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Tunnels, Med and a big church
The day started with the most expensive breakfast I've ever had, a theme that was set to continue throughout the day. After the £15 per head croissants and coffee, we paid £22 to go through the Mont Blanc tunnel, though it is very long. After that we had three hours of auto-pista tunnels interspersed with glorious sunshine. We didn't find the Italian drivers too bad, though there were plenty of roadworks, in which the Italians like to use tiny cones that look like they've come from the Early Learning Centre. We did get held up once where we filtered as best we could, following some other bikers. Most drivers moved out of the way, and if they didn't, the guy that we were following on his VFR800, banged on their back windows until they moved. We eventually decided to follow the other bikes filtering up the hard shoulder for about 10 miles, which we were understandably nervous about, but this is Italy and no-one cares. We rolled into Genoa about lunchtime and got our first lesson in inner city riding Italian-style: scooters, bikes, cars everywhere, though winning the traffic light grand prix was a particular highlight. We followed the Med coast road for a while, took some photos and stopped for some pizza before doing the last bash of the journey on the autoroute to Florence. Found the place eventually after roadworks screwed up the sat nav and we crossed the same river on different bridges at least four times in the sweltering 4pm heat. We were glad to finally take our helmets off. Dripping with sweat up four flights of stairs with our luggage, we found that we couldn't open the door. After about 15 minutes of jer jer jer jiggling the key in the lock, it eventually opened, and we were faced with another flight of stairs and another door with the same key problems. Another 10 very irate minutes and we finally set foot in the apartment. We're here for three nights and hopefully will get to see Siena tomorrow.
Glenn
PS - continuing in the same vein as earlier - we've just spent 14 euros on two diet cokes!
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