We’ve just gotten home from our vacation, and it was great. Maybe one reason is not staying up late feverishly hand-writing tales of each day’s events. Yes, I gave myself my own little blog-free vacation. Still, there are some things I don’t want to entirely fade from memory… so I will try now to relate each before it is too late.
I’d planned a vacation at the Tuscan beach resort of Viareggio. Italy’s biggest beach resort. Beautiful pictures online. Or, at least, I thought that’s where I’d planned the vacation. My exhaustive research on Trip Advisor had actually led me to a hotel just outside Viareggio. 
And by just outside, I mean that if you stood on the sidewalk in front of our hotel, you could look down the street and see the sign welcoming you to Viareggio. But the actual charming old part of town was too far to walk with a five year old… so at first I was mad. Then I realized being mad was not how I wanted to spend my vacation. One evening we rented bikes from our hotel and pedaled our way down there. What we found were overpriced stores that had already closed (and it was only a little past 7 at night), overpriced restaurants and, well, that was about it. Maybe the beach by our hotel was a little like the Jersey shore minus the pulled taffy… but it actually had better, unique stores, open later, and was kinda fun.
The beach itself was like nothing we’d experienced before. Only a very small strip of the beach is public. You have to pay to burn your feet on nearly every inch of sand along that coastline. The fee covers something to sit on (chair or lounger… the latter being more expensive) plus an umbrella. 
There are private changing rooms, but our hotel was only a block away. There’s also a bathroom which was clean. And a snack bar complete with a grumpy waitress. The beach is pretty wide and covered with a sea of umbrellas. Different colors for different clubs, I guess you call them. 
It was days before we ever bothered with the beach. (Well, our first day we wandered down just to check it out and after Kaitlyn went in the ocean some guy came up and informed us we were on a private beach.) She loved the pool at the hotel. 
It was very pretty…. lined with and surrounded by marble tiles. Slippery marble tiles. She took a couple of spills, including one smack onto her belly while trying to jump backwards into the pool. (Yes, she’s gotten rather confident in her swimming skills over the past week or so.) We spent one entire day at the pool, which we realized that night was a mistake when Kaitlyn became so tired she was entirely unreasonable and we ended up ordering room service for dinner. She spent a couple of afternoons at the pool flirting with an 8 year old boy from England… Benjie. Seriously, I think he’d have done anything she’d asked him to do. When Benjie’s family left, luck smiled on us and another family with two girls just a bit older than Kaitlyn arrived. They became fast friends. Once the girls got past Kaitlyn’s tendency to ramble on with an impossible-to-follow stream-of-consciousness which I think is partially brought on by the thrill of finding another English speaker to listen to her. We even ended up in neighboring umbrellas at the beach one day.
Besides a beautiful but slippery pool and a short walk to the Jersey shore, our hotel offered an ideal location for a few short afternoon sightseeing trips.
Our first excursion was to Carrara… to see the mountain of marble. It really is something. It looks like it’s covered in snow. But it’s white marble. At the top, you can see where they’re carving it out of the mountain leaving behind giant white steps where ragged mountain tops should be. We’d hired a private tour guide who told us all about the trucks loaded with marble, marble scrap or marble dust, lumbering through town at frightening speeds. Although she was sure to add that the trucks have good breaks… now. We were there on a Sunday… in August… there was no mining going on so no trucks to worry about. We went inside the only mine that’s inside the mountain. 
Kaitlyn’s favorite part of the tour was the gift shops offering every imaginable marble piece. We hit probably four shops. Kaitlyn picked out a little pyramid made of pink marble. She calls it flesh colored. Bill and I took a little longer to decide, finally settling on some marble dice and marble book ends. Before we left the area around all the quarries, we stopped to take our pictures standing on top of some of the giant slabs of marble slated for a future trip down the mountain on one of those trucks. The slabs are about 6 feet tall and 8 feet wide and solid. Kaitlyn and I managed to climb up a couple for the pictures. 
Then Bill and I managed to heave a few small scrap pieces of marble into the car… for better souvenirs. Don’t know what we’ll do with them, but they’re cool.
Our next afternoon trip away from the pool was to Pisa. Kaitlyn wanted to see the tower because she’s seen a picture of Scooby Doo in front of a cartoon version of it. Or maybe it was Mickey Mouse. Either way, she was excited. She really liked the knock down tower, as she calls it. We stood and took the required pictures pretending to hold up the tower. I hope Bill got a picture of the row of people all looking like idiots standing there with their arms in the air. Kaitlyn didn’t quite get how to pose to make the picture look right, so I’m sure she looks merely like one of those people whose arms are in the air for no apparent reason. 
And she was a little disappointed that she couldn’t go inside… no one under 8 allowed. But I was relieved. Last thing I felt like doing was climbing I don’t know how many steps inside a leaning tower in the 90 degree heat. We went inside a couple of the other buildings in the same piazza. I’d worn a tank top… which I nearly never do… and was forced to cover up with a crazy paper gown thing in the cathedral. 
It had a funny smell and made me hotter than I’d imagined paper could do so I was really glad when we escaped that. I had a card with a walking tour away from the tower… but it was so hot. And Kaitlyn gets tired of walking rather quickly. So we rented a surrey and biked around town. 
Pisa’s actually fairly pretty when you get away from the row of vendors hocking leaning tower statues, fountains and shot glasses. We got a little lost, but only a little. It was really a lot of fun, even in the heat. Although maybe the heat did get to Kaitlyn. She picked out a little knock down tower so her dollies could see it. She chose one that’s purple with green glitter. 
On our way back to the hotel, we spotted a sign for a Chinese restaurant and figured it had to be better than yet another pizza… so we went. It was delicious. The best steamed dumplings we’ve had in ages. And they spoke English. And it was not expensive. It cost less than our lunch of pizza at the beach. So we went back our last night before coming home. They remembered us and gave Kaitlyn a gift: a small fan which she thinks makes her look just like Mulan. (She wrote on her arm in marker to complete the look.)
Our final mini-road trip was to Lucca. It hadn’t been in our original plan. But everyone under the sun (literally… at the pool) told us to go. So we checked the gps, it was only a half hour away, so we went. We rented bikes and rode along the old wall that surrounds the city. 
We even managed to rent a little tandem bike for Kaitlyn so she could pedal and she just laughed and whooped and had a great time doing that. 
I found a place selling Tuscan pottery that was actually reasonably priced, so I had a great time. Although getting it from the shop to the bike store on the bike was a bit of a challenge. Kaitlyn’s souvenir is a bunch of plastic dinosaurs… it may not be Tuscan but it was good entertainment while waiting for our meal to be served at dinner. I’d taken along my tour book on Italy with kids and we chose a restaurant from their list. It was very good. And it wasn’t pizza or spaghetti. Bill had steak. I had veal. Kaitlyn had tortellini. (We couldn’t have an entirely pasta-free meal in Italy.)
Florence is only an hour from the shore, but we decided to spend our last two days sitting on our (rented) beach chairs and enjoying the sun. We can always go back. Kaitlyn has already asked us several times if we can. Maybe we will…
