We confess that sometimes the must-see places on popular bucket-lists aren’t always on ours. So when we told our niece Danielle we would be near Pisa but we had decided to skip seeing the famous leaning tower, we were surprised she told us we should go.
She said the real experience was the strange sensation you feel as you climb up the steps inside the tower. So we took her advise and went to Pisa to check it out.
Everything about the day was wild—the wind, my hair, and as promised—most definitely the climb to the top.
On the way down those well-worn steps, Mark and I realized that all of us were really here to curiously see an infamous blunder. If the tower had been built on firmer soil it would have stood perfectly strait and would have likely been so unremarkable that it never would have drawn the world’s attention. Nor Galileo’s experiments. Or put on anyone’s bucket-lists.
So on our way back down the tower, we began to laugh and recount all the things we’ve tried to do that ended up being a complete fiasco. We wondered if we could have sold tickets to let people come and amuse themselves with our long list of things gone wrong: Cooking blunders, projects we botched, errors we’ve made, that first time we attempted to Med-moor, and we even laughed over the recent haircut I attempted to give mark that went so wrong I ended up shaving his poor head to cover up the bad haircut. (Thanks to our visit to Pisa, we can now laugh about what we are calling “The Clipper Conundrum”.)
A trip to Pisa was a good recommendation. It restored our humor about our own miscalculations and mis-fit moments. Which is why this crazy “Pisa hair, don’t care” photo of our visit seems like a perfectly imperfect reminder of our day.
