The next day we were late leaving the house for various reasons. We hurried through Florence, getting faster and faster as we went, as we slowly realised how late we were. I really didn’t want to miss the train because if I did, I would surely miss my flight home. In the end, we made it to the station with what I thought was seconds to spare. We jumped onto the train, enjoyed about two seconds of feeling massively relieved, then realised that there was no-one else on the train, and the lights were off. I had a horrible sinking feeling. It looked like my journey home was not going to be straightforward. It turned out there was a train strike on, and there was no way I was getting to Pisa by rail. There was a bus leaving soon, but it was going via somewhere ridiculous and it would take three hours, which was definitely too long. Reluctantly we went to the taxi rank outside the station, and said “aeroporto” to the taxi man at the head of the queue. “Firenze?”, he asked. “Pisa”, we said sadly. His eyes lit up and off we drove. It was an incredibly [...]

Heavy winter skies were breaking up at dusk, as we walked from the tower back to the station. The town away from the Campo was much nicer, and we stopped at a great little pizza restaurant for some dinner. When we got to the Arno, the skies were velvety blue and the town looked nice.

Another weekend, another trip to Italy. This time, we spent the day in Pisa, a pleasant town ruined by its tower. I had to borrow a euro off a fellow passenger to get the bus into Pisa from the airport, because none of the cashpoints were working, so I started the day feeling very cheap. We walked up to the place that Pisa is famous for – the Campo dei Miracoli. And there it was, the tower that everyone has heard about since they were tiny. And it leans at an astonishing angle – a ridiculous, crazy angle that seems physically impossible. But the number of tourists, even on a chilly December day, made it not particularly enjoyable for me. What was good, though, was that this was that this was my twelfth holiday of 2003. After a splurge on cheap weekends early in the year, I’d had the crazy idea of just carrying on booking cheap holidays as often as possible, and to go on one holiday a month. I hadn’t been abroad in June or September, but I’d made up for that with two trips in March and two in November. And I’d even missed out on one [...]