Day 11 – Sunday 12th May 2013
Today started, after breakfast, at our allotted time of 08:33:30hrs from the hotel carpark, where we were timed out in 30 second intervals, and then had to navigate ourselves through the Rome traffic using our roadbooks for 34.86 miles to Tivoli. This all proved to be no problem at all, approx 16 miles of it being on motorway, and we were 2nd to arrive at our destination in the town of Tivoli to the East of Rome, a lovely place. The Italian Job organisers had teamed up with the Rotary and Rotaract Clubs of Tivoli to provide refreshments, but before that, there was supposed to be a Special Stage in a square in the middle of the town, for which they had arranged a road closure order. However, there were at least 3 cars parked in this area, so the first entertainment was watching the local vehicle removal guys come along and forcibly remove two of these cars, and they really didn’t give a damn! I’m surely glad they weren’t our cars they were man-handling without so much as a 2nd thought, one was removed on a suspended tow with its rear wheels in some sort of trolley jacks, the other was dragged on to the back of a wagon. The third vehicle was removed by the owner who came to see what was going on, but not before he was given two parking tickets, one for parking in a disabled area without the necessary permit, and secondly for parking on the closed roads! After the excitement of all of that, we all completed a Special Stage, going round a cone twice in exactly 20 seconds which we think we did OK on. We then parked up again prettily, had some refreshments, then went on an escorted tour of Villa D’Este, a beautiful Villa and gardens where there are innumerable waterfalls, some centuries old, that are all driven purely by gravity, quite amazing. At the end of that, we purchased an Italian flag from a nearby stall to go with our Manx flag that we fly from our radio aerial, and, as we were returning to the square where the cars were parked, we were accosted by some of the organisers who were looking for us as they wanted to include our car in a photograph for the cheque for €1,000 being handed over to the local Italian children’s charity, so we were proud to oblige and suitably parked the car for the publicity shot, how cool hey! We were then taken by police escort to a restaurant a few miles away where we had a lovely lunch, after which the afternoon was at our leisure. We returned to the hotel ready for the evening meal, which also included the infamous Italian Job auction, where all of the Jobbers are asked to bring suitable items for auction by all the other Jobbers. We brought 6 gold ingots engraved with the Italian Job logo and the year 2013. They were the first lot to be auctioned, and we were delighted they achieved £150.00, half is credited to us towards our total fund raising amount, and the other half is credited to the team that won the auction, they certainly proved very popular. We also put forward an Isle of Man TT races baseball cap and body warmer, which raised £55.00, again we were more than happy with that. The total evening raised just short of £7,000, which was an excellent result for the night.
