Improbable, but
There she stands, strange and shored-up,
Useful in science!
We waded our way back through the tall weeds from our campsite this morning, saddened that we could not take a photo of it due to our still out-of-charge camera. Sigh.
A long, flat, rather uneventful ride led us through small towns by the sea, at one of which we discovered that we had left our toothbrushes someplace... else... and at another of which where we starvingly and tooth-dirtily stopped at a Coop. We were solidly off our Liguria map by this point (the campsite where we stayed was just barely on it), and we were navigating by best guesses based on our all-Italia map. Not necessarily a good idea, so we decided to search the Coop for a Toscana map. There... was no map section. The only thing we found was a couple books on Pisa, so we looked at them for a few seconds before noticing a paper map of Tuscany (Toscana) with no barcode and which clearly didn't come from a book or anywhere. We were puzzled, but it seemed to be lonely, and we needed exactly such a map, so we became its proud owners. Then, we brushed our teeth with our new toothbrushes!
Eventually we did make it to Pisa. We wandered around the town centre trying to tarck down a store that would be able to repair or replace our charger or battery or camera or whatever it was that needed help (our camera hasn't been able to charge since... Nice?), but none could. We couldn't leave Pisa without a photo, so we wandered the Plaza until we heard some English, then we asked very nicely if they might take a photo of us and e-mail it. A group of people from Washington agreed, so we're excited to hear back from them in a couple weeks when they return home. :)
A hop, skip, and jump away was Livorno. From what we found, it was not very happening. A few tired squares with sad merry-go-rounds populated its downtown. We did find a store, though, which sold us a UNIVERSAL BATTERY CHARGER. Srsly, how cool is that? It can charge any size of regular battery, and it has positionable terminals that allow it to charge camera batteries and the like. The funny thing is that we'll need an adapter to use it when we get back in the States.
Our camera woes solved, we stopped in a pizzeria for our first Italian pizza. Yum! We also purchased some pasta (squid ink pasta, ravioli filled with spinach, and tortellini filled with several cheese) and wine for dinner.
Our ride out of town was fairly short; along the coast by Livorno is a park which contains a lot of hidden space and nice camping spots. We chose ours and sat down to cook. A few old Italian people wandered by to offer us wishes for our food, and one woman informed us that it's to rain tomorrow. What sweet people.
What a sweet campsite.