Thu 16 Aug

Today was the big day – my eagerly awaited paddleboard should finally show up. I’ve been hitting “refresh” on the TNT tracking page for days now, I literally couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. But – before play, there is always some work to do and today was laundry day. We got up early and had a nice brekkie with cornetti and coffee, a luxury that we seem to be getting used to these days.

The laundrette was around the corner and was named “The Jeffersons”, with pictures of a couple smiling hanging from the walls everywhere. I guess The Jeffersons was some cheesy eighties TV show, judging by the looks of them. 🙂

One of the things that amazes me about the cruising life is the weird things that get you excited. Things like a nice and clean laundrette, with – OMG, can you believe it – free wifi AND a power socket to charge laptops (which of course we hadn’t thought to bring with us)! I had to try very hard to stop Camilla from moving in.

After lording it up in the poshest laundrette I’ve ever seen we headed back to the boat. On the way we saw a TNT delivery truck, and I thought, “This must be the guy who’s supposed to deliver my paddleboard later?”. After a bit of ummm-ing and ahh-ing I went and asked him, and to my surprise he actually spoke very good English. Turns out he wasn’t the right guy, there’s more than one TNT delivery truck in Olbia after all. Who’d have thought?

The driver was so nice though he called his buddy (who had my board) and said it’d be delivered around 15:00. Great! Another weird thing about cruising is not having an address, so getting things delivered is always a bit awkward. Amazon needs to get on with their drone delivery! We just gave the address of the harbour office, hoping that they would take our package, but I was still a bit concerned they wouldn’t.

Knowing the packet would arrive roughly around three, our plan was to just camp out next to the harbour office and intercept the delivery guy. Well, unfortunately, another refresh on the TNT tracking page
revealed that the guy was early and wasn’t able to deliver the bloody thing. I guess the harbour office didn’t want to accept a random package for a guy they’d never met, I wonder why?

We thought about how to chase down the board. Calling TNT customer support was a reasonable first step, unfortunately there was no getting through to them. We found a TNT office on Google Maps, but it looked far away and we had no idea if the package would be there. Instead we hopped on the bus and went to pay Decathlon another visit. Maybe they could help us track down the package? The lady at Decathlon was super helpful and after hanging on the phone for half an hour she confirmed that our package was indeed at the TNT office north of Olbia.

Getting there involved waiting for half an hour in the scorching heat and taking two buses, but hey – the things we do to get our toys. It turns out that the place we had to go to was a logistic centre for TNT, and it was miles up a hill in a completely deserted industrial area. We walked for about 30 minutes in what felt like 50 degrees, but managed to get our board from the folks at TNT. YAY!