Plaza Grande

Gab wins, no Firenze this trip. But after yesterday's catastrophe of whinging kids were leaving them on board and heading to Pisa sans whinging cranks. On the way to the port bus I haggle a taxi in and out of Pisa on a nice transporter with AC. We must have synchronised our body clocks, with no planning Dad is 100m ahead of us and already on the port bus, we rode with him in our transporter and we're away with Pablo.

Fields of sunflowers line the road into Pisa, a wonderful sight. Larger than the sunflower fields, we pass a massive unmarked military storage for dessert transporters, thousands of them. Whoever owns them had millions of dollars sitting in this little pretty town. Until this point Pablo has been all "non capisco l'inglese" but the opportunity to complain about the Americans is too tempting for him, in pretty good English he tells us they own it.

Pablo drops us just off the square near the tower, amazing the number of people crowding the square, we've only been here during the day before. Perhaps like Piaza San Marco in Venice, magnificent in the late afternoon once all of us tourists have left.

Dad and I try to get the perfect tower pushing photo while Gab scopes the shops. We hunt down the pizza place we visited last time. Dad & I start on a Birra Grande and brushcetta while Gab completes her most impressive shopping scoop yet. Pizza is so so, but the atmosphere is exactly why we're here.

We meet Ed & the girls in the square where we first arrived. They'd just had an amazing experience in the baptistry with some live chanting. They were all raving so much about the beauty of the place they convinced Dad & I to go try to get a look before our clock with Pablo was up. We catch a glimpse from the outside, but the ticket queue means we won't be seeing it this trip, a reason to return.

We're back in port to drop Dad back at the boat and head on to Livorno Centro for some strolling, gelato a new kicks for me! By far the coolest thing I see is this Italian idea of the fatmacia with a vending machine built into the window. The first for rows are implements for satisfying your wife or protecting yourself from child support, neither of which will help me now.

Tonight is the England v Croatia semi final for the world cup. Back on port this morning our evacuation drill buddies saw us haggling with the Hertz guy and invited us into their big transporter for the day, tonight Gab found Kyle sitting on his own in O'Gills an invited him to join us for the game. Dad spent the evening appologising to Kyle for my rants about everything American from GOP to the NRA. A retired army major from some sort of logistics HQ role, he is currently program managing the build of a joint Toyota/Mazda manufacturing plant build in Alambama, with Trumps protectionist policies funding his holiday, and the owner of over 50 guns he was never going to agree with everything I preached, but we agreed about the stupidity off open carry, we cheers our unity!

Croatia kick England from the cup in a legendary penlty shoot out, amazing stuff to enjoy surrounded by such an atmosphere. Game over Kyle and Dad are of to bed Gab joins me in the smoking section for a cigarello. We meet Jan, a Dutch guy who has somehow sorted out how to get rich in Dubai. We banter all night until he is ready for bed. A protein powder carrying gyn junkie, Jan is intolerant of the less dedicated not wearing a shirt, her says good night to all of us individually, adding "tomorrow I buy you a shirt" to the British lobster in the corner.Read more