and trims that could have been piped icing. The statues and frescoes were of course incredible, and we sat on a ledge at the edge of the piazza just staring for awhile. Well, I was staring, Courts may have been semi comatose from the heat.

We let ourselves get lost, played in a playground after taking pictures of the view, and, surprise surprise ended up with gelato. We ate it on the slope of the piazza that hosts Il Palio, dog, toddler and pigeon watching. Adult watching is so last year. I have to say as far as gelato goes, Siena is letting down the team. We perused 3 or 4 shops before we found one that looked good and wasn’t mass-produced, glorified ice cream.

So that was Siena, another lovely day, as every day is in Tuscany. How can it not be?

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Leaning Towers and Shirtless Italians - I mean, Medieval Fairs

It wouldn’t be a kitsch trip of touristy goodness without seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. After riding just over an hour to get there, we of course had our priorities straight and instead of going directly to the tower, went to a family-run Gelateria passed through the generations from the man given credit for inventing modern ice cream. Once again, Italy proved why it is the reigning King of Gelato. Although not as cute and quaint as some of the other, younger Gelaterias, the service was wonderful and so was the Gelato. Courts strayed from the norm and got a Tangelo Granite (slushy) while I did my usual and asked them what the best they had was. The three they chose were chocolate (lazy, fail-safe choice), pear (bizarre because pear itself is such a mild flavour and should probably be sorbet) and almond (nice, but no chocolate-wine).

After a tiki-tour across the river (thank you GPS) we eventually crossed back and behind the Gelateria in search of the tower. We stumbled across an antiques and crafts market on the way, which was awesome. There was all sorts I would have loved to have bought but the highlight was undoubtedly the pet rocks. You heard me right, pet rocks. These river stones had been hand painted to look like various animals and then places in context. Dog and cat rocks slept on little pillows, parrot rocks stood upright on rock feet, and owl rocks slept on tree branches stuck to canvas backgrounds of night sky. They would have been laughable if they weren’t so amazingly painted, and I would have left with a Border Collie rock if it hadn’t deservedly been priced at 23 Euros.

As per usual, it was a bevy of tour groups that alerted us to the presence of the aforementioned tourist attraction, and if you hadn’t known it was the Leaning Tower you were near, you could have easily figured it out by the stupid number of idiots posing as if they themselves were holding it up in photos. Seeing photos of friends and tourists ‘holding up’ the leaning tower is one thing, but seeing a field of people all leaning haphazardly with one hand in a bizarre salute as others kneel and twist to get the camera angles just-so is a spectacle unto itself.

We walked around the tower, ridiculing the people walking up the top who had paid 15 Euros for the priviledge, ignoring the street vendors and marveling at the very cool cathedral and basilica in the same piazza as the tower. The tower itself is actually a pretty cool structure, and I’m really glad we made the trip to see it. We saw the first of what would turn out to be many, many sculptures on top of poles of human twins suckling wolves. I’m presuming they’re Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome who were raised by wolves, but I haven’t yet figured out why we saw them in Pisa, Florence and twice in Siena.

The highlight of seeing the Leaning Tower was not the tower, nor the very good Italian food we had just around the corner. It wasn’t even the Gelato. It was the idiot tourists who, standing next to me at a tacky souvenir shop (I do love tacky) who were trying to return a small figurine of the tower because it was straight. They were very upset that the figurine was straight and they wanted to find a leaning one. Despite the shopkeeper amusedly trying to explain it only looked straight when they held it up straight or when they put it down with the lean facing away from them, and then pointlessly trying to explain they were 3 Euro souvenirs and all came out of the same mold in identical shapes and leans, the tourists spent about 10 minutes comparing leans. At one point the patriarch of the family came over to make a big fuss and point out yet again that this tower did not lean.

When we recovered from our fits of giggles and the lunch we had afterwards, we jumped back on the bike and drove to Lucca, a medieval walled city. We had never heard of it before, until seeing that the day trip our campsite ran to Pisa included Lucca. When we found our way in, it kind of seemed like a lot of the old medieval-ness had been renovated and remodeled with the times, and many of the buildings were quite modern. The further in we went though, the more labyrinth-like the streets became and the more authentic the town felt. We stopped for drinks in a small café and were drawn outside by drums that sounded rather similar to those heard in Florence the previous day. The parade that was making it’s way past was exactly the same as the one we saw the day before, but with the leaders bearing ‘Lucca’ crests instead of those of multiple towns. The café owner told us it was the last day of a September festival in the area and that there was a medieval revival on the other side of town. We couldn’t pass that up, could we?

After finishing our drinks and stopping for candied nuts at a street vendor, we followed the sound of the drums to a piazza and into a medieval fair. It was awesome, stall holders all in medieval costume, metal workers crafting the jewellery they were selling as they were selling it, men playing medieval backgammon in the middle of the square sat on hay bales. I bought a small pot of honey and Courtney didn’t buy a small bag of Salvia he saw at a medicinal herb stall. The piece de resistance was not the shirtless Italian 20-somethings sword fighting in the field beyond the city walls, but the crossbow competition nearby. We sat and watched teams in medieval costume load crossbows with precision and shoot bulls eye after bulls eye across the field.

It was a long walk back to the bike and an even longer ride home, but such a good day. Funny how the most enjoyable things are those that are unplanned or unexpected, like walking into medieval Italy on a seemingly regular Saturday.

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The Search for the Elusive David

Riding into Florence, half an hour from camp, the first impression was that it was just another city, nothing particularly special or charming or new. That was, until we dug deeper. We parked the bike with a row a scooters on the edge of town, where the cobblestones started becoming more frequent and the roads narrower. We were a short stroll from a Trattoria we were keen to try out, and headed straight there, winding between tall imposing buildings and staring up at the churches and reliefs that called to us from the end of every second alley.

After a minor hunt, we found the trattoria, Fratellini’s I think it was. It was easy to miss – the tiny shop had about a foot between front step and counter, and just enough space behind said counter to allow the two men working there to occasionally take a breathe. The menu was posted to the side - all sandwiches were 2.50 and there were easily 20 or 30 varieties to choose from. Courts had goats cheese, Tuscan salami and fennel while I had salami and artichoke. We added a 1.50 glass of wine to our order and joined the small crowd of old Italian men and curious tourists that paused outside to eat, leaving their wine glasses on specially sized shelves to either side of the stall.

Beyond our sandwich stop, we wandred the old streets laden with modern shops, and found ourselves amongst a sea of slow paced walking tours again. When you start seeing fake flowers bobbing in the crowd, you know you’re getting close to a must-see. If ever there was one, it was the Duomo. Only days after the breathtaking Pantheon in Rome, the Duomo in Florence was incredible, an easy rival to every piece of architecture we had seen thus far. Of course as with everything else featured in any guide book ever, there was a massive queue to go in, so we happily snapped photos of other tourists happily snapping photos in front of the cathedral, wandered around the outside and then proceeded to get ourselves lost, as we do in most cities.

We were attempting to use GPS to find the copy of Michaelangelo’s David, which as I understood was right outside the Accademia that houses the original. Instead we found a market that we hadn’t planned on visiting until later, and after deciding to come back to it, eventually found the Accademia. There was no David to be found, just a nondescript museum building with yet another massive queue. We walked right round the outside and did find an empty piazza with plenty of other statues, but David eluded us.

Courts, hater of all things hot and queue-like, even volunteered to stand in the unshaded queue for the Accademia to see the real one. He knew how much I wanted to see it and how often we hadn’t gone inside things to avoid the queue, but I too was hot and sick of walking and I didn’t think the admission fee and queue was worth the one statue I wanted to see.

Instead, we ambled on back to the market near San Lorenzo Church. Most of the market was either leather or scarves, Florence’s two specialities. There were souvenirs aplenty as well and lots of jewellery and we set about shopping for presents to take home and occasionally remembering to get something for ourselves.

The stall holders were insane. A bracelet caught my eye and I asked ‘How much?’ without really stopping, only pausing as I knew I most likely wouldn’t buy it. “10 Euro” was the response and I smiled and said thank you, and started to walk away. With Courts a step behind me the guy had just enough time to offer “8!” to which we replied no and kept going. We could hear him yell “7!” in the background but we were a fair distance away when he appeared behind us, tapping me on the arm and saying in quick succession as we shook our heads “5!... 2!... 50 cents!”. Seriously, 50 cents! After trying to get 10 Euro he was willing to go 50 cents and he had left his entire stock behind him unattended to try and get it.

Although this guy was the most extreme, he was far from the exception to the rule. It was common for stall holders to pull faces and shake their heads when we walked away after their third attempt at getting us to buy something. One girl kept passing me scarved to look at without ever taking back others, until I was left with an armload. She seemed shocked and annoyed when I gave them back to her and she had to put them all away. I had known I wanted one of two scarves and they were the only two I asked to see.

At least she wasn’t touchy feely, because when a pushy Italian man grabs my arm to try and show me something or emphasise a point, that’s it – I’m done. I don’t generally have personal space issues, but I hate it when stall holders do that and all niceties fade with it. Not all stall holders were bad though – a lovely man who sold me two of something (I can’t specify because they’re gifts) let me get away with 2 for 12 when the asking price was 8 each. I had started low expecting to get a small discount but you can’t be upset with buy-1-get-1-half-price, even if the margins at the markets are stupidly high.

With a backpack full of market goodies it was most definitely Gelato time. Courts saved a seat outside and I went in to order. Courts wanted a milkshake but it wasn’t as simple as ordering ‘chocolate’ because it was made with as many gelato flavours as you wanted and there’s not often a flavour as simple as ‘chocolate’. I went back out to ask him what he wanted to add in and the lovely shopkeeper followed me out to offer suggestions to Courts. When we were finally settled with a very good milkshake and our daily serving of gelato, we settled into a game of backgammon on our phone, sitting in the shade.

We walked back towards the Duomo, hearing the sound of drums getting louder and louder. We had stumbled across a parade, making their way around the cathedral with sections holding flags for different towns Coat of Arms. There were drummers, lords and ladies in medieval costume, and flag throwers. We watched for awhile before heading down a side street for a coffee.

Eventually, it was time to go. As we headed towards the bike, Courts wanted to duck down an alley that looked like it led to a piazza. When we broke through the narrow path into a square full of sunlight, low and behold there he was – unassuming, shaded, in a corner, and surrounded by countless other statues, was David (or at least a copy of him). We ended up spending almost an hour in that piazza, not only because there was a huge columned, open air building full of statues to look at, but because the parade made it’s way through the crowds again as well, heralding our discovery of David. The perfect end to another hot, sticky, pushy, crowded, gelato-filled – aka Italian – day.

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