Back to the Beach

Today we escaped the heat and crowds in Rome for the coastline (I know, it's shocking since we clearly hate the beach). Whitney's school was "organizing" a field trip there, so we were able to tag along with her and her friends instead of having to navigate independently.

I used quotation marks for the word "organizing" because getting there was an absolute mess. The group was probably 40 or 50 people (plus two trip leaders and two Jaffe stowaways) so when the first bus came to take everyone to the train station, only half of the group could get on and we were left to wait for the next bus. When that bus came, we still couldn't fit all of the remaining people on and since there was only one remaining "leader" we couldn't take the bus. The leader wanted us to stay and wait for another bus to come by but we suggested that we just walk there since it was only about 15-20 min away. Brilliant. At the train station, we had to buy tickets -- the students didn't know this, mostly because no one ever seems to pay for public transportation in Rome but also because they'd been told that this was a free trip. The train itself was death and we had to ride it all the way to the very last stop. When we got to said stop and disembarked the trip leaders basically said, well, be free -- what they neglected to say was that the free beach that the students had been promised was actually two kilometers away and that you needed to pay to go to the beach that we'd been dropped off at. Everyone is not hoping that these will not be the people responsible for handling the weekend trips to Tuscany and Capri that Whitney will be taking with the school.

This beach was very different from those in Capri -- first off, it was cheaper. But it was an actual sand beach! Susan collected some sand, obviously, but this was black sand and as far as we can remember Susan doesn't have any black sand (for those of you who are wondering, my mother has sand from the coasts of Cohasset, California, Sydney, Australia; Perth, Australia; the Cape of Good Hope and probably more). I'm not sure that this sand was any more conducive to walking than the rocks in Capri were though because it was burning hot.

The water here was probably warmer than in Capri, but not nearly as clear. I could still see my feet, but it was murky. Another major difference were the waves! This beach had them while Capri had none and floating on your back over waves -- the amount of buoyancy was the same in both place -- is a lot of fun.

While my mom succeeded in finding sand, I was also able to find more shells! When we first got there, I was a little disappointed because my first search yielded very few results and what I did find looked very similar to what I'd found at Capri so there would be no way of telling them apart. This all changed when Whitney's friend, Mustache Will (named for his very distinctive handlebar mustache... although it isn't as good of a nickname as my Woodchuck Will) came out of the water with all sorts of shiny things. He said that you needed to walk out a little further and just feel around with your feet... easily enough done and I found all sorts of exciting things. These things are quite different from my shells from Capri as well -- my shells from Capri are mostly an assortment of colorful curly-q gastropod shells while the shells I found today were monstrous, metallic oyster shells. I found wayyy too many to take with me so after careful examination, I chose my favorites and let Whitney's friends fight over the rest.  Bringing these home is about as practical as bringing home the rocks from Capri, but I'm doing it and paperweights for everyone!

Also, despite my use of SPF 70, I am really dark now... So dark, in fact, that while I'm sitting in the lobby of our hotel to get a legitimate WIFI signal, I just had two different people come over to me and ask me if I speak English because they thought I was Italian and worked here.