Lost in Tuscany
Before we left the US, the group that we had chosen to provide ours bikes and luggage transfers had sent us a book of instructions on how to get from Pisa to Lucca and then on to Vinci and Florence. Street by street turns. Looked pretty straight forward. Piece of cake.
After breakfast we climbed on our bikes full of vim and anticipation of our days biking throughTuscany. We decided to take one last loop through Miracle Square, a time before the throngs would arrive pretending to save the tower from a horrific gravitational fate, and exited the gate on the far end from where we had spent the night. I should have told you previously that Pisa is a medieval, walled city (this is a recurring theme). I should tell you that the pace of the city outside the wall is much different than that inside and that pedaling a bike in Italian traffic while reading directions with foreign names and unfamiliar distances ("go left in 580 meters") is like setting the time and date on a cheap Japanese watch while balancing a knife on your forehead.
Apparently, we made it out of Pisa safely because I am writing to you now. It almost did not happen. The book of instructions included long and short round trip tours of the Pisa area as well as long and short routes to Lucca, our destination. It was a pleasant enough ride past vast fields of sunflowers that had already drooped due to the weight of the seed heads and a little dog who seemed to gain immense joy following us down the road growling and barking. Had we been there three weeks earlier, it would have been the most glorious site. If you have never seen a blooming field of sunflowers, you have denied yourself one of creation's greatest pleasures. As it was, these sunflowers seemed a little sorrowful no longer able to trace the arc of the sun.
We made a turn and rode beside an ancient aqueduct for a while, past grapes and olives religiously following the book. Past a gas station and a tire store and some tenement looking structures. It was then that Leslie started to doubt my navigational skills, and we discovered that I had led us on the nitwit track, the long circuit around Pisa for folks who wished to get their bike rental money's worth by going another fifty kilometers in a circle. What ensued was a morning of riding willy nilly looking for a way to repair the mistake without undoing it.
Brother, I'm here to tell you that that never works. Our fourth time passing the sorrowful sunflowers and the little dog, he didn't even bother to bark. In a world of plenty, you start to take things for granted. The good news is that we were finally on our way to Lucca!