Oh my, not what I was expecting. Our group was showing signs of wearing out traveling with each other, or at least a few were more interested in hunting down the new man from the plane ride, so we divided up into 2 groups for the train ride out to Rimini. It was a nice morning and a pleasant train ride. As we got off the train, there were loads of travelers waiting for their departure trains at the train station. Families mostly, many still in beachwear and carrying various plastic beach souvenirs. This was our first clue that we were walking into a gigantic Italian tourist destination.
Rimini is painful to describe. It is so far away from what I enjoy as a traveler. As far as the eye could see, the entire Italian seashore had been turned into a souvenir vending, of the imported-from-China souvenir sort. The road along the beach front was jam packed with trinket shops and four to five story hotels. Snapping and whirring gadgets in the shops, bad disco music, cheap sunglasses, and basically loads of junk existing in a repetitive pattern of kiosks that caused our environmentally conscious part of our brains to break down in a violent sob. Did I mention Italian karaoke?
On a more positive note, while biding our 4 days stay in this horrid strand of Italian shlock, we kept seeing a family containing what may have been one of the most enthusiastic kids ever to come to this beach. The family was a German family, and the kid was a chubby red haired little guy that was toting around a bogie board as big as he was. We watched him arrive for check-in at the hotel and bounce around the waiting area with his board, another day we caught him riding the pedal airplane and coin-operated animals and finally we saw him at the end of his stay completely and fully exhausted dragging through hotel. From his point of view, we guessed that this was a GREAT vacation.
Now, back to why we were so appalled with this place. To actually get to the ocean, you needed to walk through the gate of one of the hotel’s beach umbrella reservation kiosks on a sidewalk that leads all the way across the sand to the water. At the first part of this walk, you pass a small play area (or open air weight-lifting equipment, volleyball court, or bocci ball court), then the changing rooms and pay hut, and then finally past about 40 to 50 rows of permanent umbrellas anchored in the sand. Finally, you run out of sidewalk and you are at the meager strand of beach where the tide rises. (We suppose any umbrellas planted here would wash away.) This walk is free, and swimming in the ocean is free, but there is nowhere to sit on the beach for free.
The cost being allowed to sit on the beach was about 5 Euros for one umbrella and an additional 5 Euro per chair, no towel or drink service. So for 4 chairs and two umbrellas, the group was down 30 Euros for the day (about $42 given the exchange rate.) For this lovely price you get to sit in a sea of umbrellas. I don’t think I can quite understand why I would ever desire to do that.
With a glimmer of hope for the future, there is some backlash from the locals on this renting out of the beachfront by the hotels. From the newspaper, we read that the prices for sitting under an umbrella were recently jacked up from last year’s prices, a good 30 to 50%, and the Italian government was considering passing a law to prevent the hotels from restricting access to the beach. It seems that the beaches are national property and that the hotels have no business rights to setting up beach umbrella wardens. From our train ride out of town, and various rides through town, and the newspaper, we gathered that what we were seeing in Rimini on the beach stretched out as far as the sand existed along the East coast of Italy.
Now we did have a very fine highlight in our stay there, our friend’s had a bit of family there and one of them helped organize some dinners. One of the dinners was at an agritourismo farm and was a dinner served outside under the stars on the farm with fantastic local ingredients. The conversation was good, the pasta was over-the-top good, Strozzapreti (a Strangle-the-Priest pasta), and the weather was magnificent. And for that one evening we had left the beach tourists and whirring kiosks behind, a fine evening it was.
