European Trip 1998

The leaning tower of Pisa

I went to the reservations window and found out that the next train to Genova, Italy, was leaving in about 5 minutes. It was time for another sprint. Then, at Verano, Italy, we ran again to catch our connecting train to Genova, Italy, which was leaving 15 minutes early. We stayed in Genova that night. The hotel clerks did not speak English. They just wrote down the price, pointed to it, and said "yes or no! ... yes or no!", completely disregarding our polite requests to see the room first. Neither was this the place where you wanted to spend much time. Our view of Columbus' home town wasn't an attractive one. The next morning we got ready to check out of our hotel. The hotel did not accept credit cards and the network was down, just like the night before, for using my ATM card to get cash. This left one alternative, find a place to cash travellers checks. This turned out to be back at the train station. By the time I got the money and paid for our room, we were running to the train again. We had a very scenic oceanside train ride down to Pisa, which was a much more attractive town. We made our reservations to go to Barcelona, then boarded the bus for the leaning tower.

Someone elses picture of the tower.

Lyn had been the one who really wanted to go here, but, after seeing it, I have to admit it's one of the most incredible sights I've seen. It's a beautiful tower in a beautiful area. Open grassy areas separated each of the exquisite buildings. However, it was hard to take your eyes off the tower. So tall and leaning at such a great angle that it looks like it must either fall over or break apart. Cables were strung around various sections and on one side there was what appeared to be a massive block of concrete to seemingly tip the tower back to the right position. There looked to be much additional work being done on the tower. Someone said that the last time they tried to right the tower, it tipped even further. I hope they can save it. Even without the lean, the tower would be a beautiful piece of architecture.

Our train to Barcelona never showed up. We took the next train in the same northerly direction, but when we got back to Genova, we learned that our arrival in Barcelona would be delayed a day, a penalty we didn't want to pay. So, we attempted Paris again. The regular train had only sleepers, which required reservations, but we couldn't make reservations so late. There was an alternative train, we could catch in Turin, but that required two additional train rides to get there. Additionally, we didn't want to use up an extra day on our rail passes. For all trains up to 7p.m., we paid cash for our tickets. After that hour, "if the trip starts in overnight train ...then next day's date must be entered", thus using only one day on our pass on an overnight trip. Though our trip was an overnight one, 2 of our trains were not and I didn't know how the conductor would decide. We did get involved in a 15 minute discussion with the conductor, both parties understanding virtually nothing of what the other was saying. Eventually it came down to the phrase everyone agreed on: "not a problem".

Finally, on Tuesday morning we arrived in Paris. We called our hotel, but we were a day late and there were no rooms left because of the World Cup. I had gotten the impression before that, because the hotel was on the outskirts of the city, that we would not have any problems. Also, after changing our destination from Barcelona to Paris, we were always running for trains and had no time to call the hotel. Thus, Paris failed us for the third and last time on this trip. We could not visit with Francoise and Agnes, who were now leaving Paris for England. We could not visit with Norrie and Liza who would be trying to reach us on Thursday at the hotel where we could not get a room. Lyn suggested we try calling Philippe (a friend who lives 4 hrs away from Paris), he was in a meeting, but broke away for a few minutes to talk to us. Amazingly, he had no problem with our short-notice visit. We took the TGV to Nantes (pronounced "nant", because the French always forget to pronounce a letter or two in each word), getting even more mileage out of the one day on the rail pass.

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