cock a’ doodle doo. I woke up to the sound of a cockrel, It was still dark, and I wondered why my alarm hadn’t gone off. I checked the time on my mobile and realised that I had somehow woken at 4:55, 5 minutes before the alarm.
Time to get up, I managed to beat everyone else to the bathroom and got ready very early, no need for breakfast, it was way to early for that. We’ll eat on the way to our next destination, Florence!
Ajay managed to get up after I created enough noise, Ravi slept later than everyone else so he was spent the morning complaining about the lack of sleep, we ignored his moaning and got ready.
Once out on the road we were reminded of how kamikaze the Italian drivers can be. Ajay was at the head of the convoy when we set off and managed to take the wrong exit on a motorway, this added an extra 45 minutes to the journey, we wanted to be away from any populous towns during rush hour as we learnt that if we time the driving right and we don’t get any interruptions, we can maximise our fuel stops.
When we finally stopped at a service station for breakfast, we found it to be very busy. Ravi couldn’t wait for the next one so he attempted to order a coffee and got it completely wrong. Even he knew it wasn’t worth arguing over.
As Ajay left the service station he spotted his favourite car brand,
It’s an MG!
Ajay, 2018
The rest of the drive was quite boring, except for a new MX-5 saying hello by beeping at us as we cruised down. We arrived at the hotel quite early and immediately headed to the underground car park. It was so tight for me in the Q3 that I feared for the alloys. Once checked in at the hotel we started chatting to the very friendly staff on the reception. they gave us some great tips and we decided to leave the cars in the hotel and take a bus into the centre of Florence.
Once we were on the bus which happened to pick us up directly from outside the hotel, we found ourselves standing for the whole journey. Once we arrived at our stop, me and Ajay got out of the bus, Ravi got stuck on the bus and it travelled off without him getting off. We assumed he would just get off at the next stop and walk back to the stop we had gotten off, that would have been too rational. He managed to get off eventually but his phone didn’t work so he was reliant on free wifi to make what’s app calls. this made it very tedious locating him.
One we found him there was a very specific shop I wanted to visit. It was a 600 year old pharmaceutical shop called Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella Firenze. They made their own products so I was keen to check it out. I planned to buy a perfume for my wife and found one, but I decided that I would get it for myself instead, even though it was a unisex fragrance.
We then went sight seeing around Florence and Ajay found a lucky pig to put money into. Florence is a beautiful place filled with very cool buildings. We checked out a busking violinist and bought a few souveniers, Ajay bought a wax monogram letter stamp and I bought a old looking traditionally bound book, the kind that looks like a spell book in Harry Potter.
We found a desert parlour with a chocolate waterfall and stayed in central Florence quite late. When we did decide to head back to the hotel we experienced the comedy of a stag party encountering a hen party. They weren’t for the same couple but it was hilarious, if I was recording it I would put on my David Attenborough voice over the top of it.
This time when we used the bus, Ravi managed to get off it when we arrived at our stop. We went straight to bed when we got to our room as we had spent most of the day on our feet and were quite tired.
Tabish
Long Way There 