Our Return to Italy

We returned to Italy on Aug 4 (my birthday :-)).  It would have been nice to lay in and have a nice relaxing morning, so (despite a scheduled 11 AM checkout) we did!  Then we scrambled, packed our bags, and checked out of our hotel only about 20 minutes late.  Our return flight to Bologna wasn't scheduled until 7:30 PM, so we left our bags in the rental car and explored the city.  We visited the Alcazar and the Plaza de Espania (pics in a previous post), dropped our car at the airport (it took a couple of runs past the airport to find a gas station to fill it up) and then had some time at the airport for a farewell drink.

(Note: our farewell drink was something newly discovered in Granada, a "tinto de verano".  This is made with red wind and either limon or orange soda.  Our preference is limon and we are now exploring different recipes for "tinto de verano" using Italian red wine and limon soda.)

We had a few hours in Bologna so I climbed up the tower, and Sonya (you guessed it) went shoe shopping.  Here are some pics from the tower climb:

There are two towers (called "the two towers").  The smaller one is leaning quite a bit, and the taller one is open for climbing.  There are wooden stairs all the way up, and although it's not a difficult climb (despite being twice the height of the famous Leaning Tower) the stairs and passageways are quite narrow!

At the top are the expected spectacular views!

We caught an afternoon train back to Pisa, and a taxi back to our "home" in Calci.  (We had much better luck than our original taxi ride, now that we knew the directions!)  Today (Aug 6) we spent mostly lazing around, although we took the opportunity to clean up the garden (after 2 weeks of being ignored) (and some simultaneous experiments with "tinto de verano" recipes) and we also visited the local gelatto store.  (By the way the international gelatto critics rate the Calci gelatto as the best in Europe.  No kidding.)

Tomorrow we are heading to Cinque Terre!  We had planned to rest for at least a few days, but when we checked the availability of hotels in the Cinque Terre villages, tomorrow night was the only night we could find a reasonable priced room in the area we wanted to "overnight".  So we are off for 2 days (and 1 night) and I am sure I will have some stunning pictures to post!  Stay tuned ...