Pisa and Lucca

We spent our last day in Florence doing a quick day trip to Pisa and Lucca.  We spent just half the day admiring the famous leaning bell tower of the Pisa Cathedral. The entire cathedral square, the Piazza del Duomo, is quite beautiful and impressive and swarming with tourists as you can imagine. The famous tower leans because of its inadequate foundation on too soft of ground… it used to lean at an angle of 5.5 degrees, but corrective measures taken during the 1990s and early 2000s made it so now it leans at an angle of 3.99 degrees.  

They had an age restriction on climbing it so none of the kids could go :(  Ben was a good sport and hung out with them while Mom and I made the unique climb up the slightly tilted spiral staircase. 

The view from up top

The girls having fun in the gift shop while waiting for Mom and me to make our descent

The baptistry… again, we loved having the scooters there

The inside of the cathedral was breathtaking… as are most European cathedrals:

We spent the second half of the day in Lucca… a medieval city famous for its intact Renaissance-era city walls that you can bike around!  And we did just that.  The girls stuck to their scooters and the adults rented bikes. I believe James was in the Ergo on Ben's back.  All I really remember is Caroline getting in a nasty collision with a bicyclist and the ice cream man getting really upset with the speeding cyclist and attending to Caroline while waiting for us to arrive at the scene. 
About half way around the city Caroline gave up and I remember sitting her on the back of my bike while holding her scooter and pedaling the rest of the loop.  It must have been quite the site! There was quite a bit of bicycle traffic up on the walls, so after one go around Nana stayed with the kids while Ben and I rode the loop a couple more times.  It was loads of fun and offered some beautiful skyline views of the city.  I wished we had more time here… a half day was not long enough!

And these are the only two pictures we took… gelato makes everything better!