After securing the Monaco lap record we set the GPS for our Florence hotel and set off, about 1.5k's into our trip to Florence(yes very much still n Monaco) the GPS decided to play silly buggers and sent us into some of the very back roads of Monaco, when the GPS said "turn right" we looked up the street we were turning into and Carol and I said "WTF" in unison, the streets of Monaco are all narrow, but this was ridiculous and about 1k later we weren't able to turn the direction the GPS asked us to as someone had parked a car on that street and there simply wasn't enough room to drive up that street.
After a few more hairpins and sharp turns we arrived back on the same road that the GPS had taken us from about 5mins beforehand, and I swear it woiuld have been a 30sec trip up the main road!! As we were nearing edge of Monaco the GPS had one last trick for us, asking me to keep right we then drove straight past the required left hand turn, and had to drive about 1K before being able to turn around and go back, no real damage done but a bit frustrating all the same.
Once on the freeways we were off and running, and apart from the very confusing speed signs and changes in speed limits it was all good, I'm fairly sure that I was either 20kph below or 20kph above the speed limit most of the time, but no one else seemed to care either, with people in the right lane travelling at about 70kph and people in the left lane travelling at about 140kph. While I'm at it, lane markings are purley a guideline in Europe that shouldn't be followed in most instances, the number of people that drive along the dotted white lines like they're following the black line on the bottom of the pool while swimming needs to be seen to be believed, the Italians are also much less patient that the French, if you're in the fast lane when they come up behind you, you should pull over immediately, whether there is a car beside you or not, so the bird came out of it's cage a few times, much to Carols disgust.
Believe it or not we did make it to Florence unscathed(physically at least) in time to see Cadel win the Tour de France, which I thoroughly enjoyed, excellent to see that once they stop everyone taking the gear(yes I mean drugs), the race is a much closer affair, with anyone of 5 or 6 riders having a chance to win this year depending on their form on any given day.
Once we watched Cadel we headed off to explore Florence, I have to say that this is the first time that I've really felt that we might get robbed so far on the trip, we walked through the train station and I really believed that several groups of people were looking for people to rip off. Once surviving the train station we walked to several Florence land marks, the buildings here are stunning, but the city is generally grubbier than Paris.
At one point we walked past the turn off to the "Accademia" where the statue of David is, but found another square with some amazing buildings which we'll work out the origins on the "net" when we have a minute. We also found the amazing church that you'll see a number of photo's of before heading back to "Accademia" only to find that it was closed. While I was taking a photo of the front door, it opened to let the staff out and I noticing that I could see "Davids" bollocks through the door, I snapped a photo, what I didn't know at the time was that this was as close as we'd get to "David" as when we enquired as to tomorrows opening time, the staff member said "no" and pointed to the sign on the wall which clearly stated that Monday was his day off!!! So we'll have to see if we can "drop in" on David on our way to Venice after our visit to Rome.
We've now had some dinner, about 2 bottles of wine and a small glass of Lemon spirit which was "on the house" by the Trattoria where we ate. So please excuse the even worse than usual spelling and grammar, but I'm blaming the alchahol, and if it's better than usual then maybe I should drink more ;-)
Photos of Florence
No comments:
Post a Comment