Europe Trip #2 - June 29, 2022 - A Whole Lot Of Lucca
I’ll tell you straight up, I adore Lucca. Since the very first time we stayed there and walked those ancient city walls, I have loved it. It’s a “stroll around, watch people, climb a tower” kind of town.
On this trip, we were only doing a day trip. It took about 90 minutes and one train change to get there from Levanto. We could have 4 or 5 hours there, depending on which trains we chose to return home.
The plan was catch the 11 a.m. train to Viareggio, have 6-8 minutes to catch the next train to Lucca. Our first train ran 30 minutes late so we grabbed some food until the next train, getting us to Lucca around 1 p.m. I explained all that in the previous post.
Once we were there, you walk straight out of the train station and there are those gorgeous city walls.
We snagged a stranger to take a group photo. Never an easy task.
We headed down into the inner city and explored.
The first shop we went into for souvenirs, thanks to our SIL paying with a credit card, we learned the owners’ last name is the same as our last name.
Ahhh, Italy. We fit here.
Etta’s bookstore is across from a vintage clothing store, which was not a hit. They were heavy on denim which was not of interest to our crew.
We made our way to the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro.
Aunt T and Uncle L needed time to look in a shop for a bit, so we packed up everyone else and started our way back into a part of town for more shopping.
Once we were all together again, we decided to split up into groups. L&T and their 3 young charges headed off to climb the tower.
Buds, our nephew and Buster headed off to find a birthday present for Buddie’s brother.
Yessa had found a vegan restaurant and she, Monkey, and I headed there to grab some food since we ran out of time at the train stop before we got anything besides french fries.
Buds and the gents had great success on their hat hunt.
They decided to head over for the 4:30 train. The rest of us would go for the 5:30.
They headed off and after lunch and boba, the girls and I found a gelato place. Then we got the call that nephew’s sunglasses were still at the hat store and their train was 30 minutes late so they would wait and train with us.
Yessa popped back with me to retrieve the sunglasses and she was really surprised to discover, as she led us directly from gelato to the hat store by memory, that I no idea where the hat store was, nor how I would have walked there, despite my remembering walking by Buster waiting outside the store on our way to lunch earlier.
Different brains, Dear One. 😁
We wandered up for one last walk on the wall, bumped into the T&L group, then headed to the train station.
We found the rest of our group near the station.
We got on our first train, but it was running late and the odds were very high that we would miss our connection.
Missing a train is not generally a big deal, but in this instance, missing this train meant the final leg of our trip would be two trains instead of just one.
We jumped off the train, moved as quickly as we could to the next platform, without much hope, but that train was running late, too!!
🎉🎉🎉
It was a huge relief because we were nearing the end of the line for some of the crew.
We sent the teens home in the agritourismo shuttle. Buds and I had 20 minutes to get to the grocery store before it closed and then we meandered our way home, not able to get a taxi. The groceries were heavy, but we still gloried in the beauty of the night and walking in Italy.
It was a glorious day.
