The Grand Tour of Tuscany: Writing Assignment 6

A Very Mad Journey

In the grand scheme of things, my life is pretty organized. Given, my room is a mess, and I still have some doubts about my career aspirations, but the things in between run smoothly enough. Spur of the moment is not my style, so I have owed nearly every crazy venture to the spontaneity of my closest friends. Perhaps that is a subconscious factor in choosing them.

At the end of our trip to Florence, I met up with a friend from school to spend the weekend with around Tuscany. Few plans were made, because I had really enjoyed the smaller city and wanted to give him enough opportunity to discover as much as I had. To my surprise, he frantically experienced Florence in two days, yet saved time to take me to a place Friday evening that I hadn’t seen in my four days. Both of us were satisfied with our Florentine experiences, and suddenly our entire weekend became a blank canvas, with only a Europe travel book to paint our scene. Such an event was entirely new to me; I had traveled in the same company for two weeks prior to arriving in Rome, but plans were made months in advance – hostels and train tickets too. Now we were faced with overnight planning, but in the excitement of the moment, we went to sleep saying we’d wing it.

We arrived at the train station less than well rested at 7:30 in the morning, not knowing any of the departure times. We caught the next train to Pisa and enjoyed the rolling Tuscan countryside while discussing our plans: What’s in Pisa? The Leaning Tower. Anything else? No idea.

It was just as we expected. Pisa is just an Italian town like any other, put on the map only by an old building frozen in the process of falling over. To make matters worse, it was almost as if they purposely put the train station on the opposite side of town – like a grocery store where you have to walk all the way to the back of the store to simply get the essential gallon of milk. We sat on the lawn upwards of an hour, hysterically entertained by the hundreds of tourists making the signature pose and trying desperately to align their arms perfectly for the camera. Then of course we gave in, making the excuse that our parents would enjoy seeing corny European travel pictures. The fee to climb the tower was horribly overpriced, so after perusing the duomo for a while, we consulted Rick Steves, who sent us in the direction of a nearer station. The place was not very tourist friendly; in fact, it looked abandoned, so we were not surprised at all to find that there was no where on the departure schedule that caught our eye – not even anywhere we had ever heard of. Quiet at first, the only cargo train in the station behind us rumbled to life and began inching its way what seemed like north. My friend and I looked at each other, both obviously thinking how crazy and exhilarating it would be to ride towards an unknown destination. We spoke of it jokingly, though both of us were seriously considering it, but in the end neither of us would go so far out of our comfort zone as to jump on a moving train destined for some unknown city. I actually regret not doing it. Only in Italy
would I consider such a thing.

On the endless walk back to the train station, Rick Steves suggested Siena as a worthy visit, and I had remembered that a majority of my classmates were there for the weekend, so we bought a ticket on the spot at Pisa Centrale. A short tour of Tuscany later, we arrived in Siena and hopped a bus to the historic center. Pamphlets from the train station guided our walking tour of the place, providing historical tidbits and great viewpoints of surrounding Italian hills along the way. Despite our disorderly travel plans, we still made time to lay in the main square, where we coincidentally ran into a few of my classmates, who informed us that the others took a trip to nearby San Gimignano. After a fizzled attempt at buying bus tickets to the medieval town, we called it a night and took the train back to Florence for a good night’s sleep.

Upon reminding ourselves of the great things we had heard about Cinque Terre from fellow hostelmates, we gathered our newfound energy and dragged ourselves to the Florence terminal once again and without second thought jumped aboard a train to La Spezia. It was definitely a snap to reality when the train passed through Pisa once again – realizing for the first time how ridiculous our itinerary had been, but stress was replaced by the relaxation of having zero expectations for the day. We were just going.

Cinque Terre was beautiful, and in celebration of making a weekend out of nothing, we splurged on beach chairs, and despite being in the middle of a study abroad experience, I have never been more relaxed in my life. And like clockwork, just when I had swum as much as I wanted and had experienced what I wanted, we jumped on a train, making it back to Rome by 11:30pm (though not before stopping at Pisa and Florence once again).

Mad voyages for me are ones that have no itineraries, no expectations. It seems they also involve a Rick Steves guidebook, but more so, they are spur of the moment and spontaneous, and are not welcome, it may seem, to my personality, but I’ll have you know that those are the best journeys of all.