Lucca Day 1

It's a lovely morning in Lucca today. We enjoy our usual slow breakfast while trying to figure out the coffee maker situation. Hard to figure out how to make coffee when you need coffee to function. But we manage somehow.

After breakfast, mom and I head out to return the rental car back to Avis. The address on the map and the address on the rental agreement don't match the address we're supposed to input into the navigation so we get lost going on circles for about 30 minutes. Thankfully the roads outside Lucca's walls basically just loop around the city so we basically go around and around until we pull over to triple check the address. We end up needing to call Avis because nothing's adding up. Finally we find the correct address which was stupidly close to where we were originally going based on the navigation and find it. What a morning so far. The drop off takes a bit of time unlike the drop-the-key-and-go in the States, but we are successful and then walking back towards the city. It's really a gorgeous morning got a walk.

We enter the wall through the north gate, Porta Santa Maria. It's a bustling little center right inside the gate, cars, pedestrians, shops, all happening in a small space. Pretty fun.

Also down the street just slightly is a water fountain where residents fill up their bottles. Apparently Lucca is know for it's clean drinking water from these fountains. And boy, based on the number of people lined up to fill their bottles, it's apparent!

By the time we return to the apartment it's getting close to lunchtime so we search for a place to eat and choose Ciacco. It's a sandwich and salad place, a nice change from pizza and pasta. We order the Fig, Finocchiona, and Vegetarian. The Fig had fig jelly, obviously, with Tuscan salami, caciottina and arugula. The Finocchiona was identical except with eggplant instead of fig jelly. And the Vegetarian was goat cheese with roasted vegetables and cecina, a chickpea flatbread. The Fig was the best, with that spicy fig jelly, yum.

Post lunch gelato is our destination on our way back to the apartment. We stop at I Gelati di Piero. It was hard to choose flavors because they have so many, but I chose yogurt and what turned out to be chestnut and caramel, and mom chose coffee and an extra dark chocolate with candied orange. Seriously, the chestnut and caramel tasted like white rabbit candy. No joke. It was very tasty. And yogurt was okay, but not as tangy as I like. The coffee flavor was potent, so very good. And the dark chocolate was orange was pretty good, although I'm just not a citrus dessert person. Overall, a win! Mom declared this one of her favorites.

After a short siesta we're back out, this time walking part of the wall. It's very pleasant to walk the wall, with a wide middle path for bikes and pedestrians. This is one of my favorite aspects of Lucca.

The circumference of the wall is about two miles so a decent walk of you do the entirety in one trip. We did the eastern side on our walk today before my feet said time to rest.

After siesta we go back out to a local market, Gino Frutta, and pickup some veggies to go with leftover pizza for dinner. Keeping it simple tonight. Didn't get a picture but it was tasty and light, just what our stomachs need at this point in our trip. Now to rest up for tomorrow.

Ciao!