Tower Booked

Today was the day. You are only allowed to book tickets for the Leaning Tower of Pisa 20 days in advance, so I jumped on the booking website and did the deed. Yes, I can't believe it either, in 20 days time, I'll be climbing the 297 steps to the top of the tower. I'd best get some practise in at work, walking up the stairs rather than waiting for the lift! As mentioned before, Grizzly has declined on the grounds that he would probably drop dead half way up. Fair enough reason I suppose. I'm sure he'll be clicking away with his camera, whilst I'm climbing.

They only allow 10 people in at a time, every 15 minutes I think. I'm booked on the 17:30 entry. Last entry is about 21:00 but I didn't really want to be going up that late. That day we have about 200kms to ride. We should have plenty of time to get to Pisa, wash and brush up, before heading out into town, given that riding time is only about 4 hours from Maranello. We have the Ducati factory tour at 9:15 but that is only about 75 minutes. Calculating our likely arrival time, I've allowed a bit extra for the tour/museum, allowed 30 minutes for a fuel stop, an hour for lunch stop and stuck my finger in the air for a bit extra, to be sure, to be sure! All that considered, I reckon we'll be at the camp site in Pisa by 16:00.

I've finalised the routes now and have sent them across to Grizzly, so he can load them into his Tomtom. I checked them through the other day and added a few more way markers, to make sure we end up on the right roads. The problem you can get, as I found out in 2012, is that if you don't have enough way markers along the route you want to take, i.e. the route as devised in TYRE, which uses Google mapping, then it is entirely possible that Tomtom will take its own and very different route to the same destination. I think I have it covered though, just so long as I remember to tell TT not to use motorways, except on the 2 days we need to move fast. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

That's all for now.