Day 14: Botanical Garden (Pisa, Italy) & Lucca, Italy

After breakfast at the hotel, we walked 10 minutes to Pisa’s Botanical Garden. I must say, they had some pretty interesting looking plants. Randy introduced Jeremy to an app he used to identify plants, so Jeremy was working hard to get new badges and increase his rank by taking lots of photos! Turns out the app also identified Marissa as a human, haha!

On the way to the train station, for a day trip to Lucca, we walked 15 minutes to La Taverna di Pulcinella for some brick oven pizza, which was really good. Randy was disappointed to not see Pepperoni Pizza as an option, since that’s his favorite pizza. We learned that “pepperoni” was invented by Americans; in Italy they use spiced salami as their meaty pizza topping of choice. It was a bit spicier than he prefers, but close enough!

We walked another 10 minutes to get to the train station got tickets to Lucca, a 40 minute train ride away. Once there, we rented a 4-person electric bike and rode around the city on top of its city wall. We all enjoyed taking turns driving and Randy especially liked honking the little elephant squeaky toy at other bikes we passed. We quickly learned that only the driver’s pedals would activate the electric motor, so the passengers really didn’t need to do much. The two passenger side pedals were forced to turn together and Jeremy insisted on pedaling faster than I liked, so he eventually switched with Marissa so I couldn’t continue the pedal war with him.

Back in Pisa, Marissa took some cute pics of Randy and me on the bridge outside our hotel. And we ate a nice dinner at La Pergoletta, which was only about a 5 minute walk from our hotel. Nice job planning our time in Pisa, Marissa — lots of great memories!!