European getaway - Day 7 - Nice to Florence

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Day 7 - Nice to Florence

Another long drive day today, as we leave the Riviera for Italy. As we get on the coach Jess makes the usual call for an I-Pod to be volunteered to be played to the coach, and today I offered my I-pod for everyone to listen to. So far on the trip the music has been rather average, quite dancy. Apart from Simon’s on the way out of Switzerland, as Simons and I have similar tastes in music. I was quite nervous about which songs my i-pod would throw up as it was on a random selection of the 400 or so songs in my playlist. You can tell a lot by listening to someone’s I-pod and I didn’t want everyone to think I was a freak. As the only Brit I would also like to introduce my southern hemisphere colleagues to some proper English tracks.

Early on the i-pod chucks out some Beatles, Pinball Wizard by The Who and some Arctic Monkeys (the pride of Sheffield), but then later on I am concerned that it is playing a lot of American stuff and hard rock, which is unrepresentative of the songs on my IPod. At the first break stop however I am reassured as a number of people comment that they are enjoying the music. I’m quite pleased, my music isn’t too extreme and I have a bit of variety.
Lunch isn’t provided today, so we stop at a service station just over the Italian border, and I have a cheese and ham Panini, which is pretty boring.

In the afternoon we stop in Pisa to go and see the only thing in Pisa worth seeing, the leaning tower. We pass through hundreds of the cheap tatt men, with their favourite catch phrase ‘Bling Bling’ and finally arrive at the tower. It does indeed lean quite a lot.

As is customary, everyone takes their pictures holding up the tower/pushing it over. I do a few leaning photos and then go souvenir shopping. I also get my first taste of Italian Gelato. I had been warned that ice cream in Italy is superior to any other, and they were right. I had 2 scoops, chocolate and pistachio, it was immense. The taste was spot on.
We all head back to the coach and continue on to Florence. We arrive in the early evening and we head to our two man cabin, which is almost like a trailer. I am rooming with Trent, who I roomed with back in Paris. The cabins are close together and we can hear Vince and Chin in the cabin next to ours.

On our campsite we aren’t allowed to use cash and have to use a top-up card, this is useless, however it is useful to establish how many drinks you have consumed. We head to dinner at the camp restaurant. This is a mammoth meal, it begins with spaghetti, followed by Penne pasta with mince, followed by a full ham and mushroom pizza each, followed by Gelato, which in my case was lemon flavour, and beautiful. I was defo full after this.

After we all head to the bar where I have a couple of beers before Jess leads us downstairs to the Discoteque. We are pretty much the only people there but we have a great night. The DJ bangs out some decent tunes, most people are there and the beer is flowing. It was also on this night that you notice a few of the guys showing which of the girls they like. I’m not going to gossip on this blog however it was also on this evening where I realised that I had a soft spot for a certain young lady on our tour. I won’t say who but I will say that she is the cutest girl I have ever met, has the most beautiful smile and was happy to talk to everyone on the tour. At the moment though my opinion is that she is way out of my league. Man I write like a love sick puppy. All in all we had a good night in Florence.

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