Carnevale on the coast

A couple weekends ago, we went on a day trip to a city called Viareggio.  Every year, this city throws a HUGE party called Carnevale.  Carnevale is celebrated in countries all over the world during February and sometimes into early March.  The Viareggio Carnevale is well-known in Italy for having a big parade with tons of elaborate floats, marching bands and people dressed up in costumes.  The floats were truly incredible works of art!  From a distance, you could see (and hear) people dancing all over them and when they got closer, you could peek inside of them to see the people who were controlling all of the various movable parts.

Some of the floats, like the one below, had enormous canons that made a loud booming sound and shot out confetti!

There were all sorts of characters at the parade: smoke-breathing dragons, crazily-clad clowns, building-sized birds, out-of-water sea creatures, monstrous monsters and even Michael Jackson!  The people who designed and built these floats were really creative.  I know Hayden, Karleigh, Alyssa, Natajua, Mary and Garrett are all terrific artists too - maybe some day you'll be designing huge floats like this!  Don't forget to invite Flat Stanley to your parade!

Oh!  All this fancy float talk and I completely forgot to mention that Viareggio is on the beach - the coast of the Mediterranean Sea to be exact.  Here's Justin and I standing on the beach with a sailboat in the background.

It was such a nice day, I decided to relax in the sand and take in some rays.

All of this excitement sure can make a person hungry - even if that person is thin as paper!  Typical Carnevale food consists of Cenci (pronounced like "chen-chi") which is fried dough with powdered sugar, candy, sausage sandwiches, more candy, hot dogs, even more candy, doughnuts and even more candy!  Surprisingly though, there wasn't any pizza (sorry Gavin and Jack!).

After the parade had ended (it was three hours long!) and the sun had set, we made our way down the main downtown strip, took a few more pictures, then hopped on the train for Siena.  In all, it was a really fun trip!

I just took a look at our travel plans for the next couple months and it looks like we're going to be pretty busy!  Look for more travel reports in the coming weeks when we'll be traveling to Rome, Venice and France!  Until our next adventure, this is Flat Stanley saying, "Ciao amici"!