Company

We have company!  J.D. arrived yesterday to spend a week in Lucca.  He will then go to France for two weeks, meeting up with us when we go to Paris.

We spent a good part of the day travelling to and from, and just hanging out in, the airport in Pisa, a good reminder why most of us don’t hang out in airports for relaxation and leisure.  J.D.’s flight from Richmond, with connections in Detroit and Rome, was scheduled to arrive in Pisa at 10:55 a.m.

I had checked the bus and train schedules the day before, knowing that there are fewer buses running on Sundays.  There was an 8 a.m. bus and a 10 a.m. bus from Lucca, so we had the choice of arriving two hours early or to risk being late.  There seemed to be hourly trains, including one that left Lucca at 9:43 a.m. and arrived at Pisa Centrale station a half hour later, where we could then catch a ten-minute shuttle bus to the airport.  Because we haven’t done the train yet, but anticipate it using several times in the next couple of weeks, we chose the train, and once Shelley was able to get the ticket machine to accept a credit card, we hopped on and the ride was very pleasant.

You used to be able to catch a connector train from Pisa Centrale to the airport, but they are building a new modern connector train, PisaMover, which is scheduled to be completed in December of 2015, so in the interim there is a PisaMover shuttle bus that leaves every ten minutes on an eight-minute run to the airport.  I had read that the cost for the shuttle was 1.30 Euros, but when we followed the signs and got to the bus stop we discovered that was only if you buy tickets at newsstands in the station.  It’s 2 Euros when you purchase your tickets at the bus.

We were at the airport with 15 minutes to spare, only to find out that J.D.’s flight was late, first 25 minutes late, then an hour late.  While waiting I decided to take in the airport sights, and found there weren’t many.  I did notice several young people walking around with the kinds of signs limo drivers hold when they are picking up a VIP at the airport, and was fascinated that the signs said “Mitochondria and Chloroplasts.”  I was very tempted to go over and say that was my name.  I checked later online and discovered that a group named Gordon Research Conferences is sponsoring a five-day conference at a resort located between Lucca and Barga aptly titled, “Mitochondria and Chloroplasts: Biology and Physics of Energy Converting Organelles.”  As fascinating as that sounds, I think I’ll skip it this time.

J.D. finally appeared at 12:20, nearly an hour and a half after the flight was due, and it was hard to know who was more exhausted, him after flying all night and getting almost no sleep, or us after having sat in the airport for two hours.  The flight from Rome to Pisa is only 45 minutes or so, but apparently someone was wrong with the radar at Rome Airport (which I suppose is rather important), so they sat and sat on the tarmac as only five flights could take off at a time.

We decided to return to Lucca by bus, as the Sunday/holiday schedule said the next bus leaving for Lucca was at 1 p.m.  At 12:40 we were at the bus stop and found a blue bus, but no driver.  That bus was still sitting there at 2:00 when another bus showed up with destination Lucca.

We spent the rest of the day relaxing, with a quick stop to one of the cafes at Piazza Anfiteatro right around the corner from the apartment, where the menu included two beers made by a Luccan microbrewery, Petrognola.  The beer tasted like a wheat beer, but is probably made with farro, a local grain.

The only other excitement in Lucca on a Sunday evening was some sort of brief parade on Via Fillungo.  We heard drums, and thought it might be the drum and flag corps from the other night, but I looked out the window as they passed the intersection with Via Busdraghi, and it was more elaborate, with drums, flags, horns, and a number of people parading in medieval costumes.