Lucca

After my short afternoon/evening in Venice we woke up on Monday morning and after breakfast, took a vaporetto to the train station. We found our train with relative ease and while waiting to board found out that I was sitting several coaches away.

Makes sense since I booked separately from them. I tried to sit with them but after a couple of stops the train was really filling up and the people wanted their seat. I couldn't help but think of Mission Impossible as I was passing through from coach to coach while the train was speeding through the Italian countryside.

My real seat faced the opposite direction from the way we were going and between that and the little slice of window I could see over my shoulder I got a little sick. I dozed a bit too and didn't feel at all guilty that I was wasting time with my Mom and sister since they weren't there!

Finally, we arrived in Florence. We had already decided (via a text just a few hours before I left for the airport) that we would spend our first day in Florence actually doing a day trip from Florence. There are several good options; I finally chose Lucca. (I will just have to the others, like Pisa, on my next trip to Italy:)
I had investigated and decided that we could take a train or a bus to Lucca. Conveniently, we were in the train station. We checked schedules and realized that there was a train leaving in a half an hour. We watched closely (and probably annoyingly!) as others bought their train tickets from the kiosks and then made our own purchase. It only took us two times to get it done.

We quickly found our departing train and tried to find seats together. It was definitely more of an everyday commuter train. And all the more interesting for it, really. As we boarded and stowed are bags on the racks overhead we realized that in our hurry we hadn't taken the time to check our bags so we wouldn't have them while walking around Lucca.
We thought we would find one at the station when we arrived. After looking all over (and asking a couple of different people) we couldn't find a bag check. But we did find the bathroom, which Mom thought convenient...until she saw it. Needless to say, (and it really is needless, right?) we all declined the opportunity to go.

Our next best option for our bags, we decided, was a hotel. There was one just across the way and headed there. A nice lady (really, one of the nicer people we met in Italy) quickly pointed us up a close street to a place we could check the bags. How helpful! How close! And why did the those other people we had asked tell us they had no idea what we could do with our bags?

From there we could see the walls surrounding the oldest part of Lucca, the original city.

We crossed a smallish park and took our life in our hands crossing the road before following the sidewalk to the hole in the wall.
Then up the stairs.

(Here I feel compelled to insert how surprised I was at all the graffiti I saw in Italy. I found it less than charming and really, kind of sad. This sparked the thought, maybe for the first time but definitely not the last, about whether the average Italian just took for granted how absolutely amazing it is to have these kinds of places and things around them. As they covered it in graffiti. The Rialto Bridge, for instance, lost a lot of allure by being covered in it.)
Then out at the top of the wall. This was the view towards the outside of the wall.And the view towards the inside

We actually spent the bulk of our time taking a circuitously scenic route to the birth place of some one famous and well known. The name escapes me at the moment. Maybe Mom or Elise will leave a comment...

We picked a little place to eat (and actually used their not-a-squatty-potty) and enjoyed this little fountain with our lunch.
We also had to get some gelato for our taste test. Oh, and another little pita bread sandwich thing with cheese and olives and....ooh, it was yummy.

We didn't want to get back to Florence and be hunting our hotel in the dark so we headed back to Florence in the late afternoon.

(After collecting our bags. I didn't listen to Italian and really feel like I got what was said because of knowing Spanish. It really just made me want to speak Spanish to the Italians, something I think they wouldn't appreciate. But in that one instance with the bag check man who didn't speak English and Elise, Mom and I strained for any familiar words, my Spanish-speaking brain clutched at the one word I recognized: diez. We happily paid our 10 euro and caught our train.)