Day 24 - Florence to french Riviera via Pisa

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Today we left the hotel at 9:00am for our drive to the French Rivera. We drove for about an hour and a half before arriving at our first stop off at Pisa. We had about an hour free time here to take our funny photos with the leaning tower and get some breakfast (as most of us really weren't up to eating earlier). Mary and I took our pics, bought some souvieners then headed to McDonalds, hangover cure! I'd been feeling very average earlier on the bus, not just from lack of sleep and too much alcohol but we were like last on the bus so we got the crappiest seats on the bus, the very back and in the centre.
We all had our maccas and headed back to the meeting point for Leona to then walk us back to the bus. When we got back to the bus, Leona did a head count only for us to realise that the 2 Brazilian girls were missing. Leona sent them a text message telling them exactly how to get back to the bus. Fifteen minutes later she rang them and they were still standing at McDonalds. Leona was fuming, as today were were actually ona pretty strict schedule to be able to do things tonight when we got to Nice/Monacco. Mando (who is an LAPD officer) and Michael (who is also a cop from Sydney) jumped off the bus and went in search of them. Others offered but Leona said there was no point as it would probably just mean that more people would get lost. After about 25minutes they boys returned. No sign of the girls only for us to see them slowly making their way through the carpark. Everyone was ropable. We'd been sitting in a stinking hot bust for 40 or 45minutes for them and they couldn't even put the effort in to run the last 50metres to get to the bus. They got on, no apology and we were on our way.
We drove for about 10minutes before getting on the freeway and then it all went to hell. The traffic was completely stopped. It was so bad we got through the whole dvd of Strickly Ballroom and I kid you not we would have been lucky to have driven 20/30kms. By the time we reached our first stop it was already the time that we should have been at our hotel by, 5:00pm. And we still had about another 2-3 hours to go to get to the hotel.
We got to the hotel at 7:40pm and Leona said because of our booked dinner we had to be in the lobby ready by 8:10. Thirty freakin minutes to get showered and looking all dressed up, she had to be kidding! Nope, she wasn't. I think we all did a really good job of doing it. Thank good for me washing my hair in the morning and tieing it up, and thank god for the GHD straightener!! Lifesaver!
We went down and Derek drove us to a restaurant in Monaco. Dinner was lovely. Mary and I sat with Rob and Natalie. Rob is from Toronto and Natalie is from Townsville. We were supposed to head to the Mone Carlo hotel after dinner but because we got help up we couldn't because Derek had to have to bus parked by a certain time so we decided to do the Monte Carlo hotel tomorrow night and tonight Derek drove us back to Nice where we had some predrinks at the hotel and jumped in cabs headed for High Bar.
We were here for ages. There was a local guy here performing, his name was Colonel Reyel. He was like an RnB/hip hop artist. Very good. We danced the night away adn the was a group of 8 of us that was left so we headed out the front of the club at 5:00am where we tried to get some cabs. No luck, no cab would pick us up and by this stage we were all quite sober. So we walked all the way back to the hotel. It was actually quite nice. There wasn't many people around and we felt safe as we had the group. We ran down the beach and dipped our feet in the ocean for abit and it was beautiful, except the pebbles. The beachs here arn't sand, nor are they pebbles like the little ones in Mykonos, they are great big rock pebbles. Im talking like 4-5cm across. So they were very uncomfortable to walk on. By the time we found our way back to the hotel it was about 6:00am and the sun was just about to pop up.
Again, fun times.

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