We had a bus to catch today for the ride to Lucca and the beginning of our walk back to Rome. Now that the ride is over and I stop to think about it, i am a little intimidated. We spent just short of five hours screaming up the freeway at 70 miles per hour to get to Lucca. Now, we have to walk back that same distance. It is a long way!! To increase the intimidation factor the sky was dark and raining upon our arrival in Lucca. Let the fun begin!
Up and out of our room by about 7:50 this morning. Walk to the coliseum metro stop, then a 6 or 7 stop ride to Tiburtina and the bus station there. We left ourselves a large margin of time in case anything went amiss, so we killed an hour doing research for our hike.
Once on the bus, Sally slept nearly the whole trip. I dozed a bit, listened to my book, watched the scenery fly by and researched where we were going to walk to once the bus dropped us off. I predicted it would drop us near the train station in Lucca. I was right.
We walked into this walled city and found a cafe to have a pop and contact our hosts for tonight’s lodging. A few exchanges on WhatsApp and we had the entrance code. We needed to walk through the old city. Enroute we stopped at the museum and bought our credentials for the Via Francigena. The ladies at the museum gave us our first stamp.
A 15 minute walk exiting the walled city brought us to our hostile for the night. We have a private room with a shared bath. We dropped our gear in the room, rested a few minutes and then navigated to the grocery store a fifteen minute walk away. The road we were following went underground and so should have we, but we didn’t and consequently added about half a mile to our trek navigating around our mistake. The grocery, Esselunga, was a Walmart style monster grocery store. We bought enough vegetables for two nights of home cooked stir fry, a dozen eggs for two scrambled egg breakfasts, some chocolate, yogurt and a loaf of bread. Our food for the next 36 hours came to €16.00. Obviously our hostile has a fully equipped kitchen. I made the mistake of only bringing a hand bag to the store to carry the groceries home in instead of my empty back pack. We had to limit our buying a bit due to weight.
The route home was much quicker now that we understand the lay of the land. The street lights were popping on as we walked home and darkness settled in around us.
We cooked a wonderful stir fry for dinner. I added a chicken breast I brought from home to mine, Sally was afraid they were too old and would make us sick (they smelled great!).
More research, some washing up and it was lights out on this transportation day. The lightning and thunder accompanied the hard rain that fell after dinner. We were happy to be comfortably sheltered for the night. The forecast ahead looks great!
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| Sally in Lucca |
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| Me in Lucca |
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