We both awoke late and had breakfast in bed. I read the guides to Pisa while Tom chuckled his way through his Harpo Marx book. Our trip to Pisa was fairly simple and very pretty. We parked near the Duomo and exchanged our pre-booked voucher for a real ticket to go up the Leaning Tower. With plenty of time to spare for a spot of something, we wandered and found a super place for lunch on Via de Mille. We virtually had the whole restaurant to ourselves – how very romantic. We shared an antipasto of bread and parma ham followed by one ravioli with seafood and another with truffle and porcini – the waiter said ravioli was their specialty, and he was certainly right about that. Unsurprisingly, Tom was still a little peckish so he had a plate of beef steak with rocket that was topped with olive oil, fresh lemon, balsamic vinegar, sea salt and parmesan shavings – deliciouso! No room for pudding after all that.

We stashed our bags in the car and re-parked the car in the shade, then made our way to the Leaning Tower via an ice cream parlour. Just as we were about to order two normal sized cones, Thomas got distracted by a lady with a huge ice cream cone coming out of a different parlour. Tempted by the huge array of flavours, we went in. I chose a few flavours for my cone but the lady kept saying 'and?' – what choice did I have? I think we both ended up with about 7 scoops each, all different flavours; it took us about twenty minutes to finish these ice creams. So much for being too full for pudding. Half way through eating our sizable ice creams we realised that they had cost almost as much as our meal the night before!

We finished our ice cream cones on the steps outside the Leaning Tower and then Brave Sir Thomas the Brave climbed right to the toper-most part of the vertically challenged tower (closely following his non-vertigo-suffering wife). The views were breathtaking and I took lots of photographs whilst Sir Thomas held on tight to the railings. And all too quickly (for one of us anyway) it was time to come down. Very slowly. And then we took even more photographs from the bottom. We were having so much fun, we bought tickets for the Basillica and Cathedral too. The interior of the Basillica was very severe in contrast to the highly ornate exterior. Tom, having recovered from his last brave adventure, climbed up into the Basillica duomo as well. The Cathedral interior was amazingly decorated with paintings and gold guilding on every surface. We drove home – only getting lost once. Clean and well-fed after showers and supper, we went to bed exhausted but not THAT exhausted – though we were when we eventually put out the light.