navacchio – Our Man In Volterra

First day of the holidays! What to do, what to do. We decided to head out late morning for Navacchio, about 45 minutes away north to look for paints and lights… and maybe someone who knew a thing or two about air-conditioning units – although we figured that we were getting on grand with the cooling units we bought a while back.

We stopped quickly in La Rosa on the way, to scope out a cheap department store called Magazzini Mangini to see if we could cut short our journey and just buy lights. The stuff they had wasn’t to our taste, so onwards to Navacchio shopping centre!

We masked-up and went to Casa, and bought some knick-knacks and some gently glowing balls (bedside lamps). Happy with our lot, we decided to head down to OBI. Spotting a lift, we got inside, thinking it would take us down a full level to where OBI is. However, we quickly discovered that the lift was for disabled access to the store and just went down about 7 feet to the same level as the bottom of the stairs into Casa. Thoroughly humiliated, but laughing, we went on our hunt for OBI.

OBI had paints, but not the ones we wanted… it had nice air-conditioning units too – but I chickened out.

Quickly nipping into Euronics to confirm we had no impulse to shop for electronics, we had a big flip-off lunch in Wild West. A nice burger and fries for both of us, but damn we had to wait 20+ minutes for a table – although it was still (albeit barely) Covid-compliant. It also had yapping dogs. Italians love their dogs and they are frequently welcome in restaurants.

Afterwards, we went back to La Rosa, and picked up a couple of heavy terracotta decorated boxy-type things, which we’d use to hold the doors to terraces open. Handy! We also checked out the opening hours of a second-hand type store – Il Mercatino Dell’Usato (which I nicknamed ‘tutta la merda’ due to little bit of everything it seemed to have in stock behind its locked gates).

Then back home. I don’t think we ate much, as we’d had a big lunch, but not so big that we didn’t head back out into town to take some snaps. I also indulged in a lemon granita from Isola del Gusto to cool me down.

And that was that… screenwatching and bed!

We still had heard nothing from our furniture supplier, despite promises several times that they would call our representative back within 48 hours with a delivery date. This is our last week here, so enough was enough… we would have to go to Navacchio ourselves to get a date from them. This is no fault of the property manager looking after us – I have no doubt she did her best.

The route is virtually the same as takes us to the airport, and because we’ve done it so frequently now, it was a double pain in the arse to have to use the route again just to ask for a furniture delivery date. The round trip was a little under 130km!

Anyway, we got there and, thanks to Google Translate, were able to explain the situation to the person in customer services. She got next Monday as a delivery date, but when we explained that we were leaving on the 28th, she talked them down to this Thursday (26th). However, the reason for the delay was that they were missing a couple of the internal components for the wardrobe, and the piece which would be acting as our TV cabinet. So, we will get 90% of a wardrobe and both bedside lockers. I estimate this to be about 73.28% of our furniture. The rest will be delivered on a future date that will be arranged *shudder*.

The closest thing we got to an apology was a ‘tsk’ from the customer services rep – although she was kind and helpful. I did notice, as an aside, that there were about 15 people waiting in the customer services queue behind us. If they focused more on getting shit done right, they wouldn’t have this additional expense!

Anyhoo, there was a slightly happy ending to this annoying trip, in that we had a mooch around some shops, and ended up with some groceries (they have a HUUUUUGE CoOp there), and a WiFi network extender. We have attempted to use a powerline extender throughout this period, but it is too fiddly, and requires multiple logins, and on some occasions doesn’t work at all. We configured this when we got home, and while we’re stuck with 2 network IDs, the solution works an absolute treat. We also (again, sorry not sorry) had burgers in the Old Wild West branch in the same complex. Yummy! I think we’ll be sticking with Italian for the rest of the holiday, though, as we have Buckley’s Chance of getting decent Italian food almost anywhere back home.

So that was our day, really. We just screenwatched the rest of it. I did a little writing, but not enough!

This morning’s walk was fab – I walked the whole length of the walls and arrived home a disgusting, sweaty mess. I captured some lovely photos, though. We are currently above a ton of fog banks, so it looks impressive!