Day 3: The first cock up

Day three seems a bit early for a cock up, but in the interests of this blog being transparent and honest I have to confess to doing a doozie today. Let me say from the outset that this was my mistake alone, not Raw Travel who I booked everything through.

A bit of background. When I booked this itinerary I used Raw Travel’s standard itinerary and then added extra nights. All the support material - day descriptor, maps etc follows the standard itinerary. We then got a second document with our accommodation details. The trick with that is you are meant to check if you have one night or two booked. Simple you’d think. Apparently not.

We checked out this morning and were 7km down the road when we received a phone call from the ground operator telling us we did indeed have two nights in San Gimignano. I checked our accommodation voucher and sure enough, yes. (The standard itinerary was one night and I had completely forgotten we had booked this).

Anyway, cue me feeling a right idiot and we had to turn around and walk back again. 14km we can add to our total. The irony is a rest day would have been perfect as I am still fluey and Grant’s knee is giving him a bit of grief. I practiced all the way back to the hotel saying ‘Mi dispiace, io sono molto stupido’ which I then said to the man in reception. He did admit it might have been useful for him to tell us this morning when we checked out.

Anyway, what to learn from this? Owning up to cock ups is good, blaming others is not. Ironically (again) I had been pondering about control before the phone call, and thinking that it was one of the most challenging things in relationships. I like to be in control and so does my partner and it can result in some head butting. In this particular case though, Grant had left me to pretty well organise it all. I enjoyed that (I had originally planned to do this alone). I now realise I need to admit this has to have both of us involved and both of us taking responsibility for checking and planning. That’s a good outcome.

The photo at the top of the page is us leaving this morning with San Gimignano in the background. We get to do it all again tomorrow.