When I tried to draw cash for the first time today from our Visa cashcard, we discovered that the MasterCurrency bureau in Cape Town where we'd bought the thing hadn't actually activated the card yet. This was a problem. We were down to our last few euros of cash, and we didn't have a PIN for Nicole's credit card, which was the only one we'd brought with. Some frantic emailing and telephone calls got a promise from MasterCurrency that they'd have things sorted out by tomorrow. This didn't turn out to be the case and things were finally only sorted out on Sunday. Not very helpful people at all.
Day 8: Firenze (0km!)
Friday 30 April
No riding today - the whole day to explore Florence, and do a little shopping.
It was still raining when we woke up, and we caught the 9am bus into the town. First stop was a bike shop in the Northern part of the city - Cicli Conti - where I bought a nice club jersey, and we got Nicole a new saddle for her bike (the old one was falling apart). Surprisingly the Italian-made saddle (Selle Italia Ldy Gelflow) wasn't much cheaper here than it would have been in say the UK.
We wasted more than 2 hours in the queue for the Uffizzi museum, which really wasn't worth it. The museum was uncomfortably busy. Next time we'll just buy the book! That sort of put us off wasting any more time in museums and we mostly just admired the great architecture and old buildings, and soaked up the atmosphere.
Then began a leather jacket shopping expedition, with Nicole bargaining with various leather merchants. The result was the purchase of a very nice jacket for 300eur, which would be packed up in Nicole's luggage for the remainder of the trip.