A whopping great mouth swallows car after car, coach after coach, MOHO after MOHO, camper after camper, caravan after caravan; plus bikes, scooters, motor bikes and a multitude of foot passengers; not to mention a two tier car transporter.
Any Bowhead Whales out there? Then eat your heart out! With its nine decks now filled to capacity, the Corsica-Sardinia Mega Express (should be renamed Mega-Mouth Express), swallows, then wallows across to Livorno at a surprising rate. Clear blue sky above. Calm blue sea below. No wind. No waves. No puking! Regurgitates all and sundry at Livorno. Just south of Pisa. Leaves us just enough time to navigate and pitch up at Agriturismo Lago Le Tamerici before nightfall.
Today sees Scoot get his second run out. Scoots us 17K into the centre of Livorno. We leave him closely corralled on one corner of Piazza della Repubblica. We go walk about.
Livorno’s historical buidings ‘took a beating’ during WW2. As a result it’s not a particularly ‘pretty’ city. Disjointed old and nearly new, don’t quite fit. Like muddled pieces from several mixed up jig-saw puzzles. One squeezed into the other. Creates an unrecognisable picture of its former glory.
My lunch time ham and cheese toasty does its best to embarrass. Typical Italian cheese should never really come into contact with heat. It transforms. Morphs into a sticky piece of flubber. Takes on scientifically unfathomable properties. One small piece now capable of stretching to the moon and back. My arm not quite long enough. There’s a knack however – which is to ensure you fully bite through before that arm extention. Otherwise: 1. You sit there looking like a tuneless miming violinist, practising one handed pizzicatos, or 2. (much worse – and at first, my preferred method) you stretch your arm further than it has ever been before. This in itself results in two outcomes. 1. You dislocate your shoulder and 2. The cheese string has now received so much potential energy, that when it does eventually break, it snaps back with the speed of an elastic band. Smacks you on the nose. And, to add insult to injury it sticks there. Hangs and dangles. Does what it’s designed to do. Makes you look like some weird spaghetti snorting sociopath . . .
On foot there is no tourist route of note. We decide to indulge ourselves. Take to the small canal system. A rip-off ride of twelve euros each for a forty minute loop. Paulo, the on-board guide, provides little information of real interest. Far less than we glean from a quick glance at Livorno’s Wiki biop.
Back at camp, we end the day lakeside, with a ninety minute read and snoozzzze . . .