Viareggio!

Mediterranean, the town, the mountains

This past Saturday a group of about eight of us decided to take the train up to the town of Viareggio, a small beach town right on the coast of the Mediterranean. Since it's been basically 80 and sunny every day, we figured we shoudl get to the beach while it lasted. We tried to catch a train that left at 10:41, but since Sesto has the most confusing train station in Italy, we missed it. It was actually on the platform we were on, but we got confused and didn't get on. Anyways, we took the next one a little after 12:00, and it took about 1.5 hours to get there. The ride up there was really cool, just seeing all the mountains and hills and small Italian towns. One of the best parts of the ride was that we passed in a tunnel underneath a mountain. It was pretty ridiculous, the pressure changed instantly so your ears were on fire, but it was interesting none the less. We finally got there around 2 and spent a good 5 hours at the beach. The town of Viareggio itself was a really cool town. It was just this smaller, beach town, that kind of looked like something you'd see on the coast of Florida. One of my buddies on the trip said it reminded him of a scalled down, less rowdy Miami. But it had palm trees all over the place, and we had to walk about 15 minutes to get from the station to the beach. Which was just fine, because they had this boardwalk going on all along the beach, with a ton of little shops and restaurants along side of it which is pretty cool. Here's a picture of the town itself and the start of the boardwalk.

So we finally get down to the beach. All along the beach they have these private areas that you have to rent out if you want to get a beach chair / umbrella going on. We decided to check out the free beach, but it was real small and most of us didn't have towels, so we rented a spot on one of the private beaches, which was only like 5 euros each. Not too shabby. I'd have to say I was dead on in expecting a ridiculous amount of Euro Spedo action going on at the beach. Also, some of the people there (not from our group, just to clarify) took part in the euronudity at beaches as well. So the stereotypes were definitely confirmed. Shortly after we got all settled and such, we decided to swim in the sea. It was still really warm for September, but the swimming got cut short on account of jellyfish. One of the kids in our group was kind of far out in the water, and said he saw a fairly large jellyfish chilling right by his side, so he waited for it to float away, then we all took off out of the water.

So most of the day we just spent lounging on the beach, walking on the boardwalk, getting somethign to eat, and enjoying the view. The view was unbelievable. It combined a number of my favorite geographical features in one location. 1) Palm Trees. 2) Beaches of large bodies of water. 3) Mountains. Not just like the hills we're used to seeing here in Sesto. But legit, snowcapped mountains. It was great just chilling in the water and looking over your should at some snowcapped mountains. Pow. Anyways, there's a picture of my pasty self in the waters of the Mediterranean.