By Walter Agnew Moore II
3 April, 2002

Kitt yells "Sailors," eyes wide, and ducks back behind Little Anna and Nell. We are all leaning a little forward under our packs, here this morning on the siding at the train station in La Spezia. The Italian sailors down the way also waiting for the train don't seem to notice.

Our train is late. Eh. Maybe there will be seats available, maybe we will stand. We shall see. We are creeping down the knee of the boot of Italy, generally in the diection of Florence, a town at a time.

I don't worry about late trains. I don't have to be at work. My philosophy on pleasure travel to new places is just that—it is all new, so it doesn't matter if you get side-tracked in some obscure village or not. That is part of the vacation. You will see things there that you never saw before, so it doesn't matter if you get to Paris or Mexico City or wherever an hour or a day late. By my way of thinking, even a short period of arrest by the local authorities could be interesting, so long as it doesn't involve excessive fines or torture. You learn about the jails. You meet some new people. You have stories to tell that you never get from Club Med. Go ahead, lock me up. I'm on vacation, I don't have to be at work.

Nell, however, is my complete opposite. I seriously doubt she has ever even been ticketed back in the states, much less arrested in a country where the police once hunted down the Red Brigades. Deviation from the Plan is not Nell's idea of fun. One of the first things I ever heard her say was that, if it's not in the "Let's Go" guide, she didn't want to see it. Well, several bottles of wine over the last 2 days helped us get into at least adjacent mental time-zones, as opposed to different planets. She is handling the chronically late Italian trains rather well this morning.

I still bet she would freak out if she got arrested though.

Little Anna and Kitt are taking things as they come. Or maybe they are just hung over. I am worried about Little Anna's hip— she hurt it even before this vacation, stumbling over an ill-placed step in My Goodness Irish Pub back in Amiens, and she wasn't even drunk. She has some North-of-England groove going where you don't complain about anything, no matter how bad it hurts. Real pith. Form square and fire on my command! So when she finally said her leg hurt, back on that hiking trail on the coast, we knew it was bad.

We sit on the fold-down seats in the corridor of the train and roll into Pisa 20 minutes late. We will have 2 or 3 hours to kill here until the next train to Florence, so I get the girls started on a bee-line to the Leaning Tower.

We dodge the little three-wheeler "Ape" delivery trucks. I finally find cool sun-glasses at an African street-vendor stand.

Pisa. Everytime I come back here, it feels like a week since I left, way back when I was a soldier 10 years ago, and the Captain said, "these boys just spent 6 months in the desert, I want them to have a good time here in Italy." I didn't do any desert time, but I got Italy all the same. I try to find the bar where all of us soldiers went the first day we hit town, and I got a rep in the unit as the linguist, because I chattered in pidgin Italian for 10 minutes with the girl tending the bar. I don't think she knew what to make of us.

Everywhere I look, I am seeing 2002 superimposed over 1992. Here's the street where I saw the bar girl come whirring up on her Vespa, and her eyes got wide when she recognized me.

That bar girl is long gone now.

I remember how this town seemed like a huge labyrinth then, the buildings seemed newer, taller, shinier. It's still the same, but low and dumpy, the mysterious gloomy mazes are just crooked brown streets.

The Tower is leaning over more now than it was last time I saw it. It is going to fall soon. You read it here first.