Collecting our Fiat Panda about 9.00am, we sat for a few minutes to ponder the way back to our home. Driving on the right hand side of the road, from the left hand side of the car, in peak hour traffic, through the labyrinth of one way streets in Florence weighed heavily on Laurens mind. She is our designated navigator, so the pressure was on ! After a few nervous giggles, we were on our way. I'm happy to say, we made it out of the city like locals, squeezing ourselves into the 3-4 car wide traffic queues at round-a-bouts like Florence taxi drivers in a hurry.

We have named our Fiat "Flavio". It is definitely Male (it is a manual) and he is blonde.

Flavio scoots along with adequate pep up until about 120Kph, he sort of runs out of steam about 140Kph, but that should be enough for us.

Using Google maps as our guide, we managed to pin point the Pisa Tower car park. Thinking it would be chaos, I figured it would at least orientate us with the tower position and we could find parking from there. To our pleasant surprise, we drove into the gravel carpark (it's probably only been there for 300 hundred years, so they haven't got around to paving it as yet), straight into an empty parking bay! Job done..

The leaning tower itself is immaculately maintained and something to see. Although the condition of the chapel and baptistery struck me as in need of some love and tender care.

Like every other tourist, we completed the leaning / pushing pose and wandered the grounds for a while, before grabbing a bite to eat. The queues for the trip to the top of the tower were way longer than we were prepared to wait. There is no shelter from the sun (it's 35 degrees today) and the anticipated wait was well over an hour.

We were told, admittedly by a not so reliable source, the tower is actually rotating on its axis, and will eventually fall…

Our overall impression was, "nice, but in need of some maintenance".

Rested and fed, we headed towards Porto San Stefano. About 2 hours South, but most of the travel time is on an Autostrata, so easy driving.

Wow, this place was a nice surprise! One of the two main townships on Monte Argentario (almost an island, but joined by two land bridges), it is an idyllic, not so well known, playground for the wealthy. We are staying at a beautiful Tuscan styled, boutique hotel about 3km up from the harbour itself. We wandered around the harbour for the evening, as the sun set over the bay, we enjoyed a meal at a little café before heading home.

Indeed, Life is Good!

NB: I had to change our location to Porto Ercole to separate the photo albums. This site groups all photos from the same location..