Tin Can Travels

20th Nov – 28th Nov 2024

Our stop in Châtelaillon-Plage was not really to spend time here, but because it was on the train line into La Rochelle. This was a place that we had been to before that we were looking forward to revisiting. The next day we strolled the 1.5km from camp to the station and and within 15 minutes we were delivered to the very scenic port town of La Rochelle. We had our usual itinerary planned: walk, look at stuff, find restaurant for lunch, eat and drink, walk a bit more, go home. We executed it perfectly.

The harbour and its protective guard towers are very photogenic and before long we had found the busy market place. The weekly market was in full swing which initially we observed from a distance whilst savouring a coffee at a nearby café before walking through the countless stalls selling delicious looking meat/cheese/pastries etc. This being a fishing port, there was also a very impressive array of seafood on offer too. Our wanderings continued, taking in the beautiful town hall. This was partly destroyed by a large fire in 2013 and has been lovingly restored. Most of the priceless artwork inside was saved by firefighters and employees who mobilsed quickly and carried the pieces to safety.

We decided that we fancied a plate of oysters as part of our lunch but rather than getting these in a restaurant we walked back to the fish market. Here an outside stall was serving a shucked dozen of large plump oysters for €15 with the optional side order of a 100ml of white wine in a paper cup for €2 each. This seemed very reasonable. We ate (and drank) these under an umbrella, sheltering from the light rain, whilst trying to a politely fend off conversation with a persistently chatty French chap who definitely was unaware that he was interrupting our bliss moment. The oysters were utterly delicious.

After this we found somewhere very satisfactory for a late lunch then later sauntered back to the station and headed back to Châtelaillon.

We had planned to head off the next day but the weather forecast was hideous. Torrential rain and gale force winds soon arrived and the decision to stay put was an easy one. We were fully prepared for a ‘lock-in’ day with food in the fridge, water in the tanks and plenty of data allowance for a Netflix marathon. Davide has enough space for days like this and we are happy loafers.

The next morning, after a very cold night, the weather had finally settled and the only casualty of the wind was the bike cover. This has been slowly disintegrating over the past few months and up until this point was made up of about 25% gaffer tape. Now, following ongoing repairs, it is about 50% tape. It just had to last another week.

The other casualty of our stay here was my digestive system. I was feeling decidedly peaky this morning and Nick joined me in my gastrointestinal disquiet later in the day. Although there had been a bit of a delay, the chief suspect was a dozen delicious oysters.

We continued our trajectory north and headed to the south Brittany coast port town of Vannes. We arrived in the middle of the day and spent a few hours feeling shabby and lamenting our slightly compromised plumbing arrangements. As sunset approached we were feeling a bit better and dragged ourselves out for a short walk around a nearby small penninsula which was beautiful. The Brittany coast is rocky and rugged with large tidal swings making it really interesting and very different from the Med.

We shuffled home and had an early night. Unfortunately our camping spot was very close to a car park that was obviously popular with young people in noisy cars playing loud music late at night. We didn’t sleep much until it finally rained at about 3am, ending their party. Hoorah for bad weather! We’ll take the din of raindrops on the roof over the cacophony of high spirited youth anyday. We agreed that we weren’t going to stay another night here. Night-time noise caused by humans is one of the things that we find it difficult to tolerate.

The next morning, both feeling a bit better, we caught the bus into the town centre and were happy to find that it was market day in Vannes. Rather than being based in a central square this market, mainly consisting of beautiful food stalls, was spread throughout the streets of the old town, giving the whole place a lovely atmosphere. The old town itself was gorgeous and laden with lopsided medieval buildings and narrow streets. It was of those unlauded places that is as beautiful as any of the tourist ‘hot spots’ that we had seen on our travels, yet we felt like the only tourists in town. After exploring town, which had some lovely shops too, we headed down to the marina. This was an unusual affair as the boats are moored along the length of a blind ending canal that connects Vannes town centre with the sea. From here we braved the threatening dark clouds in the sky and walked home rather than getting the bus.

Moving on mid afternoon is an unusual routine for us, but we not going to risk another noisy night. We picked a spot mid-Brittany that had a quiet, secluded, wooded site next to a lake with our name on it. It was only about 40 minutes away so having done laundry and shopping on the way, we arrived just before dusk. That night we slept like babies.

The next day we continued our trans-Breton trajectory to the north coast and a place called Trévon-Tréguigrec. Our initial approach was kiboshed by a road closure but we eventually arrived after a scenic detour. Here there was a beautiful wide bay, flanked by rocky headlands and a perfect surf beach. It was a mild 18 deg C and there were plenty of surfers in the water and even a few non-wetsuited swimmers. We did not brave the waves ourselves. Those days of summer are well behind us. Cold water swimming is definitely not our thing! Our site, another Camping CarPark, a mere stone’s throw from the beach, was almost empty, but it was easy to imagine there would be a fair jostle for a space here in the peak season. This would be a great place to camp for a beach holiday.

We did a couple of walks here. The first was up the beach to the next bay on the day we arrived. At the other end of the bay was a large ugly building that had an amazing view over the beach and out to sea. This turned out to be a rehabilitation hospital. Awful seventies architecture aside, what an amazing place to come to recuperate and rehabilitate. Otherwise the place was dead with all of the few cafés and businesses shut. The next day we walked inland up the valley through some woods. There was allegedly a very pretty loop track through a nature reserve but the recent storm had knocked down so many trees and branches that it became impassable and we had to turn around. We took the long route home through the village and called at the shop. This, predicatably, was shut when we arrived. A long lunch break is sacrosanct in this part of the world. I quite respect that. It would just be nice if they stated their opening times on-line so that we hadn’t made an unecessary walk up a steephill to get there. Just an idea…. Nick slogged back up the hill later for our ‘essential items’ for which I have no recall. Probably chocolate supplies. For our second night here we had the site all to ourselves. Private and exclusive camping.

The next day we headed east along the coast to our last stop of the trip. This was in a place called St-Jacut-De-La-Mer which was essentially a small fishing village strung out along the length of a small north-south orientated peninsula that jutted out into a bay that was part of the Gulf of St Malo. The whole place was again a sleepy, resting, out of season holiday destination with only a few other campers on our site. The rocky coast line here has a big trick up its sleeve, which is its massive tidal ranges of up to 13 m, the biggest in Europe. This means that the coastline changes dramatically with the tides and this facilitated one of most interesting walks of our trip.

About 500m off the northern tip of the peninsula is a small archipelago of islands which are accessible by foot at low tide. In a leisurely 2-3 hour round trip walk it is possible to walk across the sand, up and over a small island and along and round a larger island to a lookout. We had walked up to the end of the peninsula at high tide on our first day here and slightly increduously looked over the seemingly vast expanse of water between us and the islands. It was hard to imagine it being walkable. There was a big sign here warning not to tackle the walk without consulting the tide timetable, and not to start the walk back any later than 90 minutes after low tide. We strolled back to camp and Nick replaced his broken bike pedal. A new set had been Amazon purchased, posted to Jan who had brought them with him on the train when he came to see us in Bordeaux. Travelling problems solved with the assistance from an international mule! Thanks Jan.

The next day we got up early to catch low tide and cycled back to the jump off point, which was 3km from camp. Low and behold the sand was quickly emerging from the depths and we could indeed walk to the islands. We initially saw no-one else but did follow two sets of foot prints across the sand banks, giving us some idea of the best way to approach the islands and letting us know that we were not alone. It was a beautiful morning and a stunning walk. Definitely worth setting the alarm for. We passed our co-explorers as they were heading home but apart from a couple of folks wing-foiling from one of the island’s beaches, it was gloriously deserted. There are some privately owned holiday homes on the larger of the islands, which much be an idyllic place to spend summer days. We were very jealous.

We had a lazy afternoon once we got home. There was Breton fish soup for lunch and an interesting ‘fridge scrapings’ dinner to eat up the fresh supplies. In the evening we finished watching the final season of Madmen. This had been an all-consuming, seven seasons of televisual magnificence. What a show!

So finally our departure day was upon us. We had an overnight ferry booked out of St Malo, which was only about 30 minutes drive away. Although this didn’t sail until 7.45pm we headed there mid morning with a view to spending some time in St Malo. We have sailed in and out of this port several times but never spent any time in the town itself. This seemed a good opportunity to check it out. We also couldn’t leave France without the obligatory supplies of wine, cheese and canned delicacies so we started the day with a trip to the biggest supermarket we could find and filled a trolley with delicious stuff. Once this was all stashed away safely we found a parking spot near the old town and walked in. What a splendid place this is.

There is an impressive, imposing wall that protected the town from past attack, and continues to protect it from the wrath of winter storms and inside the walls all the buildings are quite uniform, well restored and the maze of narrow streets are lined with cobbles. The whole place is circled with yellow sandy beaches and an interesting looking lido. In a warm summers week this would be a fine place to spend some time, with barely any need to drive any further into France if one had just arrived on the ferry. We walked the walls, purchased a last gift or two and headed to the ferry terminal mid-afternoon.

We were about to embark on the most nerve wracking (for me – because I am the worrier) part of the trip. Leaving Europe.

Many of you will know/remember that we are travelling on our NZ passports as this theroretically allowed us to extend our stay beyond the standard ’90-day in every 180-day Schengen allowance’. In the 1960s New Zealand had negotiated a stand-alone 90 day extension to the 90 day Schengen allowance for NZ citizens with the majority of the original countries of the EU block. It was technically meant to be agreed on entry to each individual participating country, but there are no border posts to approach any more. It was also possibly not common knowledge amongst all border officials and honouring the agreement was entirely at the discretion of the individual border officer that was to check us out. I had prepared for this moment. I had a detailed record of our days spent in each country. I could verify this with banking records. I had a link to an obscure document on my phone. I had prepared my speech in French to explain why we had been in the Schengen area for 210 days. We checked in with the ferry staff then I took a deep breath as we approached the French border police kiosk and we handed over our passports.

“You are from New Zealand?” The border policeman asked in accented English as he flicked through the pages, looking for our entry stamps.

“Yes”, we replied.

“You have very pretty passports”, he commented. Stamp,stamp. “Have a good trip, goodbye”.

That was it. No questions. No detainment. No fine. No deportation. No exclusion from the Schengen area for 3 years. It worked! Hoorah! This had been slightly hanging over me our entire trip so it was a massive relief.

By a twist of fate we were the first to arrive in the embarkation lanes but were one of the last to be loaded onto the ferry three hours later. We were quite bored, but happy to be able to make tea and snacks and have a loo to use whilst we waited. If we’d known it was going to take so long we could have put a movie on. It was completely dark by the time we were loaded meaning that there was nothing to see as we set off an hour or so later, the 12 hour crossing to Portsmouth being happily uneventful and fairly calm. We dined and had a couple of drinks in the bar and we both managed to get some sleep in our narrow bunk beds. One advantage of being last on the ferry was that we were one of the first off and we flew through immigration and a cursory van inspection for stowaways before we hit the road north. Our next stop was a weekend in Hereford at my brother and sister-in-law’s, a great way to manage ‘end-of-trip-blues’. Fran and I even managed to sneak in a Park run whilst we were there . I found that the arrival of winter was also quite useful to help burst the travel bubble. We have rented a cozy cottage in Shropshire for 3 months and are looking forward to log fires, central heating, baths and a flushing toilet!

This trip has almost been too epic to summarize.

It was nearly seven months of mostly visiting cities, towns and villages with a few lakes and coasts thrown in for good measure.

We have driven through: Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Italy and France.

We have visited some of Europe’s great and fine cities: Düsseldorf, Hanover, Berlin, Gdansk, Krakow, Budapest, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Bratislava, Prague, Salzburg, Vienna, Venice, Verona, Rome, Florence and Nice.

We have seen lots of really, really, really old places: churches, cathedrals, castles, fortresses, houses and inns. The ancient ruins of Pompeii and Rome were mind blowing.

We experienced Auschwitz.

We have come across many new, and unintelligable, languages.

We saw the Baltic, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Lakes Balaton, Bled, Titisee, Attersee and Garda,the noteable Rivers Rhine, Rhône, Danube, Vistula, Ljubljanica,Vltava, Arno and Tiber.

We drank beer in the East and wine in the West.

We drove nearly 9000 miles and I was behind the wheel for not a single one of them. I am a happy passenger. Nick is a happy driver. We never travel so far in one day that he needs help driving.

We met up with: Anke and Meike, Benedikt and Suzi, Mum & Cliff, Rick and Kris, Nicholas and Julian, Marie-Claude,Paul and Sophie, and Jan.

We stayed in 89 different locations and filled the tank with diesel 35 times. I can see no helpful reason to add up how much this cost.

Davide himself was epic. He is a fine tool for life on the road and is now clean and tidy and tucked up in his pyjamas for the winter. Next adventure? A month touring Ireland in April. See you then!

Auf Wiedersehen! Do widzenia! Búcsú! Zbogom! Zbohom! Ahoj! Adijo! Ciao! Au revoir! Goodbye!

8th Nov -19th Nov 2024

From our high roost in Sospel we headed back down the hill and hit the south coast motorway again. There was no police check today and we continued west. There had been tolls on some of the Italian autostrada but we knew that we had to brace ourselves for the French pèages. This is the deal with the devil that you make if wanting to get any distance in any reasonable time across this vast country -although that is all relative as it is less than half the size of Texas. Luckily one can just (frequently) wave plastic cards at the problem and disassociate from the actual cost of using their very civilized motorway system. Onwards we go.

Our next stop was a trifle random but the location was the happy intersection of several key requirements. It was about a three hour drive away in our direction of travel, with a camp site run by our preferred French provider ‘Camping Car Park’, in a small port town with boats and sea to look at, bike lanes to get around, a place to do some laundry and a supermarket. So that’s how we ended up in the town of Port St Louis Du Rhône. This is in the Camargue, the wetland area lying between the Mediterranean and the two arms of the Rhône river delta, the Petit Rhône to the west and the Grand Rhône to the east. Port St Louis sits at the mouth of the Grand Rhône. The weather was a little grim for our planned 2 night stop here, so although we managed to do a rather windswept and rain spattered bike ride around the town, marina and along the river, we decided to stay an extra night to make the most of the next sunny day. A search on the satellite map showed that there was a quite long beach about 10km away, so we headed out there. This turned out to be a splendid idea as the route was entirely on a dedicated cycle lane through some lovely Camargue wetlands (complete with flamingos, but none close enough to get a good photo of) and the beach was lovely. There was also permitted camping here which would have been a great spot in retrospect. Ne’er mind.

The beach was covered in bamboo canes of various sizes. A shipping container full of them must have gone overboard near here at some point in the not too distant past. We strolled for a while and then headed home. Our French camping neighbours, an older couple and their 30-something son and daughter-in-law, invited us to play some petanque with them later that afternoon. We did not let some communication issues or our lesser skills get in the way of a fun hour of throwing around the boules, but play was brought to a close by fading light, mosquitos and a sudden plummet of the temperature.

As we moved on the next morning we stopped off at the small laundrette in town to irritatingly find it out of order. Our plan had been to have breakfast in the car park whilst the washing was in progress. But no. We continued onwards to our next destination, which was only about 90 minutes away, stopping at a laundrette there instead. Breakfast became brunch. We were now in one of our favourite places from past travels, Sète. This coastal port town is a real gem and we had spent 3 months here in 2018. During that time we had taken French lessons with an amazing lady called Marie-Claude with whom we had had a lot of fun. We had briefly revisited Sète last year when our plans had changed at the last minute due to the weather and I had regretted not getting in touch with Marie-Claude to catch up with her then. I was not going to do that again and we had arranged to meet up this time. After the laundry was done we installed ourselves in a beachside camp and then cycled into Sète along the cycle path.

It was the type of beautifully warm, sunny autumn day which the Mediterranean coast can deliver so perfectly. In France it was a public holiday for Armistice Day, the 11th of November, so the beach, the cafes and the cycle/walking path were all busy with people out and about. We rode in light layers with the bike panniers loaded up with coats, gloves and scarves for the inevitably chilly return journey after dark. The days may be warm, but we knew how quickly it went cold after dark. We spent a delightful three hours catching up with Marie-Claude in her appartment, decadantly drinking champagne and eating biscuits in the late afternoon. Our French skills, which she had been so instrummental in honing in the past, were woefully rusty and we could only apologise to her for that. But we communicated nonetheless, reminisced about our Sète Summerof 2018 and laughed a lot. Six years is both a long time and no time at all, so although life goes on, the truth is that none of us really change and friendships like this can hang in the wardrobes of our lives and be ready to wear again at any moment. It was so lovely to see you again, Mclaude. We won’t leave it 6 years until we come and visit again!

It was indeed a cold and dark ride home, but we were prepared.

The next day we cycled back to Sète to spend some time stomping around the old grounds of our past time here. We had done the same last year, but this is always a place worth revisiting. There is the fishing fleet in the harbour and the canals on which in summer they do jousting from heavy rowing boats. There is the old town area with its restaurants,cafes and shops, all happily quite busy. There is our old appartment – a fourth floor walk up – that is situated above a boulangerie where we were taunted with the early morning aromas of baking bread and pastries wafting up to our bedroom window. One hundred steps was quite a deterrent to daily outings for breakfast baked goods. Then there is the indoor market, the daily deliverer of unctious cheeses, fresh pasta, cured meats and terrines like many other markets in France, but with a singular exception. The Tielle.

This is a food item seared into our souls. A dish so synonymous with Sète that to come here without eating one is unthinkable. A delicious, magnificent, edible thing. The Tielle is a sturdy, yeasted pastry pie filled with a spicy octupus and tomato ragôut that was brought to this area by Italian fishermen having been influenced by Spanish cooking. The bars around the market are relaxed about the eating of market-purchased Tielles if one is having a glass of their wine, and this was at the top of our list of ‘things to do’. We were not disappointed. Can strongly recommend. We finished our day with a walk out along the harbour breakwater, had the obligatory photo with the SÈTE sign and headed home. The cooler weather and the working day made the cycle path almost deserted today, quite different from the buzz of yesterday. There was heavy rain overnight and earplugs were needed for sleep.

The next day saw us head northwest and away from the Mediterranean coast and head towards the Atlantic. It was time to put in some hours, kilometers and euros on a couple of longer ‘péage’days. As I said before, the French autoroutes are generally magnificent, but you pay for the pleasure. We had a single night stop just outside a town called Montech, a place near Toulouse. The camp site was another ‘Camping Car Park’, which provide very standardised, fully automated parking spots complete with power, water and waste disposal, all for about an average of €12-13 per night. This one was right next to a very scenic canal, so we stretched our legs with a stroll after we arrived.

We ploughed on the next day, heading out to the Atlantic coast and the town of Arcachon in the Gironde. This place has become quite popular over the years due to its unique placement. It not only sits on the Atlantic coast with miles of glorious sandy beaches to its south, but it also sits on the sheltered Archachon Bay, giving it access to a huge and safe area for boating and watersports. The air was thought to be beneficial for those with pulmonary diseases in the past and it has a long history as a hospital town where people came to take the air. The town does not accomodate free-form or budget camper parking well, and with all of the peripheral campsites shut for the winter we were limited to staying in the only site open, a Huttopia campsite situated atop the hill overlooking the town. We arrived, having pre-booked, during the six hour window in the middle of the day when reception was unmanned and our personalised gate code didn’t work. Crap. Luckily, despite the place being nearly deserted, a French couple were walking past and were kind enough to let us break in using their code. Then we discovered that our assigned site was small, an odd shape and not exactly level, so there were a few moments of manouvering and wheel-wedging to get us into the spot and horizontal enough to stop all the cupboard doors flying open and the blood rushing to our heads whilst we were sleeping. We are getting better at doing this without falling out. As long as we are not hungry.

We filled the afternoon with a walk down the hill into town and mooched down to the harbour and waterfront of the bay. The houses here are quite unusual and pretty with many having girl’s names. There were also some very impressive piles. On our wanderings we happened across a hairdressers and I spontaneously booked a cut for the next day. I was hoping that my ability to communicate with a non-English speaking French hairdresser was going to be better than my previous cuts with the Hungarian and Italian ones! It was a lovely walk, but Nick had developed a sore knee and a 8km hilly meander was not being kind to it. We limped home.

The next day we cycled back to town and after I had received a very satisfactory haircut we headed out to see this area’s most famous ‘thing’. This is the Dune du Pilat, Europe’s tallest sand dune which has about 2 million visitors per year. It is about 500m wide, 2700m long and 106m tall, and is slowly encroaching inland. I had been here as a young teenager when my family last came to visit old family friends who lived in this area, but to be honest couldn’t really remember much about it. There was a cycle path most of the 10km from Arcachon to the dune and we were happily cruising along when at about the 3km mark Nick’s bike pedal suddenly snapped off. Hmmmm. A brief survey of the damage revealed that it might be good for a limp home, but not to continue the outward journey too. However serendipity had caused the breakage at a bus stop on the route to the dune and the hourly bus was due in five minutes. We chained the bikes up to a nearby fence and hopped straight onto the bus. Magic. The dune was quite lovely, the massive carpark being testament to how busy this can get in the summer. There were no crowds today. In the busier season there is a temporary staircase installed up the dune, but that was removed last weekend meaning that we had the slow scramble to get to the top. Luckily Nick’s knee tolerated this. The views from the top were magnificent, made more lovely by the glorious sunshine and blue skies. It was well worth the journey.

We made our way back down and were lured into a cafe with the promise of French onion soup. (Or is it just called soup here?). It was warm enough to sit outside, especially with the prospect of a hot bowl of soup. Unfortunately the soup was barely even tepid when it arrived, so back it went. It’s not that difficult, surely!? They got it right in the end and it was very tasty. We navigated the bus back to the bikes and the jury-rigged pedal was sufficient to get us back to base. The evening consisted of a brief sunset drink at the campsite bar during which we completed on the purchase of a car for when we get home. The internet is an amazing tool.

The next day we exited the campsite about ten seconds before the checkout time of 12pm and headed to our next stop. This was a small town called St Helene inland on the Gironde. Here lives Paul, my old childhood friend, who moved to France when he was 10 years old. He is, for all intents and purposes, now French although is still very fluent in English. I haven’t seen him nearly ten years so there was much to talk about. Davide fitted perfectly on the driveway of the house and we had a fantastic 24 hours of catching up. His partner, Sophie, was a bit bamboozled by our rapid chit-chat but heroically managed to keep up with the aid of a bit of translation from Paul. We tried to keep it as ‘Franglais’ as possible, but it was such a treat to speak English to someone other than each other! We spent the evening in a local bar which served us beer and burgers whilst we watched the France vs New Zealand autumn rugby series game. We were the only All Blacks supporters, made evident by our lone voices during NZ scores, and unfortunately we lost. It was an excellent game however.

After a peaceful night’s sleep on the driveway and a cooked breakfast in the morning we said our goodbyes and headed off. Our next stop was to be Blaye, on the other side of the Gironde Estuary. The quickest way to get where we wanted to go would have been to catch the ferry that runs across the estuary between Lamarque and Blaye, a total distance of only 33km. But Davide was too big to catch this, so we had to go via Bordeaux, a much longer journey of 77km that took twice as long as it should have due to a bridge closure and resulting traffic jams. I formulated our own back street detour that Nick executed with aplomb as we pulled an audacious U-turn at some gridlocked traffic lights. Nice.

We had another social engagement in Blaye. After months of solitude on the road this was to be our fourth rendezvous with friends in France in 12 days. Here we were to have a visitor from London. Jan is a friend of mine from university days and is another of my male friends that Nick has stolen/formed a strong friendship with over the years. They have shared passions for Anthony Bourdain, fine wine and talking bollocks about American football and supercars. Having taken a sabatical of sorts this year, Jan found himself with a few free days and a desire to come and find us on our travels. He had been in touch about six days prior and wondered where we might be. How fortuitous that we would be rolling up on one the world’s finest wine regions that was a hop and a skip from a large transport hub. His trip to Bordeaux was quickly locked in with a train tickets booked from London and a small appartment for three booked in Blaye. We parked Davide in a camping aire on the other side of the town, packed several bags: clothes, food and drink supplies and laundry and then walked the 2km to our accomodation. Whilst we waited for Jan to arrive in his hire car from Bordeaux I managed to sneek in a load of washing. Never has an opportunity to do laundry on the road been missed!

Our 40 hours with Jan was a delightful interlude. First up, full marks to him for making the journey at such short notice and putting in the hours on the Eurostar and the TGV to come and see us. Even more laudable is that as the Northern Line was not functioning on the day of his travel, he actually began his journey with a 30 minute, pre-dawn, rental bike ride from East Finchley to St Pancreas. That is commitment.

On the first evening in Blaye we walked the short distance to the town centre to find a place for dinner. It was a Monday in winter, so our options were limited. Very limited. There were only two restaurants open, and one of them was deserted whilst the other was fairly busy. We followed the crowd and were not disappointed. ‘La Marina’ served us a very respectable three course meal for the princely sum of €18 each with a bottle of very quaffable wine for not much more. It was a beacon of light in an otherwise deserted and quite depressed feeling town. Weird, as this is one of the epicentres in this wine area and must be heaving in summer.

The next day we embarked on a mini, self-guided, Bordeaux wine tasting adventure. Happily we had Jan and his hire car to ferry us around and our day started with an actual ferry ride. This was the small car ferry that Davide was too big for yesterday that took us directly from Blaye back across the Gironde Estuary (the biggest in Europe) to the small settlement of Lamarque on the other side. It was a breezy and cool day, so we were a bit windswept up on deck. From Lamarque we drove north to the town of Pouillac, a place name known to many drinkers of Bordeaux wine. I think that we all expected to roll into a buzzy little place, full of cafés, restaurants and wine caves and boutiques, all catering to the wine tourism.

Nope. Pauillac was shut. There were no people and there was almost nothing open. Very strange. It became apparent that all the wine tourism happens out in the chateaux and wine houses themselves, and that we had to set off into the countryside yonder to find one of them. We just hoped that somewhere would be open.

Our first stop, a few kilometers south of Pauillac, looked promising. There was a chateau and a beautiful modern tasting room alongside. We pulled up, waltzed in, saw the roaring log fire, and our hopes soared before they were cruelly dashed. ‘Tastings only for wine industry professionals and by appointment only’ was the disappointing pronouncement from the receptionist. Merde. I asked if we could walk around outside and she acquiesced to this. It was a picture perfect mini-chateau with fantastic views across the vineyards. The vines by now have done their work for the year and are sporting their autumn livery of golden, brown and russet leaves just prior to winter hibernation. It was quite lovely. In the distance Nick spied another chateau. Google told us it was open so we scurried there instead.

Here, at Haut-Bages Liberal, we had a fabulous private wine tasting with the knowledgeable Jonathon. We treated ourselves to a bottle of the 1996. This was the year that Nick and I got together (with our 25th wedding anniversary to celebrate this year) and coincidentally mine and Jan’s graduation year. A fine vintage. We will savour it at some point next year.

From here we were headed south to the other, even more famous Bordeaux wine region, Margaux. Armed with a recommendation from Jonathon we set off. Again, the town of Margaux was nothing to write home about, but we sailed through it, heading into the hinterland of the Margaux AOC area and our destination of Chateau Angludet. The sat nav took us an interesting route down ever diminishing lanes and farm roads which culminated in a basic hard packed track around the edge of a field prompting Jan to grow concerned about the exact terms of his car rental contract and his insurance excess. His fears were allayed when we were spat out back onto a tarmac road with all tyres and axles intact and soon arrived at our destination. Here we ignored the ‘By Appointment Only’ sign at the gate and drove up the long driveway. We passed a chap doing some gardening who seemed unfazed by our presence and directed us up to the house. Here we had to knock on several doors and windows until we located some human beings and were happily informed that absolutely, we could do a wine tasting! Apparently the ‘By Appointment Only’ is only relevant in the high season when they have to protect themselves from summer crowds.

Our host was a young woman in her mid to late twenties who spoke fluent English, but with a slightly incongruous broad Irish accent. She had spent five years in Ireland working in a bar and had left the country not only with the native lilt but also with an Irish husband. We had another very enjoyable and informative tasting session with her and then it was time to make our way home. It had been great to see these well known wine regions in the flesh and learn more about the dark art of winemaking. Apparently the industry is trouble as the younger generations are not developing a taste for red wine and sales are slipping. Even in Margaux.

Back in Blaye we assesed our dinner options again and made the same decision. The €18 set menu in La Marina would suit us just fine again. We even sat at the same table, in the same seats and drank the same wine.The next morning we packed up and Jan drove us back to Davide where he got the extensive and time consuming ‘Full Guided Tour’. Mere minutes later we were finished and then we spent an hour exploring Blaye’s nearby citadel, the waterfront fortress build to defend this east coast of the Gironde Estuary.

Soon it was time to bid farewell to our visitor and Jan headed back to Bordeaux. We headed north up the coast and stopped at a small seaside resort called Châtelaillon-Plage where we pitched camp and did nothing for the rest of the day. All this socialising had been exhausting!

29th Oct – 8th Nov 2024

It was time to leave the history laden cities behind us for a while and get back to some sea air. Did this mean that we would also be escaping the crowds and turning away from Italy’s over-touristed hotspots? Well….maybe not.

Next stop, Cinque Terre.

We hadn’t planned on visiting this area when (very loosely) planning this segment of the trip, but that was because we hadn’t done any research and thought it was somewhere on the Amalfi coast. Nope, it isn’t. It is here on the eastern edge of the Italian Riviera, that bit of coast that runs around through Genoa to meet France. Also I had it in my mind that it was so mobbed by poorly behaved tourists that it was a place to avoid altogether. That is true in the busy months, but knowing that we would be passing so close as the craziness was subsiding for the season, we felt that we could risk a visit without compounding the problem.

For those that are not familiar with Cinque Terre, it is a group of five very scenic, medieval fishing villages ingeniously constructed along and against the cliffs of a spectacular segment of coastline. Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore are linked by an ancient coastal path that winds a total of 12km around headlands, up slopes and steps, down slopes and steps, through olive groves and into and out of the villages which are also linked by a railway line that runs just above sea level and a now also a road that runs at the top of the cliffs. Coming here to walk sections of the path is a very popular activity, so much so that in 2001 a daily fee was introduced. An early attempt to control the numbers, raise funds for the path’s maintenance and pay for resources in the area. Camping anywhere near here is impossible so we based ourselves further up the coast in a town called Sestri Levante which is also on the train line and a place worth visiting in its own right.

It was a lovely sunny day when we arrived and we strolled to the waterfront to have a look around. This place was charming. There was a large sandy beach that obviously was usually covered in beach-club parasols and loungers, but was now deserted and empty, a small marina, a headland and a cute old town with its own small sandy beach on a sheltered bay. This, in the last few days of October, was full of people sunbathing and swimming. How amazing. We were a bit sorry to have come unprepared to join them and we headed home.

The next day, armed with our online passes for the track, a day pack of essentials and my poleskis (walking poles purchased in Poland) we caught the train to take us to Cinque Terre. More and more walkers joined the train at each stop. We had decided to stay on the train to Corniglia, the middle of the five villages, and walk back to the start point in Monterosso, a distance of about 8km. We were strangely almost alone in our decision making as the train pretty much emptied at Monterosso. This pleased us. In Corniglia a little shuttle bus met the train giving us an option to bypass the 200 step climb up to the village, and we took it. Here we briefly explored the very sweet village, a maze of narrow streets and steps, perched atop a rocky knoll which is now mainly home to cafés, holiday appartments and souvenir shops. We bought nothing and headed to the track. Our passes were checked by an official in a little booth and we set off. It was a perfect day for it. Sunny, warm and with a gentle breeze. Having chosen to walk in a NW direction, rather than a SE direction the sun was on our backs not in our eyes and the views were superb. We also, for the first one and a half hours, had huge swathes of the path to ourselves. Quite a treat. The terrain was fairly uneven, and either up or down, but then what great walk doesn’t get you sweating a bit?? It was a delight.

As the morning wore on, and we passed throught our second village, Venazza, the crowds started to build. 95% of the people were walking in the opposite direction as us, having started in Monterosso. They were also seemingly 95% French. There were a lot of kids too, making us realise that a) it was Autumn half term holidays and b) the French come in droves to Italy to walk the Cinque Terre. Is that because it has a French name, or the reason it has a French name? Who would I ask about that? ‘Going against the flow’ had its pros and cons. It was a bit tedious to have to be constantly stopping to let people past in the narrow areas, but it was also great to not be stuck behind people. We also got to play our favourite game whilst out walking which is ‘Force the person walking towards you to make eye contact and say hello’. The game can be enhanced by making your greetings in a different languages to sow confusion, or by adding an inane grin on approach. The kilometers just fly by.

After 2.5 hours of walking, our final decent into the town of Monterosso was down a steep and relentlessly long rocky staircase. It was slippy and the going was slow. This was my least favourite section of the walk. This was also the busiest section as loads of people were walking up, suffering the torture of a significant climb. It looked tough enough for the young and fit, and there were many who looked nothing like that. I wonder how many of these folk had romantised the notion of ‘walking a small part of the Cinque Terre path’ then were disappointed having picked the sh*ttiest section to do. We were happy to arrive in the town, treated ourselves to a nice lunch in a shady spot and got the train home again. It had been a great day.

From here we continued west along the coast, cruising past Genoa and stopping in the rather grandly named city of Imperia. This was created by Mussolini in 1923 with the amalgamation of two towns and ten villages. This was to be our last stop in Italy and our two nights here coincided with a long weekend so it was going to be busy. We had discovered this late, as 31st October is not a public holiday anywhere we had ever been before. I called a campsite to make sure they had space and after a conversation in my very rudimentary Duolingo Italian with the non-English speaking chap on the other end of the phone I was fairly sure that I had booked a spot. We arrived and happily a spot was ours! My very friendly non- English speaking friend, the manager, was busy all day as the place soon filled up with Italian campers, and once it was full, he let four or five more vans in. So very Italian! Always room for a few more and nobody cares about a bit of double parking or close quarters. When we left two days later we had to ask two vans to move so that we could get out. Nobody cares about this sort of stuff here. In the UK or Germany…Apoplexy would ensue!

Imperia itself wasn’t really the reason that we were here although it was quite pretty and we did have a trip into the centre on our bikes do do some laundry. (It is going to be quite a treat to live in a place over the winter with its own washing machine again!). The main reason for coming here was to go fo a bike ride on the very epic cycle path that runs from here. The pista ciclabile del Ponete Ligure is an amazing 28km, mostly flat, mostly tarmac, mostly duel lane cycle path that follows the route of a decommissioned coastal railway line that currently runs from Imperia to San Remo.

The views are amazing, there are some judiciously spaced and located refreshment stops and it also runs through some cool tunnels. On a benign and sunny day like the one that we were lucky enough to score this day I can’t really imagine anything much more delightful than throwing a couple of crispy apples in the panniers and going for an hour’s electrically assisted cruise along the ‘Flower Riviera‘. The path was well used by a happy population of walkers, runners and cyclists but there was plenty of space for all and loads of places to stop and sit and appretiate the view.

When we arrived in San Remo we chilled for a while on a bench, ate our apples and then we did a tour of the large marina on our bikes. This is another of our favourite activities: window shopping for boats. Which ones would we have when we win the lottery, the pros and cons of the various sizes, shapes and hulls, the memorable and the terrible boat names, what size lottery win would prompt the purchase of which boat. You know, that sort of thing. Once we had delivered an opinion on all the larger vessels in the marina we headed back. The ‘benign’ day had aquired a significant headwind in the homeward direction but luckily we had electricity to throw at that problem and our enjoyment of the return journey was almost equal to the outbound one. This was a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant place for a bike ride. I love it when the powers that be invest money in this sort of infrastructure.

So the next morning it was time to leave Italy after six weeks of mooching about. We had loved the scenery, the history, the beauty of its old towns, the food, the wine, the prices, their love of socialising, their prioritisation of family and meal-times over money and business, the language, and their relaxed attitudes to free-camping ( and pretty much anything that doesn’t directly affect them personally). We hadn’t been so enamoured with their driving, the litter down south, their low levels of respect for personal space and the sheer VOLUME of the whole nation. These people talk LOUD no matter how far apart they are. It had been a ball and it is a place that we would definitely come back to……………………

……………………….if we could only drag ourselves out of France to get here.

It was a modest hop along the autostrada, a final toll to pay and then we were suddenly back into France. The beautiful port town of Menton came into view but rather than go there it was time to turn inland and head into the hills. Our destination was the village of Sospel located a 15km drive up a tortuously winding mountain road. It was an exhausting journey, even for me. We were going here for one reason only and that was because here was an aire campsite where we could safely and cheaply leave Davide unattended for a few days whilst being within striking distance of our next destination, Nice, by public transport. In Nice we we were meeting our friends Nicholas and Julian who were flying out from the UK for a four night visit. We had rented an apartment in the Old Town near the beach and had plans for several days of eating, drinking, sunshine, exploring and general merriment.

The next day we packed our bags, hid the valuables, locked Davide up and walked to the station. Our research had told us that Sospel has trains running through to Nice in about 50 minutes but the reality was, that for whatever reason, there was a bus replacement service. That was fine, at least someone else would be driving that stressful road this time. The driver then asked us if we had ID documents as the police might stop the bus us to check them at the bottom of the hill after we got back onto the motorway. Luckily I had thought to put our passports in. As we descended the windy mountain road my mind was very distracted. I know that these ID checks are being increasingly carried out on people crossing between Schengen countries to flush out illegal immigrants, who often travel by bus. We were on a bus that would be rejoining the motorway that connects Italy and France, thus appearing to have crossed the border. We had been in Europe for nearly six months. Having done plenty of research on the lesser known ‘bilateral accords’ that NZ has in place with many European countries, we were working on the educated assumption that our NZ passports would give us an extended stay in Europe, but I was planning on testing this theory, and it being accepted by an equally educated border official, as we were leaving France to get on a ferry back to the UK in three and a half weeks time, not in the next fifteen minutes. For all intents and purposes we were apparently significant Schengen Area overstayers. To say that I was quite nervous as the bus was was indeed flagged down at the Péage station and two Police officers came aboard is an understatement. There were three other passengers to check and then I handed over our passports. They were scrutinised. The pages were flicked through until the one with the entry stamp was found. The date was spoken between the two. A third, more senior officer came abord and was consulted. Some words were spoken, he looked at our passports, he said something, he passed them back and they were returned to us. They all smiled, said their farewells and got off. Then the bus drove on. I have no idea what they said, but it was ok and we weren’t being deported today. Hoorah!

Nice was a blast but in the interests of getting this post done I am going to keep details of our stay here brief and succinct.

-Our old town apartment was amazing with views over the Cours Saleya and its various markets of flowers,vegetable and fleas and the sea. It was only a few steps to many bars and restaurants, to the spectacular ‘Promenade Des Anglais’ and to the beach.We ate well and drank consistantly, and no-one disgraced themselves.

-We went to Monacco on the train one day. This is a funny old place. Part building site, part gold-trimmed tosh, the best bits are its old town and the park on the other side of the old town hill. The marina is always good for some window shopping and there are some amazing supercars crawling around at 30kph. We were all bizzarely excited to find salad bowls for our lunch.

-we did lots of exploring the old town, walking the prom, walking up the hill to Colline du Château, appreciating Nice’s beauty, charm and climate, completely understanding why generations of British have flocked here in the Autumn: to soak up the sunshine, of course.

-Rosé, of course.

-Oysters, of course.

-Orange trousers, of course.

-Croissants, of course.

-Cocktails at the Negresco Hotel, of course.

-Photo ops, of course.

-Swimming in the sea in November, of course. In yer pants because you forgot your trunks, Nicholas and Julian, of course.

-Ready to go home after four days of fun? About right.

It was soon time to say our goodbyes as Nicholas and Julian headed off to the airport and we headed off to the train station. Here we made an educated guess that there was still a replacement bus instead of a train (despite the fact that there was zero information online or at the unmanned station to confirm this) and that it was picking up across the road from where it dropped us of. Right on both counts, thank goodness. Back up the hill we went, another dicey journey as the bus driver had to contend with lots of downhill-bound trucks, but at least there was no passport checking this time.

In Sospel we bought a hot chicken at the unexpected market on the walk home and were happy to find Davide exactly as we had left him. Happy days. We had a recovery night here: no booze, healthy food and an early night and continued on our way in the morning, back down that blessed hill.

Being back in France feels like coming home. It is a place we have spent a alot of time over the years and our French, although woefully rusty, is infinitely better than our German, Polish, Slovakian, Hungarian, Croatian, Czech,Slovenian or Italian. Being able to communicate completely changes the travel experience and we were looking forward to the next three weeks of mooching up the country.

21st Oct – 29th Oct 2024

In my head, when I have thought about coming to Italy for the first time I have pictured myself in Tuscany. My mental images of the place being a mélange of all the pictures that I have seen online and in magazines, blended with a sense of Provence in a French summer. In my imagination it has been sunny and warm with the tall thin cypress trees and the renovated, tercotta-tiled villas sprinkled across the hillsides groaning with grape vines and olive trees. Some of this was true.

October can be a beautiful month here. The oppressive heat of summer giving way to more benign temperatures in the mid-twenties and the sunshine is theraputic rather than murderous. Or it can be wet and cool. Our experience was mainly the latter, unfortunately.

We headed into the hinterland of Tuscany, which really was beautiful and it reminded us a bit of our home county, Shropshire (autumnal vineyards, fruit laden olive groves, terracotta roofs and hilltop medieval villages aside). The roads were fairly winding and tortuous, giving Nick and Davide a bit of a challenge and making it noisy driving as the contents of the cupboards rattled around. We had a lunch/laundry stop in a town called Bolsena, situated on the lake of the same name. This is the largest volvanic lake in Europe, the last erruption being documented in 104BC. For some reason we were surprised to discover that Tuscany has many large lakes. Most are natural, but there are several reserviors created for hydroelectric porpoises.

Our next stop was a town called Lubriano. This is not only noteable on its own merits as an attractive old town built along the edge of a steep ridge, but it is what it looks at that puts it on the map. Across the gorge from Lubriano sits the curious town of Civita di Bagnoregio.

This is the medieval hilltop town of all medieval hilltop towns. Originally settled by the Etruscans about 2500 years ago, it is perched atop an isolated rocky outcrop in the middle of a wide gorge. Easy to defend, but a nightmare if you want to pop out to the shops…. Unfortunately the rock of the crop is not the hard stuff, it is the ‘tends-to-crumble-over-time-and-wash-away-in-the-rain’ stuff and so the town has become smaller as the centuries pass and bits fall away. It is a shadow of its former self and now has only 16 full time residents. It is, however, still a quite amazing place to see and visit. Since the 1960s it has be accessible by a long and steep footbridge, along which the residents are permitted to whizz up and down on their mopeds at certain times of day. They then transfer to their cars which are parked at the bottom of the hill under the footbridge, popping to the shops still being a pain in the proverbial. The little bar which managed our campsite organised us a ‘shuttle’ so we could go and see Civita, a gnarly 7km road journey away. We went in the late afternoon thereby catching it at sunset. For ‘shuttle’ read ‘some chap called Mario in an ancient car with no outward signs of having any taxi licence or formal status as a passenger carrying vehicle‘. He may have been the father of the lady in the bar. Mario dropped us off and gave us his number so that we could call him for a pick up later. No money changed hands at this point, but we were essentially marooned, so he was confident of his fare.

Civita was quite a marvel. A small toll is charged to walk across the foot bridge to the town and then a steep climb delivers you to the hill top and its warren of narrow streets and ancient buildings. There were a few bars and souvenir shops open for business but it felt very dead. We could see that many of the old homes were now tourist accomodation and that this late in the season, most of these were vacant. There were a few view points of the surrounding valley and hills but the worst view of Civitia is from Civita. We sampled a few wines in one of the bars whilst being amused by the antics of some of our fellow tourists – one can flâneur in Italy too – and waited for the sunset hour. Once it arrived we strolled back down the bridge and found a perch at the bottom to appreciate the town in the changing light.

As we sat there taking our photos we were approached by a woman in her late thirties, who slightly bashfully and in perfect English asked us if we had captured her and her boyfriend in one of our photos as they had walked down along the bridge towards us. Both of their phones had run out of power and they had no photos of themselves here. She asked if we had, could we forward it to her? Nick did his usual trick of extracting an extraordinary amount of information from her in about 10 seconds finding out that she was Swedish (hence the accentless English), her boyfriend was Italian, this was quite a new relationship and she ran a company in Sweden that combats food waste. Yes we had captured them in a photo, but that wasn’t going to cut the mustard! Nick morphed into David Bailey, performing a mini photo shoot for them, with multiple poses, and sent the photos to her later. This was a travel interaction entirely of the modern age. Night finally fell and the town disappeared from view. They do not waste any money on lighting this place up after dark. Happily Mario answered his phone and came back to take us home again.

The next day we headed into Umbria, destination Solomeo. In the past Nick had read an interview with the cashmere business magnate, Brunello Cuchinelli, whose billion euro luxury knitwear empire is still based in this small town where he grew up. Rather than move the factory and adminstative arm to somewhere fancier and more urbane as it grew he decided to plough his money back into the town, building a new, sensitively designed factory here, buying up and restoring the crumbling old town infrastructure to house the offices and provide improved housing and facilities for the locals and his workers alike. He pays well, treats his workers like family, prioritises and promotes work/life balance and has created a small eutopia where once was a dying community. We decided to go and see it. It was a very pretty place, but did not cater to tourists. There was no factory shop, no Cucinelli ‘museum’ and no cafes or restaurants for non-workers. How refreshing in our modern times! It had been a bit of a pointless diversion, and there was no reason to stay here, but we were not upset. We had time to push on to Siena, so back to Tuscany, everybody!

We arrived in Siena an hour or so later and found a place to park within walking distance of the city centre. This was a big, free, multi-purpose car park. The main purposes seemingly being: rat run, lorry parking, camper parking, place for motorbike skills training, place for young people to congregate on their noisy trial bikes and to raz around trying to impress each other. Luckily some heavy late afternoon rain put paid to the noisy youth antics and the rest wasn’t an issue once night fell. The next morning we headed into the city. The rain continued but we were prepared. Siena seems to reside in that Goldilocks sweet spot as a city. It is not too big, not too small. It attracts tourists, but not too many. It has a plenty of old buildings, squares and streets but is not too spread out. Oh and it has the Mother of all Markets.

Siena’s main claim to fame is the Palio. This is a bat sh*t crazy horse race that takes place around the perimeter of its main square in the middle of the old town a couple of times over each summer. There are crowds, grandstands and a ton of imported sand. It is a religion here. It was hard to picture the spectacle of the event on this fairly quiet rainy autumn day but an internet search was informative! We interupted our touristic meanderings to tackle a bit of admin, which was to source a new sim card with data for our router. As the days get shorter our evening streaming hours are increasing and we are deep into Season 2 of Mad Men. What a show! Why have we waited 10 years to watch it? Oh, I know, so that we can binge all 7 seasons without interuption. I strongly recommend that you watch it if you haven’t already.

Around the city their are many statues of a she-wolf suckling a pair of human babies. Legend has it that the young twins, Aschius and Senius (for whom Siena is named), fled to the forest on two horses, one black and one white, after their wicked uncle, Romulus, murdered their father, Remus, and usurped his throne. The children survived by being suckled by the wolf and after they grew up they founded the city. The black and white flag, representing the horses, and the image of the suckling wolf remain potent symbols of the city. But I have questions…

The most obvious is, couldn’t someone have come up with a slightly more original origin story than one that involved a second generation of ‘twin-babies-raised-by-suckling-a-wolf-having-fled-a-murderous-throne-usurping-relative-who-then-went-on-to-found-a-city-named-after-just-one-of-them‘?

And secondly. If they were such young babies that they needed to breastfeed from a wolf for their very survival, how did they manage to ride horses into a forest?

Our Siena mooching was a little dampened by the rain, but there was a ray of sunshine that significantly brightened our day. Porchetta! On our way home we detoured through aforementioned ‘Mother Of All Markets’ which was arranged around the outer walls of the Medici Fortress, in itself quite impressive. This weekly market is the biggest in Tuscany and obviously attracts shoppers from far and wide judging by the number of nearby parked coaches and packed car parks. It was for the most part selling ‘wares’ which mostly describes the plethora of synthethic clothing items that you wouldn’t want to be wearing whilst standing too close to a naked flame, but there were a few food stalls, including a marvellous one selling the opium of the Hampsons, roast pig in a bun. We purchased one each, resisted the urge to just scarf them down there and then, beetled back to the bus, added some cheese, warmed them under the grill and enjoyed our dopamine lunch high in the warm and dry. Mmmmm.

Porchetta devoured we headed back into the countryside and the region of Chianti. Our destination, the small town of Castellina in Chianti, plucked from obscurity on a recommendation from our good friend, Dean, who came here eons ago. The good news about old, rural Italian towns is that they are mostly unchanged by the passage of eons of time, and this was a great spot to stop and visit for a couple of nights.

Think Chianti, think wine. Think of the traditional fiasco, the squat bottles wrapped in straw baskets. Historically this was to protect them during transport and to be able to provide a flat base for the original round bottomed, hand blown bottles. Once synonymous with Chianti, now only a few wine makers bottle wine in fiasci, most having gone to the more standard-shaped bottles. We, of course, directed our wanderings into a cave on the edge of the town.

They had wine production and sales here but no tastings, so with a moderate ‘cart-before-the-horse’ technique of wine buying, we purchased a couple of bottles (including a fiasco) of the local brew here, then found their wine shop in the centre of town in which to do some wine tasting drinking. Here they had one of those self-service wine dispensing machines that takes cards. Coupled with a small plate of nibbles, some interesting chat from our host, and a self guided tour of their small 600 yr old wine cellar, we had a pretty happy hour. At four o’clock in the afternoon.

The symbol of Chianti is the black cockrel. It adorns any and everything deemed to be authentically Chianti. This has its origins in a legend from the Middle Ages when the Republics of Siena and Florence were fighting a bloody war for control of the Chianti area. There was proposed a competition to decide the matter once and for all. On a specified day a knight from each of the towns would ride off at dawn towards each other and the border would be drawn at their meeting point. The start time for this would be dawn, determined by the first crowing of a rooster. Siena chose a white cockrel, who was much pampered and because of this he was happy as Larry, had a lie-in on that day, not waking and crowing until after dawn. Florence chose a black cockrel who was shut in a tiny cage and not fed for several days. He was really pissed off and started shouting about it well before dawn. Thus Florence’s knight had a very cheeky head start and consequently the Republic of Florence took ownership of a much larger chunk of Chianti than Siena, a situation that persists today.

The gloomy and damp weather continued here, slightly curtailing our plans to go for a longer walk but we did get to appretiate the charms of the town of Castillana, explore an unusual nearby cemetry and do some laundry. Sometimes travel is low key.

Our visit to Florence was another of our anticipated ‘big ticket’ destinations of the trip. A place that many people have expressed as being one of the most beautiful cities that they have visited. I was looking forward to it. Our choice of camping spot was heavily influenced by its proximity to the location of the city’s Parkrun, which was to be my last of the trip. The ‘spot’ was a free car park in a residential city suburb that was on a bus route into the centre of Florence. Pretty ideal. We arrived and were lucky to snag the last space big enough for us, pleased not to have had to resort to our non-existant Plan B. We had three nights here, giving us two whole days in Florence and we spent the afternoon organising our plan of attack and booking tickets to the Ufuzzi, the famous art gallery.

Day one in Florence started with the Parkrun that was in a small park a mere 500m from our spot. It was another event where the field was bulked out with a bunch of British tourists. It is amazing how many UK Parkrun enthusiasts turn up at various events elsewhere. The locals are quite bemused but very welcoming. I wonder whether the next 20 years will see the snowballing British enthusiasm for this event be matched in other countries. I hope so.

Post run (no records broken for me) we showered, had brunch and caught the bus into Florence. We were moderately overdressed as the weather improved considerably as the day progressed, but that was better than the reverse situation. Our meanderings took in many of the streets of the old town, random small churches and official buildings. Everywhere you looked there was an impressive statue or a fountain, sometimes combined.

The main sight of the city is the spectacular Duomo, or Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore. Built between 1296 and 1436, its pink and green marble edifices dominate the square in which it sits and its huge octagonal dome, designed by the architect Brunelleschi is still the largest masonry dome in the world. The queue to get in was ridiculous so we just admired it from the outside, as is our usual technique of sightseeing.

We saw the other sights of Piazza della Signoria, Campanile di Giotto, Palazzo Vechio and Ponte Vecchio and on multiple occasions braved running the gauntlet of the market stalls around the Mercato Centrale. More than 50% of the stalls were selling copious quantities of ‘Italian made’ leather goods, but I am not sure how genuine their provenance was. They all looked a bit too samey to me.

We continued our strollings across the river, starting to think about the next meal. Nick had his eyes on another Bourdain establishment, but unfortunately it was shut. By the time we had walked back towards the main central area of the city we were hit with that inescapable truth of eating out in Italian. The good restaurants, catering to locals and serving good quality, authentic food are open for lunch and then dinner. If you are hungry between 3.30pm and 7.30pm then you are in trouble. Either you stay hungry or you are committed to eating at one of the throng of lesser restaurants catering to tourists. We did several laps of the centre, wishing this not to be true, getting hungrier and more irritated with each other, finally caving and picking the least tacky place we could find. It was food, it was disappointing, it was a lesson learnt. We went home.

The next day we were back in the city and during another hour or two of wandering we stopped for a pitstop whilst exploring the indoor Mercato Centrale. On our way round we came across this stall creating cheesy goodness by just rolling cooked ravioli or gnocchi directly inside a round of parmesan. Mmmmm. Despite how lovely this looked we decided that we needed to sample the local delicacy of a lampredotto (tripe) sandwich. This is strips of a cows 4th stomach, slow cooked in a tomato sauce and served in a bun. We shared one between us and caused a fine old mess in the act of passing it backwards and forwards. It was quite tasty, but I think that was mainly due to the sauce. I wouldn’t rush to have another one. In the market the food was served street style, but the drinks were served to the tables by wait staff. It seemed rude not to have a glass of white wine too.

In the afternoon we had tickets to visit The Uffuzi. More acurately titled the ‘Galleria Degli Uffuzi’, this is Florence’s premier art museum and houses the world’s greastest collection of Italian Renaissance art in the enormous U-shaped ‘Palazzo degli Uffuzi’. Originally built in the 1500s as a government administration building, the Palazzo still bears the mark of its origins, with ufuzzi meaning offices in Italian. It also is home to an unfeasibly large collection of sculptures, many from Ancient Greece. It was an epic place to visit, both in quantity and quality of the artworks, and in the sheer size of the building and number of visitors. The info advised allowing 3-4 hours for a visit. We managed to stick it out for 2 hours, doing a moderately abridged ‘rapi-tour’ of the place, dodging the crowds and whizzing past pieces that didn’t interest us. There were some key works by Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Räphael, Carravagio and Leonardoda Vinci, so we feel that we have ‘done’ some greats as well as generally soaking up some culture.

There was also this sculpture that looks uncannily like my father. He said it didn’t look like him as it had no glasses, but I fixed that.

Florence had been lovely, with some quite beautiful sights to behold. We had seen a lot of them and our Old Sh*t appretiation batteries were running very low. Our next planned stop was Pisa. Did we need to see another old city with a tourist-trap hot spot? Mmmm…… Could we really bypass Pisa and its famous tower whilst passing so close by? No, of course not! To Pisa we go!!

We really did just make this a whistle-stop visit. We arrived at lunch time, found the only campsite in the city, settled in and set off walking into the centre mid afternoon. Once we had made our way through the ubiquitous non-scenic, residential neighbourhood of appartment blocks we arrived in the old town and found the river, both of which were charming and beautiful. In fact, I may go as far to say, were generally more pleasing on the eye than Florence.

We initially walked a short distance away from the centre to find ‘Tuttomondo’, a large mural done by the renowned American mural artist Keith Haring. This is on the rear wall of a church and one of the last he painted before his death a few months later from AIDS in 1990.

We walked back to the old town and went to find the tower. This was obviously not difficult. It was just a question of continually walking in the direction where there were more people than where we were at any particular moment in time. We felt like homing pigeons, equipped with an innate talent for navigation.

For all the photos that I have seen of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, I was still quite suprised by it. I was suprised with how small it is, how beautiful it is, how clean and well restored it is, and, most suprisingly, how ‘leany’ it is. I was also suprised by the other two handsome buildings sharing the large Cathedral Square with the tower, namely Pisa Cathedral and the Pisa Bapistry. They both are also worthy of photographs. The whole area has large grassy areas, creating some separation from the crowds and improving the views. The Cathedral and Bapistry also have some degree of subsidence due to their unstable foundations, causing the brain to be slightly confused as to what constitutes the normal horizontal and weirdly, in all my photos the tower seems to be leaning less than it is in real life

I could write a paragraph here about the history of the tower, its lean and the massive job between 1993 and 2001 to correct its tilt from an alarming 5.5 degrees to an acceptable 3.97 degrees, but I am tired of all that history stuff.

We appretiated the buildings and the tower in the light of the setting sun, ate pizzas in a tourist restauarant at 5.30pm, because, well, that was the time we were hungry and we had obviously not learnt our lesson, and then we walked home in the dark.

Our time in Tuscany had come to an end. It had been quite different from how I had pictured it, but marvelous nonetheless. From here we continued northwest, and back to the coast of the ‘Italian Riviera’

13th Oct – 21st Oct 2024

I feel that all our travels through the historic old towns and cities of Europe to date, and all our admiration of ancient churches, castles and streets and squares, has been preparing us for this part of this trip. Like runners preparing for a marathon, we have been in Old Sh*t training. We have put in the kilometers, our gaze has fallen upon many an olden thing. Are we now ready for the main event? We have seen ‘old’, but that was mostly late Middle Ages/Medieval/Renaissance old. Now we were going to experience ‘way older than that‘, and flipping loads of it. All at once. Lace up the shoes, Hampsons, it’s time to visit Rome and Pompeii.

I don’t know who else spent hours of classics lessons in their early teens learning about the tragedy that befell the town of Pompeii on 24th August 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius errupted burying the town under 6m of hot ash and pumice stone and annihilating all its inhabitants with toxic gas, but I did, and this place, and it’s history, is seared into my childhood soul. Nick felt the same. Of course we were going. That Pompeii is one of Italy’s most visited tourist destinations was the moderate downside that we were just going to have to deal with.

We booked a campsite almost next door to the main entrance of the ruins, or scavi as they are known here, and headed across the lower leg of the country to arrive in Pompeii, mid shin, on the Bay of Naples. To get here we had to pass by the Sorrento Peninsula, home of the Amalfi coast. This was a place that we would have loved to see but one that is just not practical in a motor home. Narrow, steep roads and a dearth of flat land make it better suited to a future trip in a convertible car.

As the motorway snaked its way towards the coast and to our destination there it was. Just there. Mount bl**dy Vesuvius! Just an everyday sight for all that live here in its shadow. But to us, a mythical thing. We arrived, installed in camp, and set about our plan of attack for our visit the next day. The reality of visiting the ruins is that unless you book some sort of tour, the queues are riduculous. The other reality is that there are about 57,000 outfits offering tours, of which only a few are highly recommended. We made our choice and booked on line. At the allotted time of our tour the next day we arrived at the meeting point, along with about 100 fellow tourers. This looked bad until we realised that the company had five tours in various languages all starting at the same time. Not so bad.

Our guide was a very tall, angular and dishy Italian chap called Vitale, who had no need of the ubiquitous tour guide prop of an jazzy umbrella or eye-catching scarf tied to the top of a long stick. We just followed his eye catching cheek bones and silky pony tail that soared a foot above the heads and shoulders of all us lesser mortals. Vitale was a font of Pompeii knowledge, it being his job n’all, and expertly guided us through the hoards of other tour groups and folk doing their own exploring, strangley managing to sweet talk us to the front of many queues controlled by lady docents. There was masses to see and a lot of information to take in, so I won’t even attempt to summarise it all here, just share a few factoids that stood out to me.

Did you know….

…that if the wind had been blowing the other way on the day of the erruption it would have been nearby Naples that copped it? As it happened, they barely had to bring the laundry in.

…that the ruins were only discovered in the late 1500s, major excavations only commenced in the mid 1700s and by the 1960s it had been significantly uncovered but then left to decay? There is a new area being excavated as we speak.

…that no actual bodies were found? Those had long since decomposed. What were left were hollow voids in solidified ash. The archeologists made plaster moulds of these, creating models of the people that died. For some reason it still felt weird to take any photos of them.

…that Mount Vesuvius had given plenty of warnings of an imminant erruption in the form of numerous earthquakes? A big one in 62AD had caused lots of damage and fires, leading to many buildings being in a state of partial repair at the time of the erruption and causing many people to have already left.

…that the Romans were quite preoccupied with the images of male genitalia? These were seen as a talisman for good luck and prosperity and were liberally used to decorate their homes. Obviously I had no scrupples about taking any photos of those.

…that inexplicably the brothel is one the most popular buildings of Pompeii with the tourists? It’s just a bunch of rooms, people. No plaster models of victims who died ‘in flagrante’ to be seen here.

…that Pompeii was once a port town, but the erruption changed the topography of the area and it is now 2km from the Bay of Naples?

The whole place is just so amazingly preserved. There are loads of beautiful and detailed frescos and countless excavated homes, restaurants, shops, temples, water fountains, roads, baths, the forum, the Basillica, an amphitheatre. It was also very apparent that the Romans were WAY ahead of the rest of Europe when it came to living standards and personal hygiene.

After our three hour tour ended we dragged our weary bones back to base and considered the rest of our day. It was 2pm. Option one: relax and do nothing. Option two: go to Sorrento in the late afternoon for a mooch around and an early dinner. Option two prevailed. Our well placed campsite was also a mere stone’s throw from the station and an hour and a half later we were on the very full, overheated, standing-room only train to Sorrento.

On arrival we gave the main areas of the old town our usual treatment of ‘walking about’, saw the quite unusual deep ravine right behind the main street that is the site of a now defunct water mill, and then set about finding a spot with a view for a sundowner drink. Lonely Planet did us proud again, leading us to the bar of Hotel Bellevue Syrene which had an amazing terrace and an epic view of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius.

Here we enjoyed the changing light as the sun disappeared behind us, watching the scuttle of boats returning from a day on the water, and drinking some delicious wine. It was very fancy with free nibbles and everything. We offset the sizeable drinks bill with a cheap and cheerful pizza dinner – we are nothing if not adaptable – and the train home, with excess pizza in hand, was another standing-room only affair. We were glad to get home and glad to have managed to have squeezed a little slice of the Amalfi coast into this trip.

From Pompeii we continued north to Rome, by-passing Naples on the way. This motorway journey was busy and frenetic, showcasing the Italian driving attitudes and skills in all their glory. The main facts of the case are: Lots of Italians drive small, economical cars. Perfect for whizzing around congested cities, not so good for making decisive overtaking manouvres or joining motorways at an adequate speed on the ridiculously short slip roads on Italian Autostrada. Italians also don’t worry too much about indicating. That would imply that they are aware that they may be someone behind them to indicate to. Italians handle a car as if it is a droplet of water in a river. The general dynamics of ‘flow’ past and around other objects is the ethos of their driving, rather than conventional ‘rules of the road’. Once these principles are embraced, stress levels whilst driving can fall. Nick is slowly managing to embrace these principles. And so to Rome!

Our Rome camp was a utilitarian place within spitting distance of a tram stop that meant that we were only 20 minutes from the centre of the city. Very handy. We had planned four nights here, so three full days to ‘do’ Rome. We spent the afternoon of our arrival day doing some planning and logistics. What to see. What not to see. Where to eat and when. We hit the guide books and the internet and made some decisions. The first, and hardest, decision was to part with a not inconsiderable amount of money to do a Vatican tour. Trying to see it ‘solo’ involves a lot of time spent in queues and we thought that we’d get much more out of it with the wisdom of a tour guide. This was going to be the one and only Vatican City visit in our lifetime. It was now or never. We bit the bullet and booked a tour for the next afternoon. The other sight that neeeded significant pre-planning for a visit was the Colosseum, next available tickets being the afternoon after that. We also booked a ticket and time slot to go into the Pantheon. All this organising and spending money on tickets and tours was exhausting and alien to our usual ‘wander and admire from the outside’ technique of sightseeing. We needed a lie down.

There is so much to see in Rome and much of what it has to offer is so ancient, so well preserved and so famous that it is quite overwhelming. There are obviously also many, many other people who are here for the same reason and this definitely creates crowds to be endured. We joined the salmon run.

The Vatican is a place of extremes. It is an extremely small country, with only 121 acres of land. It is extremely light on women with only about 5% of its 450 citizens being female. It has an extremely convoluted security and walking route to get in. It is extremely popular with about 6.7 million visitors per year. It is extremely full of priceless artifacts, paintings and sculptures, the collections amassed by various Pontifs thoughout the centuries who spent an extreme amount of money making the place look nice.

The Sistine Chapel was extremely beautiful but so full of people that there was ‘shuffling room’only. It was hard to find a spot to stand still so to be able to look at the frescos and Michelangelo’s famous pieces. Viewing was hard on the neck. The rules of ‘no noise and no photos’ was ignored by many, including me, and I was extremely naughty and took a quick snap. I felt that I had paid enough money and deserved one.

Our tour tickets ensured us a ‘back door’ entry to St Peter’s Basillica thus avoiding a long wait. This is the Catholic Church’s HQ, its flagship store, a main showroom. It is extremely massive. So big that the usual scale of a church or cathedral is lost. There is almost no seating meaning that the space is undefined and open, with huge spans and domes, sculptures and art. Of all of the tour, this was the most impressive bit. Our guide was not permitted to continue the tour inside, so she said her farewell and cut us loose at the enormous door so we could look around by ourselves. We did a loop and then headed for the exit across St Peter’s Square.

The Vatican had been interesting, but not worth what we had spent on the tour. As non-Catholics our visit had not been about faith or pilgrimage, it had been solely about seeing, and what struck me was the embarrassment of extreme wealth that had been tied up over the ages for the use, enjoyment and worship of so few. We wandered back to the tram stop via a rosé pit stop and headed home.

Day two in Rome was a biggie with many kilometers covered on foot. We started our day with a tram and then a bus ride across town to see the Pantheon. On the bus we met a young honeymooning couple from Texas who had come via Florence and Paris. He was bemoaning the lack of good beer in Italy and that the burgers in France weren’t as good as in Texas. We agreed with him wholeheartedly, whilst politely and subtley intimating that perhaps these countries have other marvels of food and drink to offer that might be different from those in Texas. Not sure if he got it. It was very hot and crowded on the bus so we got off early and walked.

The Pantheon. Classical facade with columns, amazing domed circular room. Lots of colourful marble everywhere. Nice and symmetrical. Loved it.

From here we set off across town towards the Forum passing, amongst other things, the Victor Emmanuel ll Monument, aka The Vittoriano/The Typewriter/The Wedding Cake, a veritable spring chicken of a magnificent construction having only been finished in 1935. It is one of Italy’s national monuments dedicated to the first king of a united Italy and houses the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier.

We passed the Largo di Torre Argentina, an archeolgical site uncovered in 1929 that was 20 ft below street level and has the remains of four ancient Roman temples and the site of the Theatre of Pompy, where Julius Caesar was murdered in 44BC. Now it is a cat santuary in which about 200 cats are cared for. All just lying around amongst the ancient ruins, being fed by volunteers. ‘Et Tu, Kitte?’

The Forum is madness. A large gap in the fabric of modern time and space where an ancient Roman time portal sits. It is a massive swathe of the ruins of buldings and arches and columns and squares and temples and roads and ramps and steps and shops. Here was the heart of the city for many centuries. Built and rebuilt, modified and renovated, added to and demolished. A place to meet, trade, govern, judge and worship. Just here. The ancient past poking its head into our present. All those people from the past getting on with their lives in their own present with no idea that we would be so captivated by what they had built, and left behind, so far into the future. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by history.

We did a bit of the Palatine Hill and then needed a sit down and a sandwich which revived us sufficiently to continue cruising around, soaking up more Old Sh*t that I don’t even know the names of. It was everywhere. Ruin here, ruin there. An arch way! A column! A temple! Here was a market place. Over there was a palace. All over the blimin’place. Good job we had trained for this.

Throughout the day we were repeatedly approached by hawkers selling identical bracelets. All young African men, all with the same patter. ‘Nice shoes! Where are you from?’ ‘Have a bracelet for free, I’m celebrating – my wife just had a baby yesterday!’ Classic, basic sales psychology that they obviously all learnt from the same person for whom they were working. It must get results though. We passed many a tourist sporting a wristful of bracelets or being encouraged to look at a photo on a phone that I am sure was a generic newborn baby. We started preempting the patter by complimenting them on their shoes first.

Finally our late afternoon time slot for our Colosseum visit had arrived and we headed there. This is another place that is an ancient history lesson hard-hitter with near mythical status and consequently another very popular spot. We joined the procession around its walls and paid a little extra to be able to get onto the central arena area. It is hugely impressive and we were able to appretiate it in the golden hour of the day. I felt the history time warp here too, being conscious of the past presence of all the people who had sat here and watched the gladiatorial spectacles and all the lives lost for their entertainment. I am a logical, practical scientist type, but sometimes I get a bit adrift on the time contiuum.

Post colosseum we found a bar nearby and had a much welcome sit down and aperitif before walking to our final appointment of the day: dinner at Trattoria Morgana, another Anthony Bourdain destination. We spent the entire meal chatting with our closely situated table neighbour, an Australian called Tess. She too was on a Bourdain pilgrimage and was very good company. The highlight of the meal was a starter of fried octopus on a bed of warm hummus with fresh rosemary. Unexpectedly wonderful. Then we went home, but not before exchanging contact details with Tess and threatening to visit her next time we were in Melbourne.

Day three in Rome took us past the small church of Santa Maria della Vittoria to see a renown sculpture called The Ecstasy Of St Theresa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. This was beautiful with some delightfully kitch golden rays of light reflecting some actual rays of sunlight coming from a hidden skylight. Artistic genius.

We continued up to and through the park of Villa Bourgese and past the National Gallery of Modern Art. We were going to go in, as an antidote to all the Old Sh*t, but decided we didn’t have the cerebral cortex space spare for any major inputs. Confusingly it is located in the the quite old, 17th century building of a former Barefoot Carmelite monastery.

Our wanderings had a lunch purpose from here and the committment to our Anthony Bourdain fandom thinks nothing of making a 4km walking detour to eat at one of his destinations. This time it was ‘Ciaco e Pepe’, an eatery named after its most popular dish. Translating to ‘cheese and pepper’ this simple yet delicious dish comprises solely of spaghetti, or its fatter cousin, tonnarelli, combined with grated pecorino romano and black pepper. The place sold vats of the stuff, rapidly serving up generous €10 portions on a jolly and busy pavement terrace. ‘Fast food’, Roman-style, with a wine on the side of course.

From here (here being a random residential district) we headed back towards the snake pit of the tourist destinations. We headed along, and then over, the River Tiber, then along to Piazza del Popolo, The People’s Square. One of the ancient, main gateways of the city, formerly Flamina, laterly Porta del Popolo stands here. Pilgrims and traders arriving to Rome on the Via Flamina, a road built in 220 BC to link Rome with the Adriatic Sea, entered the city here. Seriously Old Sh*t. The crowds increased as the modern day Via Flamina led us to The Spanish Steps and then we really braced ourselves for a visit to the Trevi Fountain. This suprised me. It was much bigger and more impressive than I had imagined, the scale of it being a bit distorted by the fact that it is in quite a small square. It also was not the Trevi Fountain, it was the Trevi Sculpture, having being emptied for cleaning and maintenance over the Autumn. We tossed no coins and made no wishes. Next summer you will need to book a ticket and time slot to see it.

Finally we headed back towards our tram stop, past the Piazza Venezia, more ruins (or were they the same ruins from yesterday – I wasn’t sure at this point) and went home. We were pooped. We had ‘done’ Rome. Our feet had done about 36km over three days. Our brains were full of facts and mental images. We had taken all the requisite photos. We had eaten some excellent Italian food (they just call it food here). We had sampled the public transport. We had observed the city driving (small cars, lots of them, mostly Smart cars and Fiat Pandas, mostly dented, can park anywhere). We were ready to move on.

There was just one more small thing to do before we left Rome. After all, it was a Saturday morning, so we all know what that means! We saddled up early, and despite the heavy rain, my lovely husband pretended that he was driving a Fiat Panda and bashed through the narrow streets of some suprisingly-busy-considering-it-was-8am-on-a-Saturday-morning residential areas to take me to one of Rome’s two Parkruns. We found the the last available and suitable parking space within a 1km radius of the start, pulled out the coats and umbrellas, and headed to the park. It was a bit of a mud-fest, but the field of 60-odd gave it a good buzz and I puddle-jumped my way round whilst chatting to a German girl, also called Sara. The rain stopped soon after the start so Nick didn’t get too miserable whilst he waited for me and after a quick car park below-knee hose-off we were on our way again.

We headed north into Tuscany and to a curious place that warranted a small detour. Near a village called Saturnia, in the middle of the hills, fields and forests, lies a strange place called Saturnia Hot Springs. As the name might suggest, this is a thermal area, but is unusually fed by a hot cascade rather than a hot spring that bubbles up from below. Consequently it has formed a series of very scenic, terraced hot pools that are hard to describe. It was also hard to take a decent photo, so I have borrowed one from the interweb to show you.

Miraculously it is free, refreshingly undeveloped and although can get busy, there was plenty of space for everyone in a pool somewhere. The pools closer to the waterfall were hotter but busier, so we found an empty pool half way up the terraces and compromised a little on the perfect temperature. There are some lockers and changing rooms but most folk just dumped their bags on the rough banks and then squelched back to the carpark in their towels and wet cozzies. Our camp was about 1.5km away, and plenty of people were walking down to the pools in their robes from where we were. Perfectly normal in this neck of the woods. The nearby village of Saturnia, perched on its hilltop, also got a visit from us. It had the usual offerings of old church, some Roman relics, a quaint square, an old fort and some shops, but lurking amongst the handful of bistros and cafes was a small, unassuming steak restaurant that had found its way onto the list of ‘The best 100 steak restaurants in the world’. Fancy that!

We had a couple of nights here, enough to gather our thoughts after our frenetic city exploits and to give us a little taste of Tuscany, which was the next focus of our trip.

4th Oct – 13th Oct 2024

With the rain finally having eased and blue sky visible again we headed back to the motorway and onwards to Rimini. This was a sleepy sand dune bit of coast until the mid 19th century when it was developed as a beach resort and by the end of the 20th century had morphed into a throbbing mega-resort well known for its boistrous night-club scene. Just what we were looking for, she lied.

The old town, situated slightly back from the beach, has an impressive Roman history, and the film director, Federico Fellini is the city’s most famous son. We stopped for just one night here achieving the following (in chronological order):

Laundry.

A 20 minute walk to the old town. Destination ‘Nud e Crud’, a cafe in the old fishermans’ district of Borgo San Giuliano that does gourmet piadine (toasted flatbread sandwiches) as recommended by Lonely Planet. Delicious.

A walk around the French themed market that was set up in the square. We caved and bought chocolatey marshmallow treats that ended up being less tasty than they looked.

A cycle out to the beach to view the mega-resort. It was very quiet and all the beach clubs were closed and packed up for the season. Unfortunately the mini-golf was closed too. Tragedy.

Sleep. Despite the din of more heavy rain overnight.

Rimini Parkrun. This was back near the lunch spot of yesterday and had the impressive backdrop of a 1st century Roman bridge. The rain had stopped but it was cold and quite squelchy underfoot. The small field of 24 was half British and I didn’t come last! Nick was a bit of a popsicle by the time I finished.

Rimini market. A weekly,sprawling affair offering mainly clothes that we navigated through on the way back from the Parkrun. I found a stall selling pre-loved knitwear and am now the proud own of an over sized, hand knitted Bolivian wool jumper that spent two days in the freezer before being allowed in the cupboard. It will need to be subzero before I can consider wearing it without risking hyperthermia.

From Rimini we headed south down the east coast, putting in a relatively long day on the road for us. It was motorway all the way and we passed through the region of Marche and into Abruzzo. The further south we went, the more olive groves there were. We stopped for two nights in a random coastal town called Cologna Spiaggia in which we found a small cheap beachfront camp in amongst the large expensive beachfront camps. This was overseen by an old chap called Fransisco who spoke no English and who took some money from us, but, in retrospect, I don’t think enough. The place had a comfortable unkemptness, bordering on the shabbby, but all this was forgotten when looking at the sea and listening to the waves. The sun was shining and the cold dankness of the past few days melted away. We spent our time sitting, reading, walking and chatting to neighbours. It was tempting to consider not moving for a week but we managed to drag ourselves away and continue south.

Another longish day on the road brought us through the region of Molise and into Puglia. Here we stopped at the coastal town of Trani, another reasonably randomly selected spot that entirely fullfilled the remit. It was a coastal town not far off the motorway with a pretty harbour, a few impressive old buildings and a cheap, secure camper park a short walk away from it all.

We strolled to the waterfront in the mid afternoon, the day still hot and sunny, appretiating the seafront fortress, the enormous church and the slightly faded, ornamental park along the way. Only about half of the harbourfront eateries and bars were open and as the sun disappeared in the west the rest were cast into a rapidly cooling shade.

There was one bar on the harbour wall that clung to a slither of fading sunlight and we beetled there for a sundowner apperitif before heading home. It seems that only a short time has passed since we were seeking shade when sitting outside. In October we are like lazy cats, basking in any pool of sunshine that we can find. As dusk settled in we walked back along the harbour’s edge and discovered the low-key fresh fish market. The fishing fleet had returned and was directly selling its catch from the dockside. It looked amazing, but we had to resist any purchases. Small space and messy/smelly fish cooking not ideally suited. Better in the BBQ era of this trip.

From Trani we continued south for a while then cut inland into the Itria Valley. The landscape was rocky with softly rolling hillsides, covered almost exclusively in olive groves. This whole swathe of Italy is groaning with olive trees, as far as the eye can see. Unfortunately, there was another unexpected and disappointing thing that Puglia is groaning under the weight of, and that is litter. This beautiful countryside is cursed by fly tipping and every layby, roadside, and ditch is full of rubbish. Often this is bagged up, or spilling out of a bag, making it obvious that it has been deliberately dumped rather than carelessly discarded out of a car window. It was depressing and infuriating. There seems to be an apathy here about changing the situation. The authorities not investing any manpower into doing clean ups and the people not making any effort to tidy up their own imediate environments. I think they are all blinded to the situation now. It is a shame.

Our first port of call was Alberobello, a small town with a big drawcard. Trulli houses. The whole area is dotted with them but Alberbello has the biggest concentration in one place. Apparently about 1500. A trulli house is a small round limestone building built in dry stone construction with a conical shaped roof. They are often in adjoining clusters, each one forming a room of a dwelling or a farm building. They look like charming hobbit houses and it is impossible not to take photos of them.

We managed to stay close to the centre of the town in a place that was part car park, part olive grove run by a chap that looked like a southern Italian version of a young Alexei Sayle. It was only a short walk from here to the trulli house/tourist trap area so no time was wasted before we were able to imerse ourselves in the crowds. Most of the trulli are now converted into tourist tat shops/retaurants/bars but some entrepenurial owners were just opening their propertiesfor tours, either by payment or ‘donation’. They are all interconnected by narrow walkways and passages and (commerce aside) the whole place was quite magical. The place was crawling with ‘Insta-ready’ young things, fully made up with flowing tresses, flouncing around in neutral tone garb, pouting and photographing the sh!t out of themselves. (Next stop a lavender field in Provence, darling!) We were bemused, as usual, as to the world of social media and its driving forces, reduced to quietly mocking them all for our own personal entertainment. Perhaps that is its point!

We spent a day a’bike, cruising through the country lanes of the area, visiting another couple of noteable and scenic towns along our way, Martina Franca and Locorotondo. Both were situated on hills and both had handsome old towns with mazes of narrow lanes and impressive, ancient old churches and predominantly white or pale buildings. We had lunch of a meat platter and burrata salad washed down with a couple of glasses of chilled Pinot Gris in Martina Franca and chocolate ice creams with a view in Locorotondo. Like a progressive dinner. But for lunch. On bicycles. Our little, suspension-free, electric bikes are not the perfect machines for long distance cruising on uneven roads but they do the job and it was (mostly) a very enjoyable 40km in the saddle.

On our onward journey from Alberobello we stopped at another very scenic, hilltop, white, ancient village, Ostuni.

A brief hour and a half’s wander was sufficient to appretiate its charms, including sampling its local, sweet, custard-filled delicacy, Pasticotti. It was very warm (27 dec C) and rather than staying here for the night, we decided to escape the hoards and the heat and headed to the nearby coast.

Here we found a beach side, free parking spot in a small faded seaside resort called Specchiolla and had what was probably our final sunbathe on the beach/dip-in-the-sea experience of the season.

This was slightly marred by an unpleasant interaction with a mother and young daughter who not-so-subtley sidled up to our bag on the beach whilst we were in the water. Their complete incompetance as thieves gave me opportunity to dash out of the water like a charging hippo and confront them before they could make off with Nick’s phone and my underwear. Their feeble ‘what us?’ expressions and whatever the f**k bullshit Italian excuses they mumbled not convincing me as to their innocent intentions. We moved a significant distance down the beach and kept our beady eyes on them. This has been our only disagreeable experience with people in 6 months, so not bad going.

The next day we made our final push south towards the town of Lecce, into the heel of the Italy’s boot. We didn’t make it all the way there, feeling that we probably had seen plenty of old and beautiful towns for the time being, instead heading for a place in the middle of nowhere. Parco Naturale Regionale Bosco e Paludi di Rauccio. This was not a random destination. This was Friday and the place was the site of a Parkrun tomorrow morning. The road here took us through many more olive groves that looked different from the others. The fat-trunked, elderly, ‘grandfather’ olive trees had all been cut back, removing all the branches containing foliage. Some had had time to resprout, others were still naked. Scattered amongst these groves were newly planted ones. I found out later that this pollarding was to try and salvage trees affected by disease. Sometimes it works, sometimes the trees succumb and need replacing.

The last 2km of the road was gravel with deep pot-holes, giving everything in the cupboards, and us, a good old rattle. There may have been some expletives from the ‘non-Parkrunning’ member of our contingent as we bounced down the track. It was worth it though, when we arrived at the deserted parking area which was in the middle of a peaceful swathe of olive trees and scrub land. Nearby was a lesser used picnic area with a few overgrown facilities and initially it felt a bit like the setting for the opening scene of an episode of CSI where exploring teenagers make a grizzly discovery. The reality was that this was a supremely peaceful spot that we only shared with one other (distantly parked) camper that night. There was a beautiful sunset, lots of wildlife noises, and aside from a few pesky mosquitos, was one of our favourite camping spots of the trip.

It was also the location for mainland Europe’s most southerly and most remote (ie furthest from another Parkrun) Parkrun. The start line was a very convienient 10 metres from where were were camping and although it was 11 km from the main civilisation of Lecce, it attracted a field of about 12 people, half of which were British/Irish tourists. This was a gem of an event run by the very friendly Saverio, with his mum as the only other volunteer and official cake baker. The after-run breakfast of cakes and pastries was fully attended by the participants as barcode scanning did not happen until after we had all assembled and had a plate of sweet treats in our hands. One British couple have a second home in Italy 110km away and come every week they are here to do this run, supplying baked goods too. An Irish, Parkrun-committed, holidaying couple paid a taxi driver to bring them here from their accomodation 50km away, to wait for them and take them back again. Got to admire the passion!

At about 11am, with blood sugar levels running high and much post-run chat under our belts we said our goodbyes and headed off. Our day’s journey took us past the port-city of Taranto and into the region of Basilicata where it was immediately obvious that the attitudes to litter and the investment into keeping the place tidy were very different than in Puglia. It was a relief. Our next destination was the ‘jewel’ of Matera.

Noteable not just for the fact that it was a set location for an epic car chase in the most recent Bond movie, No Time To Die, this is Italy’s oldest, and possibly the world’s third oldest, continuously occupied settlement, there being evidence of habitation here since about 7000 years ago. The original people made their homes in natural limestone caves in the sides of the gorge of the Gravina river and countless subsequent generations dug more caves, embellished and elaborated original caves and created a village clinging to the gorge sides, complete with cave churches, homes and businesses.

The caves, or sassi, were mostly single room dwellings and the living conditions of the people occupying them into the middle of the 20th century were dire compared to the improving standards of modern life. They were deemed to be the ‘Shame of Italy’ and the sassi dwellers were removed from their homes.

Recent decades have seen the gentrification of the sassi areas and such was the turn around in its fortunes it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a magnet for those hunting an achingly beautiful and intensely interesting place to visit and stay.

It is a very special spot that is difficult to do justice to with our snaps. Search out better ones on line, or even better, come here yourself. Avoid the summer months and definitely stay for sunset. It was even more beautiful as the light fell and the lights came on. Around every corner there was another view, a busker playing beautiful music and a narrow lane leading to another set of steps and another view. It was gorgeous.

There was the expected crowds of daytrippers and but we found a very stylish little hotel bar away from the mêlée for a sit down and a drink. Initially this was on their terrace and then we moved inside as it cooled down. The small foyer/breakfast room/lounge area was a renovated, white-washed cave dwelling no longer displaying any of the poverty that was of such concern in the 1950s. We were quite taken with the space and decided that it would be a perfect spot for a private party.

As we travel around Italy we are building our fantasy future itinerary. Where would we return to if we were to fly in and travel around in a convertible hire car? So far Venice was the only place firmly on the list. Matera has just been added.

And to finish off, a few other random snaps to share…

24th Sept – 4th Oct 2024

It was time to head to Lake Garda in preparation for a main event. As part of the celebrations for his 50th birthday this summer Nick’s cousin, Kris, wanted to come and find us on our travels. Many iterations of what this might look like, where this might happen and who it might involve were brainstormed and the final result was: Kris and Rick (Nick’s middle brother) would come out to Lake Garda for a weekend and we would rent an apartment for two nights. There would be a soupçon of sightseeing, some larking about in the lake, a plethora of perambulations, an excess of eating and a deluge of drinking. Nick and his two brothers grew up with Kris, their adult relationship cemented by a closely shared childhood. Their Whatsapp group is called’ The Four Hamigos’ and their common genetics undeniable. Despite their arrival into middle age, whenever two or more of them congregate, especially after a period of separation, there is a transmutation of their beings into a single entity. This morphing of man-flesh is always well fuelled and well lubricated and, especially if the quantity of accompanying Mrs Hampsons is low, there is the possibility of mayhem.

Accomodation was secured, their flights were booked and we opted to arrive a few days early to do some pre-planning and make sure we had a good place to leave Davide. Our stay was to be in the slightly unusually named area of Sportsman-Ceola, a small settlement with a big hotel and some appartments that is located on the easterly shore of the lake, equidistant between the towns of Garda and Bardolino, an easy 30 minute drive from Verona airport. The other thing that this area offered us was a big, reasonably priced, lakeside car park that allowed overnight camper vans and had the requisite services of water and drainage. It was only 200m from the appartment so provided a nearly perfect solution to the problem of what to do with Davide whilst we having our ‘nights on dry land’. Our only mild stress as we headed there was not knowing if there would be space for us. Our fears were unfounded as we pulled in and secured one of the best spaces, a mere stone’s throw from the lake.

There were about ten or so other campers, strategically occupying alternate parking bays at this more desireable end of the car park. This meant that we all had a bit of elbow room and although small cars might park between us between us if got busy, there was no space for campers to fill in….or so we thought! Later in the afternoon we strolled the very short distance to the lake shore and its small, grassy public beach to admire the view and check out the water access. Our ten minute absence coincided with the arrival of another camper (Italian, need it be said) that had heroically, and ludicrously, parked in the space next to us. It was even orientated so that its door opened exactly level with our door, and so close that there was not space to open either door without hitting the other. This was maddness as there were loads of other spaces. We gave them a knock and politely, but firmly suggested in our best sign language and simple English that they move. They acquiesced without a fuss and moved about 10m into a free area. We offered our best ‘Grazie mille!’ and we all got on with our days. It was unfathomable that they would have arrived, surveyed the car park as a whole, looked at the tiny gap next to us and thought “Yup, that’ll be good for us”, even if they weren’t considering how it might affect their prospective neighbour. I think that this episode sums up the Italians quite well (as far as I can make sweeping judgements on a whole nation of people having only been here a few weeks). They sail through life and space with a strong emphasis on their own sphere of existance rather than worrying too much on the opinion or needs of others outside this sphere. Their personal spheres are small spaces and they are used to butting up against each other, not really getting upset by it, or being called out for it. This also quite acurately describes their attitude to driving.

We had a few days before the boys arrived and it was a great opportunity to get orientated and explore the locale. As mentioned, the car park was right on the lake front, with only a hedge, the lakeside promenade and a small grassy area between us and the water. The weather was still amazing so we took the opportunity to get the paddle boards out again a couple of times, leaving them inflated and tucked under the van ready for the weekend. We also explored Garda and Bardolino, both about 2km away in opposite directions along the promenade, and hunted out a spot for dinner on Saturday evening. We settled on Bardelino and asked at a few choice restaurants if we could book a table. They all advised that they did not take reservations at this time of year as it was getting quieter and it was easy to get a table. (We shall return to this.)

I also managed to get a haircut in these few days. That was an interesting experience. By virtue of our lack of shared language, my hairdresser and I barely communicated. There was a small amount of sign language to acertain roughly what I wanted, then I white-knuckled it in silence as she wielded scissors, thinners and clippers. All was fine in the end and I left happy. Ah, the lesser known adventures of travel.

Soon it was time to check into our accomodation and we had a couple of hours before the scheduled arrival of the Rick and Kris who were driving from the airport. The appartment was perfect. It had three bedrooms, a good communal space and a great terrace with lake views. It was only a five minute walk from Davide and we made the journey looking like homeless people, laden down with reuseable shopping bags full of clothes and provisions. I also took all our laundry, never one to look a gift washing machine in the mouth. We had bought some 50th birthday decorations for Kris, so bunting needed to be put up and balloons needed inflating and we also put together a platter of nibbles and made preparations for welcome cocktails. Add to that the fact that we had been substituting lake swims for actual washing over the past few days, we also needed to shower. It was a busy few hours.

Soon they were with us and the party began. The terrace was the perfect spot for sundowner drinks and snacks and later we headed to the very closely situated, lakeside pizzeria for dinner and beers. This was a magical spot, a place that you would travel to, and it was right on our doorstep. The rest of the evening played out fairly predictably with much liquid enhanced merriment and I retired to bed and left them to it.

There was a predictably slow start to the next day and it was midday before we left the building and strolled along the lake front to Garda.

It was a beautiful day to soak up some Italian autumn sunshine, sit in a waterfront cafe, rehydrate and watch the world go by, with most of the world here coming in Germanic form. They seem to make up 95% of the visitors to this area.

The rest of the afternoon was spent enjoying the lake itself. The appartment complex we were staying in had its own little private, grassy beach and a jetty so we grabbed the paddle boards and played in and on the water for a few hours.

The evening saw us washed, dressed and strolling in the other direction to Bardolino for dinner. On the way we stopped at another lakeside bar for a sunset drink and then headed to town.

May I just say here….’quieter at this time of year’, my ar$e. The place was heaving. We struggled to find a suitable restaurant, but we did prevail, settled ourselves into our outdoor seats under the large umbrellas in a courtyard and had just about ordered our drinks when the mother of all storms hit the town. There was thunder and lightning, torrential rain and hail and it was only because that we were in a sheltered courtyard that the wind did not blow everything away. 90% of the other diners decamped inside, but we were brave and managed to (mostly) stay dry under our umbrella.

The place was in chaos, the wait staff abandoning any hope of clearing up whilst until the storm passed over, concentrating instead on keeping tabs on who had moved to where. It was quite exciting. Our food was good, the wine excellent and the company sublime, obviously! We had the obligatory grappa digestif that was dispensed from a comically oversized glass bottle that was entrusted to me to hold for a moment. It was a nervous few seconds!

The wild weather was all done and dusted by the time we walked home and there was no repeat of the late night drinking as the boys realised that they are all middle aged men now and they cannot do it two nights in a row. That and the fact that they had drunk the entire weekend’s supply of booze on the first night.

Sunday morning saw clearer heads and an earlier start. We drove up the lakeshore in Kris and Rick’s rental car to the town of Malcesine. Here there is a cable car that goes to the summit of Monte Baldo giving a great view of the lake, the mountains and, if one is so inclined, a place to jump off and parapont. It was, of course, busy, but the lines moved with acceptable speed and within the hour we found ourselves at the top.

Here we appreciated the beautiful view, took snaps, watched paraponters and found a moderately challanging 5km loop to walk. It was a gorgeous day, last night’s rain having cleared away the haze. We were on a bit of a schedule as Rick and Kris had a flight to catch in the evening so we beetled back down the hill and drove back towards home. Our final destination was the superbly located Ristorante San Vigillio. This sits on a small promentory, co-located with a beautiful hotel that Kris and family had stayed at in the not too distant past. He thought it would be an excellent place for a late lunch and he was so very right.

The shady tables were crammed onto a stone built dock and overlooked the lake and the comings and goings of the small harbour here. The swankier customers can arrive by boat and be collected by a small tender. It was very chi chi and Kris treated us.

Finally it was time to get back to the appartment and for the UK contingent to head back to the airport. One major plus point of this appartment was that it offered a third night free, so Nick and I had a night to ourselves before we reversed the trip back to Davide, laden down with shopping bags filled with our possessions, including four loads of clean laundry. It had been a very fine weekend.

From Lake Garda we headed to Maranello. It would not be possible to bring my car obsessed husband to this vague area of Italy without a visit to the Ferrari museum, even if he is not particularly a Ferrari nut. We found a place to camp that was a short cycle out of town and spent a day in and around the birth place of the Prancing Horse. The day started with a non-Ferrari themed activity, a visit to a mobile phone provider. Here we procured an Italian data-only sim card to power our on-board wifi, our UK provider having changed their roaming T&Cs and effectively cut us off. Thanks for the memories, but we need Netflix….We will work out what to do in France when we get there.

Next we cycled to the museum. The area around here has loads of businesses offering Ferrari hourly rentals and ‘joy rides’ and every stretch of moderately straight bit of road circling the town has an excited Ferrari fan in a merch baseball hat behind the wheel of one of his dream cars, giving it ‘the beans’ and making ‘the noise’. The cars are a variety of models but all red, of course. Not many petrol heads arrive at the hallowed ground of Italian motoring by bicycle, consequently there was no bike rack to be seen so we just left ours in pride of place outside the front door.

The museum was, as expected, full of lovely, shiny, mostly red, examples of exquisite automotive engineering. They had a good selection of past Formula 1 cars too. And lots of trophies. It was impressive.

After here we did a ‘cycle by’ of the original factory site, complete with iconic signage and then tried to get a look at the test track. This was unsuccessful, but we did spy something in camouflage livery as it was leaving.

Next we headed in a vague south easterly direction through the region of Emelia-Romagna, location of recent rain deluges and internationally reported flooding. We have felt quite lucky that the timings of our travels have kept us safe from the weather chaos both here and further north in Austria. Our next destination was a small, non-descript town up a valley out of Imola. The reason for this? Another Bourdain pilgrimage site. The town, Borgo Tossignano, is home to a small, meat-focused family run eatery called Fita Trattoria.

Our route through Imola brought us right past the back entrance of the Formula 1 circuit: ‘Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari’. We stopped, de-bussed, and pressed our faces to the chain link fence, catching the end of a race of Ferrari 360 GTs. Just a normal thing to do in this neck of the woods…

In Borgo Tossignano we found a free car park by a park and a river that had very obviously been quite affected by the recent floods. It was a short walk from the restaurant and we headed there that evening for dinner. Having faithfully practiced the Italian for ‘Good evening, I have a reservation at 7.30pm in the name of Nick’, we were the first to arrive in the restaurant and before even the word ‘Buon’ was out of our mouths, the owner said “Ah, you must be Nick!”. Is it so obvious that we are not Italian? Yes. It absolutely is. The whole experience of the evening was splendid. In the middle of the small space there was a glass fronted meat fridge stuffed full of great slabs of cow-sides, a butchers block and an open fire.

We were taken to the fridge and chose our steak based on a ‘meat tasting’ of slivers of raw meat. A huge T-bone was then hewn from the slab, weighed to calculate its price, then cooked to perfection on the open fire. Our host refused to serve us a potato side dish (too much food he said, quite correctly), did serve us some very tasty and very cheap red wine and was very entertaining. We shared our table with a couple of friendly Italian chaps who included us in their football watching on the ipad propped up on the table between us, ending the evening with swapped telephone numbers and an invitation to Jerry’s ski pad in Cortina. Oh, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. What have you done? See you in February!!

We heroically ate a phenomenal amount of our beautiful steak and still had some to take home.

Heavy rain started overnight and we vacated the flood zone before there was any sniff of the river rising again. Our next stop was a village up another valley, this time one that was slightly elevated and with no river to worry about. Brisighella is another one of I Borghi più belli d’Italia, a fine example of a medieval village on the slopes of the Apennines. Here there are vineyards and olive groves, with fine olive oil being one of its best known products. The town is scenically overlooked by three structures built atop three rocky hilltops: a fort, a clock tower and a church.

We had another solo car park camping site and there was relentless monsoonal rain. There was no prospect of it easing so we bit the bullet, dug out the coats, hats and boots and set out to explore.

I am sure this beautiful place can often be busy with people in their quests for the perfect photograph, but today we had it to ourselves. There was a misty quietness over the hills and a slippery deadliness on the uneven cobbles and steps.

We managed not to come a cropper as we climbed two of the three hills and meandered through the back streets, all whilst the rain poured down. One short moment of relief from the deluge was walking down a 700 year old covered walkway, evolved from one of the town’s defensive walls which became a commercial thoroughfare serviced by cart-pulling donkeys. Hence its name: Via degli Asini (Donkey Street).

From here, with a shower cubicle full of wet clothes, coats, hats and boots and a fleeting yearning for a normal life in a house with a utility room and a tumble dryer we headed to the coastal town of Rimini.

29th Aug – 14th Sept 2024

The transition from Southern Germany into Austria is a subtle one. That statement would probably horrify both Bavarians and Austrians, but to the untrained eye and ear there are far more similarities than differences. The terrain was the same, the homes looked the same, the language on the signposts was the same. It was only really the greater proportion of Austrian licence plates on the vehicles that gave it away. Our next stop was Salzburg and our travel distance across the border between camps was about 25km which took only about 25 minutes. A brief moment in time. We arrived fairly early in our campsite, which was essentially a glorified field with an exceptional view of some hills, and a restaurant, about 5km outside the city centre. The recent rains had bogged down several areas of the site, which the owner had cordoned off, but due to our early arrival, and a bit of luck we managed to land a pitch on the edge of the cordon thereby giving us a ton of space. It was still busy on the days that we were here and everyone else was crammed into the central area. We felt like Lord and Lady Muck. Again.

Salzburg is a very impressive little city. It is dominated by its castle which stands high upon a rocky bluff casting shade on the cluster of impressive slabs of architecture nestled at its base, sandwiched between it and the river Salzach. It is a very small, dense offering of Old Sh*t. With its wealth built on the back of its salt mines, it is still a very rich place, reflected in the calibre of its resident’s cars and the shops on the main retail street. One thing that Bavaria and Austria share is their non-ironic love of their traditional dress. Lederhosen for the men and an outfit of a full skirt with apron worn with a décolletage-honouring blouse and bodice combo. There are multiple outfitters selling the garb, which is locally handmade and priced accordingly. A pair of lederhosen, the decorated leather knee-length shorts, will set you back €1500-2000. The outfits are often worn ‘for best’ at formal events like weddings and funerals and are seen as a completely normal part of one’s wardrobe.

Aside from our usual sightseeing routine of ‘walking around’ we did actually pay to go into the castle. The views from it over the city were just too good to forgoe. That and the climb up to it was too steep to squander. Salzburg is a city of cyclists and there was an amazing bike path along the river to deliver us into the heart of the city from our campsite.

The other thing that we did here was to catch up with a person that I have known since 1991, when she was the 12 year old little sister of my best friend in Uni. 33 years later Izzy is an Austrian resident of ten years having married local boy, Patrick, and moved to Salzburg for love. The past decade and some has made her fluent in Austrian German and a mum of two. She has never looked back. Our paths have crossed very infrequently since Katie and I graduated, but we did reconnect two and a half years ago at Katie’s wedding. We met at the local brewery, Steigl, for lunch, which also has a great view over the city by virtue of its location at the base of the castle. A very enjoyable three hours was spent chatting over our meal, getting to know Patrick and their kids better and filling in the yawning chasms in our knowledge of each others lives that the intervening 30 years had created. The kids were delightful and very well behaved. A credit to them both. They shared a particularly exciting event of the previous 24 hours…securing tickets to the reunion tour of Oasis next year. Patrick, a forever fan, was pleased as punch!

The other things that Salzburg is known for: it was the birthplace of Mozart in 1756. There are numerous places of Mozart interest throughout the city. We limited our visitations to a statue. Also it was the setting, and filming location of the 1965 movie, The Sound Of Music, which in its day became the highest grossing movie of all time. If you adjust for inflation, it still holds the number 6 spot today. Interestingly, if using the inflation adjusted metric, Gone with the Wind still reigns supreme, with Avatar in second. Also of interest is that neither Nick or I have ever watched The Sound of Music and saw no need to visit any set locations or museums relating to it. I think we cycled past the villa used as the set location for the Von Trapp family home by accident as it was near our camp site, but that was only on the far more interesting mission to find the vending machine that sold cheese and wine. It is a civilised country that dispenses these items in such a fashion. Forgot to take a photo.

During our stay here I managed to do another Parkrun. The Hellbrun event was in a beautiful park an easy 4km cycle from camp. It was another hot morning and I clocked another snail’s pace time, although the slightly bigger field meant that I wasn’t tail-end-charlie again. My ‘photo with the sign’ was taken at the finish, hence the sweaty strawberry vibe.

There was also this tractor and trailer transporting a brass band around the neighbourhood. They were busking for charity. They got €5 from me, although I have no idea what the charity was!

Our onward trip through Austria took us east to the the utterly delightful Salzkammergut region and Attersee, one of the region’s lakes. The combination of a new paddle board to play with (and to justify the purchase of), a good weather forecast and a sneaking suspicion that this might be a lovely place to spend some time prompted us to head here. Again, we just pitched up without booking anything, beacause nowhere would take reservations for less than a four night stay. The campsite that we chose was right on the lake and, it transpired, very popular. Most of the non-permanent sites were quite small and crammed together, leaving more than half of the camp assigned to permanent pitches. We were lucky in several regards: 1) they had ‘one last space’ for our requested 3 night stay and 2) it was located in a funny triangular ‘overflow’ area that was wedged between three permanent caravans. It would have been very close quarters with no privacy, except that it was mid-week and they were all empty, so we were again, like Lord and Lady Muck, with tons of space, whilst our fellow campers were wedged in like sardines. Also 3) The lake was stunningly beautiful and warm and 4) the weather was magnificent. Somehow this didn’t feel like being in Austria. The water was warm, a stunning turquoise colour and apparently so clean that you drink it directly.

The lake was ringed by hills and mountains covered with forests, dotted with farms and villages and and with suprisingly little development. Attersee is one of Austria’s biggest lakes, and the largest to be contained entirely within its borders, rather than shared with other countries.

The Austrian composer, Gustav Mahler loved it here and spent many a summer on Attersee. It was such an inspiration for his work that he even had a small ‘composing hut’ constructed on the lake shore. Here he would spend the mornings locked away with his piano and he wrote his second symphony here. The hut is still standing and where as it was originally in a random field, it is now a micro museum contained in this campsite.

Our stay here was all about being on the lake. We are conscious as August gives way to September that the ‘bikini days’of summer are coming to an end. All opportunities to labour over a paddle board pump and inflate the boards, slap on some factor 30 and set off onto the blue yonder should be taken where offered. My nice new board has been a great purchase, Nick’s board continues to slowly disintergrate and bulge in odd places but is still hanging in there. His paddle handle broke though, thus rendering it useless. Luckily we had a spare. It was a wrench to drag ourselves away from the lake, but the show must roll on.

We continued north-east, to the northern city of Linz, and found ourselves back on the mighty Danube River. Now we were only 72km from the Czech town of Ceske Krumlov, where we had been 6 weeks ago. Linz is Austria’s third largest city and a centre for the arts and for conferences and congresses and such. It may not suprise you to hear that it is old, having originated as a Roman fort in the first century, been first documented as a place called ‘Linz’ in 799, and granted city rights in 1324. And bla, bla, blah. Now we are here. Why? Because it was on the way to where we were going. Where’s that? Never really sure….

So we arrived and due to the derth of near-city campsites (which normally means that not many campers stop in a place, which usually means that there isn’t a major ‘tourist attraction’) we camped about 12km out of the city in a small neighbouring town called Ottensheim. This was also on the Danube, or Donau as it is known here, and linked to the city by bus/train/river and cycle path. The cyle path is part of the epic Danube Cycle Trail, a cycle route that follows 1200km of the Danube from Donaueschingen in Germany to the Hungarian capital of Budapest.

We had a day in Linz having cycled along the river path to get there, a very leisurely 50 minute journey. The city was in the middle of a week’s long arts festival with the main exhibitions in the modern art museum, but with other pop up installations in squares and churches. We happened upon a few of these, including the one in the main square. This consisted of a tall, free-standing scaffolding tower up which one climbed to find a mirror lined box at the top into which one stepped to be confronted with multiple images of oneself, rather than the quite impressive elevated view. Deep. The nonsensical, self indulgent blatherings that accompany artworks could be scrapped. I’ll do it.

Due to his feeling ‘a bit iffy’ about heights, Nick opted not to make the climb, thus missing out on how the artist created a thunderclap of commentary on modern existance in aluminium and mirrors: We are all very self absorbed. See, I am good at this.

Linz felt like a pretty normal place. There was a handsome old town, but it was functional and not a pastiche. There were trams and bicycles, a boring castle, back streets, shops, a university and freed from the perils of mass tourism, the happy locals seemed to be just getting on with life. Yes, there were some cycle tourers, and yes, the odd river cruise boat stopped here but mostly it felt calm and serene and rather nice.

For lunch we succumbed to another meatloaf sandwich in an eaterie called Leberkas-Pepi that sold little else but meatloaf sandwiches, served simply as a slab of meatloaf in a bun and no condiments. It was doing brisk business with a queue snaking out of the door. Always a good sign. We were not disappointed.

We also purchased a small Linzer torte on our wanderings. This traditional pastry, a form of shortbread topped with fruit preserves and sliced nuts with a lattice design on top, is apparently the oldest cake named after a place, the oldest receipe having been dated back as far as 1653. We were good and took it home to have after dinner, rather than just chowing it down on a street corner. It was a little disappointing. A bit dry.

Our journey home was one of the highlights of our trip so far. Rather than cycle back we booked ourselves onto the small excursion boat that does the 30 minute trip up and down the river between Linz and Ottensheim. This was the closest we were going to get to a Danube cruise for the foreseable future. It transpired that we were only the passengers on our trip, so having lashed the bikes to the railing we settled in to enjoy our journey. The sun was shining, the river was majestic and we had a private cruise. It couldn’t get any better….but wait….it DID get better, because there was a self-service mini bar on board and we could enjoy our voyage with a cold beer in hand. Now that’s a civilised way to get home!

Our camp in Ottensheim was slightly unusual, being in the grounds of restaurant that was co-located with a small tennis club. We sacrificed a scenic outlook for the sake of some shade and parked up close to the outdoor courts in the shadow of the large building housing the indoor court. This meant that we were essentially courtside and our late afternoon entertainment involved sitting on our camp chairs outside Davide watching players of all levels of talent and expertise playing their games. There were some shots that deserved a round of applause, and that’s exactly what they got from us. Not sure how much they appretiated the unexpected ‘crowd’!

Our exit from Linz involved an early start as I managed to sneak in another Parkrun on the way out. This was a very laid back affair with the small field and two officials only really assembling at about 5 minutes before the start. I was pretty sure was in the right place, but it was a bit disconcerting. This event is called Donauradweg – Danube Cycle Path – and that exactly describes the course: Starting under a large bridge it went 2.5km down the riverside bike path, turned around and come back again. It was straight, fully tarmac and very flat. A perfect place to get a PB if one is in that game. The small field seemed to be comprised mainly of lean, lanky, fast looking chaps, so I was entirely expecting to be last again. Which, apart from the lone walker, I was. I am a happy plodder, and that is the beauty of Parkrun, it doesn’t matter.

Further east along the Danube, and convienently along the A1 motorway, was our next stop, the tiny city of Melk. Its population of only a little over five and a half thousand people is small, but its Benedictine monastery is enormous. It was originally founded in 1089 and built high up on a rocky outcrop above the Danube. A small service settlement, now with city status, grew up outside its walls and is a now cute and well preserved old town that services the needs of visitors to the Abbey and the passing cycle tourers.

The monastery was extended over the centuries, acquiring a monastic school in the 12th century and an abbey church in the 1700s. It still hosts the monastery and the school is still a private catholic school of 900 pupils to this day. Its library is world renowned as is its scientifially significant collection of minerals. There is a segment of the magnificent building open to the public and we did actually pay to go in. The library was amazing, but unfortunately photos were not permitted. The tour ended with a walk through the back of the rather magnificent church, which we reached just as a brass band struck up playing, the music being the walk-out accompaniment for a bride and groom who had just got married in this amazing space. We sat quietly at the back, well out of the way, to enjoy the music and the spectacle of the very attractive and well-dressed wedding party leaving the church. Despite the public areas of the building being quite busy and there being a large tour coming along just behind us, we were the only ‘spectators’ for this short moment and it was quite magical. One wonders who one has to know, or whose palm one has to grease, to get married here. We had just one night here, staying in a riverside car park almost directly below the Abbey. This gave us quite the view from our roof window.

I was going to end this post here, and split our Austrian travels into two offerings, but owing to the ever present and ever increasing backlog of my writing, I’m going to push on! So you may take a quick break to to go make a cup of tea/ visit the loo/ walk the dog/ see a patient/ unload the dishwasher, and I’ll see you back soon….

Our next destination was another biggie, the city of Vienna, or Wien to give it its Austrian name. We opted to stay about 10km out of the city in a northern suburb called Klosteneuburg. Here we had found one of those perfectly situated campsites that was both on the riverside cycle route into the centre and right next to a station giving direct train links too. This gave us a couple of good options for getting into the city, whilst being a safe and comfortable place to stay. We arrived in the middle of another hot day and although we hadn’t planned to head into Vienna that day, the forecast for the next day involved an awful lot of rain so we had a quick bite to eat and jumped on to the train into the city centre.

Vienna is another grand dame of a city with handsome imposing mansion blocks lining the streets and countless magnificent buildings from throughout its ages from its Imperial era, through its Art Nouveau years, and into the modern architecture of this milleneum.

We cruised the central old town area, slowly as it was very hot and muggy. We admired the cathedral from the outside, and then followed signposts to The Spanish Riding School. As a horse-mad girl I knew all about this place. One of the world’s four great riding acadamies, dedicated to the art of classical dressage and the breeding and training of the famous Lipizzaner horses. I didn’t need to go in or to watch a performance, we have done one of the other three recently in Jerez (actually in Spain) last year. It was just enough to see the building in the flesh and get a whiff of horse manure. That was all my memory banks needed. What this did do was lead us to a big square called Heldenplatz, home to a range of impressive buildings such as the Hofburg Imperial Palace. Here we were met with an unexpected sight, a row of large John Deere tractors. On venturing further into the space it was obvious from the large array of tents and stalls, the music stage, the hay bales, the autumnal garlands and the large number of folk in traditional outfits, that we had stumbled upon a harvest festival type event. It was the equivalent of a county fair in Trafalgar Square. Surreal. We found the beer tent and watched the world whilst rehydrating. After this we were ready for home and so slowly retraced our steps and public transport route back to the station.

Our back street meanders brought the sound of choral music to our ears and further investigation brought us to a nondescript square where we discovered a small, free open air recital in progress. The acoustics were amazing. It was a reminder of Vienna’s ongoing love affair with classical music following its establishment as a cultural capital of arts and music during the heyday of the Austrian Empire. Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, the Stauss family and Mahler were all either from Vienna, or chose to live here for a significant portion of their lives. The legacy of this era lives on in the blood of the city with numerous and frequent performances of classical music throughout the city, both formal and informal. The buskers here are of very high quality.

That night was hot and sticky and in retrospect, the last uncomfortable heat of the summer. We have had an epic run of amazing weather since we started this trip back at the beginning of May with even the north of Poland delivering lovely sunny days in those first few weeks. In the height of summer there were several weeks of almost unbearable heat making it difficult to do anything but immerse onself in water during the day, and wish Davide was fitted with aircon at night. On these days, and nights we were kept sane by our two 12v mini fans. They create just enough breeze to stave of hyperthermia and we have one each to stop arguments. This night was their last night of deployment. The weather forecast was entirely correct and the next day the building heat and humidity gave way to thunder storms and torrential rain. Definitely a day to sit in, not to tourist. It always amazes me, having had the extended luxury of having all the time in the world, how we have got very good at spending hours and hours of it in a contented, companionable, low energy state, with me trying to write/do some duolingo lessons whilst Nick whitters on at me. Given that the campsite had a laundry room that included a tumble dryer, it was also a day to get some laundry done. Our inital plan had been to perhaps head back into Vienna in the evening for a meal once the rain had cleared, which it did. I had thought that cabin fever and the lure of seeing the bright lights of a big city at night might overcome the apathy of a rain day, but I was wrong. We dined chez Davide and hit Netflix instead.

The next day delivered significant improvement in the weather with all of the sunshine and none of the heat. It was a day to break out the bikes and head back to the city via the Danube cycle trail. The city itself has a fantastic network of cycle lanes with junctions and crossings having dedicated cyclist traffic lights, with just enough trams and tram tracks to add some exciting jeopardy.

In 1850 Emperor Franz Joseph hatched a plan to unite the city and the suburbs and ordered the demolition of the medieval city walls. This set in motion one of the radical urban design projects of its time which involved the building of a great ring road, the ‘Ringstaße’. Nobles and rich citizens hurried to build pompous palaces along this magnificent 5.3 km long boulevard and this created a distinct ‘Ringstrasse’ architectural style (a type of Historicism) in which numerous architectural forms of previous epochs were imitated. (Basically, a lot of money was spent building huge ego-fanning, copycat edifices in order to impress each other. Some aspects of human behaviour are reassuringly consistent.) The Ringsraße is still an important route through the city and this was our first ‘cyclo-touristic’ destination. Being on two wheels is a great way to cover a lot of ground when sight seeing. We whizzed past many impressive piles on our way along the boulevard including the impressive city hall, or Rathaus, the ground in front of which was partly inaccessible due to the travelling circus that was being set up. Can’t imagine the same happening in London somehow. The Ringstraße is also home to the Austrian Parliament Building, complete with armed police, as expected and several museums and the National Opera House. All marvellous and magnificent.

Next stop was the over-sold Naschmarkt, a 120-stall food market which seemed to have been flooded with identical stalls selling obviously commercially prepared turkish pastries or industrial quantities of spices. The fresh and local produce was seriously lacking and the tat shops were creeping in. It had no local flavour at all. We were glad to have had the bikes so that our journey out to it hadn’t wasted too much shoe leather or precious touristing energy. By now it was lunch time and our thoughts were turning to food. Not that they much turn very far away at all, ever. Our quest is always to find a small, authentic, off the beaten track, not too fancy place that locals might frequent. Sometimes we have pre-selected a spot and head right there, sometimes we wait until we are good and hungry and have the fighting fever that only famishment can trigger, bitching and squabbling with each other as we try and select ‘the perfect place’ through a haze of hypoglyacaemia. Luckily today Nick had an idea where we were going and I was happy to follow. Apple maps were deployed and we had a seat-of-the-pants journey across the heart of this major capital city, arriving in our requisite two whole pieces at a little place called Gasthaus Pöschel. It was tiny and quite busy but our arrival coincided with a table coming free and we were in! Our lunch consisted of two local delicacies: Weiner Schnitazel, which needs no real explanation, and Tafelspitz, thick slices of tender slow-poached beef served in a broth with potato rosti on the side. Both delicious.

Our route home took us back through the old town, through more old streets lined with lovely buildings and churches and soon we were back on the path home. On the way back we took a short detour off the cycle path and up a hill in one of the urban villages to find a heurige, Meyer am Pfarrplatz,est 1683. Vienna is the only metropolis that grows enough wine within its city limits to make it worth mentioning. Heurige is the Viennese for ‘wine tavern’ and there are about 100 of them throughout the city, in various shapes and sizes, mostly quite rustic in nature. This one is intimately associated with Beethoven, who spent time living here in his summers, probably due to the neighbouring sanitorium offering him therapy for his hearing loss. His 9th symphony was composed here. Whether his creativity was enhanced by the sanitorium treatments, or by the wine, we may never know. (We do know, it was the wine.) Anyway, in homage to our great hero, LVB, and to our well known and well documented love of classical music, we stopped in here to have a glass of wine in the sunny courtyard. It was only fitting. Then we went home.

From Vienna we began our southward trajectory and headed to Austria’s second largest city, Graz. This university town with a population of about 300,000 (60,000 of which are students) has one of the best preserved old towns in Central Europe, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was the European City of Culture in 2004, the European City of Culinary Delights in 2008 and boasts the world’s longest underground slide. (Yes, of course we did…more on that in a bit). We had decided to only stay one night here, so after arriving at our Stellplatz on the edge of town we quickly hopped on the bus into the centre for an afternoon of exploring.

Well, it was delightful. Even taking into account all the previous places of note and significance that we have visited on this, and our last trip around Spain and Portugal, it was one of the loveliest places we have been. The city centre was totally pedestrianised with no vehicles except the trams. It had impressive, wide boulevards and narrow, pretty backstreets, all paved with polished marble slabs, and an interesting selection of shops and eateries. There were some tourists like us, but not an exhausting mob to do battle with. It felt very civilised.

Of course there were the usual cathedral to gawp into, squares and town hall to admire and a fortress on a hill climb up to. There was the Grazer Landhaus, the first and very well preserved, Renaissance building built in Graz, completed in 1557, and the grand mausoleum of Emperor Ferdinand ll. Before we hit the hill we stopped for a drink in Glockenspiel Square and waited to catch the highly anticipated 3pm performance of the very kitch and quite underwhelming dance of the couple of figures who appeared from behind their doors to twirl monotonously to an automated carillion sound track. The crowds gathered to witness the second of its three daily shows. We could see it from our cafe seats. It was, like the market, over-sold. We headed off. It was time to climb the hill.

The guide books say that there are four ways to get up to the fortress, and five ways to get down. We eschewed bus, funnicular railway and lift and schlepped up the switch backs through the park to reach the top of the hill on foot, giving us amazing views of the city. The walk took us past the city’s beloved clock tower. This has been standing since 1300 and something and has three bells. One to strike the hours, one to alert for fire and one that rang to announce executions and the start of curfew. Another curiosity about it is that the clock’s minute hand is shorter than the hour hand. Originally it had only one long hand to indicate the hours and with the later addition of a minute hand it was decided to make this shorter, rather than replace the hour hand too. I know. Fascinating.

Having appretiated the view from all sides of the top of the fortress we began our descent….by the fifth method. Some genius had decided to blast a shaft through the rock hill upon which the fortress perched and now there is a 175m slide that descends 64m with multiple steep corkscrews and a couple of near vertical drops giving a 40 second ride enough to make a middle aged woman scream like a child. What a completely random and brilliant way to extract money from people! Graz also has a funky modern constructions,

like this photogenic footbridge-come-cafe-come-exhibition-come-performance space, and the Kunsthaus, nicknamed ‘The Friendly Alien’, an example of ‘blob architecture’.(No, never heard that term before either, but quite descriptive.) Built for the City of Culture celebrations in 2003, it is an exhibition space and art gallery and difficult to get a good photo of from up close, so I have copied one from the interweb for your perusal.

Our afternoon in Graz was coming to an end, but before we jumped back on the bus we popped into a local produce shop to purchase a bottle of one of the local delicacies, pumpkin seed oil. This is a new product to me but I am a complete convert. It looks brown, but is actually a very intense dark green and it can be drizzled over just about any other savoury food stuff to enhance it. Can recommend.

Overnight the weather turned to Custard. Capital C justified. Storm Boris was coming our way and we had a decision to make – where to sit it out. There was no point paying for a more expensive campsite if we were just holed up inside and we needed to get a bit further south-west along the road towards Italy without getting caught in the mountains. A seemingly suitable spot was picked and we headed to it, through the torrential rain. It was a small leisure lake on the outskirts of a town called Sankt Andrä in Wolfsburg, Carinthia, in the foothills of the Koralpe mountain range. This had a few designated spaces for campers with electric plug ins and hot showers, all for the princely sum of €10 per night. The weather remained awful for 24 hours, with the view out of our window being of the swimming lake complete with slides, floating platforms, sun loungers, grassy beach area and ice cream kiosk, all turned cold, dark and grey under the relentless rain. A cruel taunt. Up until two days ago this place would have been swarming with locals and day trippers, swimming and frolicking in the lake, soaking up the sun on its shores. As it was the temperature had dropped from the mid twenties down to single figures necessitating the deployment of jumpers, jeans and thick socks, putting the camper heating on and having a blanket over the duvet on the bed.

The next day the rain stopped earlier than expected and we emerged from our tiny box of existance, blinking in the sunlight, to engage with the world again. The legs needed a stretch so we walked a loop along the nearby river, which was looking decidedly beefed up by the deluge and the biggest suprise was the sight of more than a dusting of snow on the tops of the nearby hills. I think we can safely say that summer is over. We had another night here, in relative splendid isolation and the next day we continued south-west and to our next country, Italy. Austria had been another unexpected delight. Italy has got some tough acts to follow

(Phew. Now rest!)

21st Aug – 29th Aug 2024

We all know how I feel about ‘big ticket destinations’ that create tourist hotspots, the crowds they attract and the antisocial behaviour that can seep out of probably quite normal people when they are frustrated with queuing or unhealthily focused on taking photos and videos of themselves in these places. Some might say that we can be unhealthily focused on the behaviour of others, we might call it a hobby. Despite this, we found ourselves heading for a trilogy of ‘must see’ locations. We took a breath and joined the scrum…

Füssen, in the region of Swabia at the foothills of the Alps, is the town over which presides possibly/allegedly the most ‘fairy tale’ of castles, Neuschwanstein. This was built by King Ludwig ll of Bavaria between 1869 and 1886 as a retreat from his official residence and life in Munich and also in honour of the composer Richard Wagner, whom he greatly admired. Ludwig struggled to combine the responsibilities of monarchical life and the pressure to produce an heir with the fact that he was an eccentric, introverted homosexual who would much rather spend his days doing creative things and being No. 1 fanboy of his hero, Wagner. This pretty castle was his bolt hole from reality, but unfortunately he died in fairly suspicious circumstances along side his doctor, in a lake in 1886, before the castle was finished.

Neuschwanstein is quite the sight from a distance, perched on a rocky outcrop, surrounded by forest and with mountains as its backdrop. Disney apparently used it as inspiration for their Magic Kingdom. It has been open to the public since not long after Ludwig’s demise and has to date been visited by over 61 million people, about 6000 per day in the summer. This is the main reason people come to Füssen, a pretty town in its own right, complete with castle, monastery, church and old town. It also boasts the River Lech, a man-made lake and a rather impressive lakeside festival hall, belying its other identity as that of a music town. The town has a very noteable history as a centre for violin and lute making.

We arrived and slotted ourselves into our reserved spot in one of the three busy Stellplatzes in this area, 2km from the town centre. This was an occasion on which we had been sensible and pre-booked, and just as well. The town was heaving.

The next day was ‘castle day’. In retrospect we should have cycled, but decided instead that seeing as our ‘tourist tax’ levy gave us a free bus pass, we would make use of it. The castle is about 6km out of town, and we were 2km out of town in the other direction. Our public transport experience began in a mediocre fashion as the bus to town was 20 minutes late and when it arrived it was already loaded. The cramped, hot and sweaty ride to town was slow due to traffic and if we had walked in the first place we would have arrived sooner. In town the queue at the bus stop for the hourly bus up to the castle was about 150 people long, with a 30 minute wait until it was due. One look at the line told us that we would not make it onto the next bus. This is when it dawned on us that a) we really should have cycled, b) there was some woeful underprovision of public transport, c) there are lots of people who will patiently wait in a queue for a long time without thinking through their options and d) we were now committed to an unplanned walk.

It was, in fact, a lovely walk along a beautifully maintained cyle path (grrrr) up to the castle and we arrived relaxed and in good spirits an hour later. There are in fact two castles here. There is Ludwig’s lofty and impressive Neuschwanstein and then there is the more modest lower Hohenschwangu Castle. There has been a castle on this site since the 1300s and it went through many hands and itterations until the dilapidated building came into the ownership of Ludwig’s father, King Maximillian ll, whilst Ludwig ll was a child. He renovated it and used it for many years as his summer residence and thus Ludwig and his brother spent many formative years here as they grew up. It was the reason this hill became his happy place.

As expected, the staging area for the castles was a chaotic and busy melée of people, cars, tour buses, shuttle buses and horse carriages. We knew that there were no available tickets for entry into Neuschwanstein today and we had no desire to see around ‘the other one’. The only ways to get up the hill to the main castle are electric shuttle bus, horse and carriage (with electric motor assist and braking-very modern retro) or a 30 minute schlep by foot. We were on a roll, so carried on carrying on. There were a few people on the trail, but the crowds were obviously mostly playing at sardines on the buses.

Now I’m not saying that we were disappointed with the castle when we arrived at the top – it is after all quite a massive monument of well designed and crafted stone work – but up close it is, well, just a bit too new and perfect. That, and just as they say the worst view of Paris is from the Eiffel tower, its beauty is best to be admired from a distance. We arrived, we opined, we descended. On our way down, via the more trafficked route associated with the shuttle bus, a chap motioned to Nick as if he wanted him to take a photo of him at a lookout. Well, that was close. What he actually wanted was someone to take some video of him as he (apparently) nonchelantly wandered up the path whilst looking serenely off into the distance with the castle in the background. FFS.

Having ‘done’ the castles we headed back. Initially we had planned to get the bus but the sun and lack of fluids must have got to our heads because we decided that carrying on walking was a great idea. By the time we got back to camp we had done 14km in normal clothes, merely comfy shoes and 50oml of water between us. Lesser hikes have involved hiking shoes, poles and a backpack containing emergency clothing layers, snacks and 2L of water. Go figure.

Of note, our campsite in Füssen was very close to three supermarkets. Why is it that as natural rural dwellers we are very used to the food shops being miles away and can happily go a week between supply runs. Here we completely lost the ability to meal plan and made SEVEN trips to various of the establishments in ONE AFTERNOON. It’s the first step on the slippery slope to Doordashing ice cream at 9pm.

Next stop, the long-windedly named, alpine ski town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Formed by the almagamation of the two towns of, you guessed it, Garmisch and Partenkirchen, it was the host of the 1936 Winter Olympics, the first to include alpine skiing. Hard to imagine the winter games without it now. In winter the town is a magnet for skiers, hosting one of the Ski World Cup meets, and in the summer there are an almost infinite number of hikes in the area. It is close to Zugspitze, Germany’s highest peak at 2962m, and this is really the reason that we, and many other people, make the trip here. Our camp was a couple of kilometers from the centre of Garmisch on a Stellplatz at the base station of the gondala that went up The Wank, a smaller mountain of about 1700m. Obviously here the ‘W’ is pronounced ‘V’, but the purile part of our brains cannot do this. I defy any English speaker to deny that they are any less immature than us.

Anyway. It was a very handy spot and we arrived so early that we had time to pack a picnic and head up The Wank (stop it…) gondola before midday. It was a lovely day, sunny but not too hot, and the views were amazing. We chose a route to hike back down and set off, getting confused almost immediately. Teutonic efficiency had designed a fantastic map of the mountain with accompanying logical labels for each trail and how they intersected to create routes in various different directions. The paths themselves were clearly signposted and also identified with logical labels. Unfortunately the two systems bore no relation to each other whatsoever. This created a bit of faffing about at the top for a few minutes whilst making sense of the situation – which was apparently was mostly my fault – but we were soon on the right path going in the right direction and the descent began.

This time I had the Poleskis, which did definitely help with the tricky and the steep bits, but three hours down hill took its toll on the knees and toes again. No, lessons are rarely learnt.

The scenery was lovely, we had the trail almost to ourselves (which is amazing given the number of people that ride the gondola up) and the obligatory ham and cheese sandwich picnic was delightful as usual. The trail miraculously ended right next to where we were parked up and the rest of the day was spent sitting around, groaning whenever we had to get up out of our seats. Love hiking,me.

The next day, having shelled out a not inconsiderable sum of money for the pleasure, we headed to the ‘Top of Germany’ (their description, in English), Zugspitze Mountain. It was a magnificent bluebird day and the perfect weather for a mountain ascent. The journey consisted of taking a bus to Garmisch station where there is a dedicated Zugspitze train terminal. Here a 7.5km train journey took us along the valley floor to an interchange where we transferred to the historic cog wheel train. This 11.5km section then climbs nearly 2000m up to the Zugspitze plateau, including 4.5km through a tunnel carved through the mountain. Epic.

The plateau was like a moon scape, covered in rocks of all sizes and dotted with ski-lifts in summer hibernation. The sun was blazing and it was hot, hardly feeling like we were at 2500m, until we tried to walk up hill. We wandered around and walked up to the edge of the glacier. This has retreated so much that it is no longer technically a glacier, it is known as ‘dead ice’. This is when a glacier has lost so much volume that it stops moving. Now it is just in its death throes.

We bucked the trend of building stone cairns, building Inukshuks instead and visited the little chapel. Of course one can eat and drink up here to one’s heart’s content and of course we sucumbed to currywurst and chips for our lunch. This we had to eat inside in the buffet restaurant as it was far too hot to sit outside on the terrace in the sun.

Full of sausage, we embarked on the next phase of the trip, the gondola ride up the final 500m to the summit. Below us we could see the multitude of ‘serious climbers’ making their final ascent, crawling like ants in single file up the final scree trail and then along a ridge to get to the top, then queuing for ages to get ‘that photo’ at the peak. Mass tourism takes many forms.

For our part, thus far, the day had seen us part of a very manageable crowd within a well planned system that cannot be over subscribed by virtue of its ticketing system. Made it all very bearable. The views from the summit were unworldly. There were so many surrounding peaks and from here one can see to four countries: Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy. Eibsee, at the base of Zugspitze, one of the most beautiful lakes of the Baviarian Alps (and our next destination) looked quite discobombulated from up here.

There is an amazing viewing terrace up here (and the obligatory restaurant) and after a slow lap (most of which Nick spent with his knees knocking because he handles heights badly) it was time to head down. This next phase of the journey was in a gondola back down to Eibsee, which is where the train interchange also was. This is quite an epic feat of engineering, featuring the world’s longest unsupported gondola cable span of 3.2km and the highest ascent/decent of any single gondola, of 2km. In fact the whole cable system only had one single supporting pylon on its whole length. Each of the two gondola cars can take nearly 50 people. The cabin effortlessly decended, and it felt like we were returning to Earth.

It was even hotter down here. We walked the short distance to the lakeshore and found the crazy crowds again. The lake itself was gorgeous, a deep blue colour surrounded by thick forest and mountains. It is possible to drive up here and park in one of the large carparks in order to enjoy the lake and about a gazillion people had all had the same idea.

The lake itself was easily big enough to accomodate all the visitors, but the car park was not. It was a one-in-one-out situation, meaning that the queue of traffic coming up the hill was moving very, very slowly. We headed to the station and got the next train back to Garmisch. Along our way we could see that the almost stationary, nose-to-tail traffic extended the best part of the way back to town, at least 5km. All those people who had decided, on a busy summer Saturday, that a dip in the lake would be a great antidote to the heat of the day, were spending at least an hour and a half in a traffic jam, in the heat of the day. I felt sorry for all the people that had done the right thing and opted to take the buses which were also unfortunately caught in the same gridlock, but for the others, those who didn’t assess the situation as untenable and turn around, there was more than an itty-bitty feeling of Schadenfreude. (Did you know that the Germans have no word for Schadenfreude…?) Back in Garmisch we opted to walk the 2km home, hoping to swing through the old part of the town on our way. Somehow we managed to miss it, but by that time we were too hot and bothered to care. It’s not as if we really couldn’t live without seeing more old sh*t for a few days.

The walk home brought us out at the bar/restaurant at the Wank Gondola base station and the inevitable, refreshing and rehydrating beers were consumed. As we sat, sipping our cooling amber brews, surveying the car park and all its comings and goings, we witnessed a man with a food wagon pull up and set up his pitch. He was selling deli items of cured meat and cheese, his main product being speck (a type of cured,lightly smoked ham). Apparently the ‘best speck in the world’. Nick was lured to view his wares as if guided by an invisible and irrestistable force. There was almost no overlap of our German or Herr Speck’s English repertoire of words so with much sign language, mostly pointing if we are to be honest, we set about buying a hunk of speck. The bit we almost bought, the ‘best speck in the world’ stuff, was going to cost us….wait for it…..€200! For 300g! We hastily decided that the average stuff was still going to be quite marvellous enough and that we didn’t need quite as much so ended up spending a more ‘sensible’ €40 on 150g. Still quite a wedge. Pork products still continue to be the guiding light of our travels.

The weather forecast for the next two days was awful and a heap of rain was due. It seemed a waste to spend these days somewhere where bad weather would make mountain views invisible and stop us getting out and about. Also it seemed crazy to pay the higher prices of the more touristy area camp sites whilst twiddling our thumbs inside. We opted to sit out the storm in a very basic Stellplatz in a spa town called Bad Aibling. It was a perfect pit stop and we got some admin done – which is code for ‘I did a blog post’.

From here we headed about as far south-east as one can go in Germany without finding oneself in Austria, to the town of Berchtesgaden. This is a region of spectacular natural beauty and is home to The Berchtesgaden National Park. The town is nestled in a deep, narrow valley, alongside the glacial coloured waters of the Berchtesgaden stream and is surrounded by mountains: the Untersberg in the North, Obersalzberg in the east and further south by the Watzmann. The Obersalzberg gained notoriety in the years of the Third Reich when it became their second most important centre of power after the Reichstag in Berlin. Here in 1937/8 they built a retreat, close to the summit of the 1800m high Kehlstein, known as Kehlstainhaus, otherwise known as Eagles Nest. Here the senior Nazis, and less so Hitler himself, spent time in the summers plotting their strategies, socialising, relaxing, entertaining and impressing guests. There were many properties and buildings on the mountain that were built or compulsarily purchased to create an eclave for the Nazi entourage. Most were destroyed by the Allies after the war.

The trip up to Eagles Nest is another ‘must-do’ and many do. The ‘tourist machine’ has it first staging post about 1/3 up the mountain, from where a fleet of electric buses take people from the vast car parks, up the steep and winding road up to the base of the Kehlsteinhaus. This feat of engineering was completed in a mere 13 months. The road is also very narrow, so four or five buses will go up together, disgorge, reload and then come down in convoy too. Here the Nazis’ famous ‘gold elevator’ (actually with brass lining to the walls, so not golden really) transports people up the lift shaft through 124m of bedrock, directly to the building. It is just about the only ostentatious Nazi era part of the complex that remains, aside from the house itself. The buses are expensive, but entry to the lift and building are free. We obviously did things a bit differently. Firstly we made a ham and cheese sandwich picnic with the usual accompaniments, then we got a bus from our camp, about 5km out of town, to the bus station in town. From here we could catch the scheduled bus that went another 5km up to the staging post area. We apparently weren’t the only ones that had had the same idea and by the time the bus arrived there were about 150 people waiting. A polite scrum to board ensued and we were amongst the lucky sardines that got packed on for the trip. The next bus wasn’t for an hour, so lordy knows what the other unlucky 75 people decided to do. It seemed another rare failure of effective crowd management by the otherwise efficient town management. From the staging post we had decided not to get the bus to the top, but to walk up. The path was well surfaced but relentlessly steep. It took us two solid hours of upwards yomping to get to the top which was a change from relentless downhill trajectories of previous hikes. There were a few other mad people walking, and a few really mad people opting to cycle up (although admittedly all but one on electric bikes). At the top we waited in line for our elevator ride, because, well, it’s a thing to do, and were soon delivered to the Eagles nest.

Up here all echoes of the Nazi past of the building and the summit have been expunged. It is now merely a place from which to admire the view and a place of refreshment. The restaurant was doing a roaring trade, the cluster of blue umbrellas shading diners from the ongoing, unrelenting summer. It was further 200m hike up the hill to the summit and we dodged the masses to find a plinth from which to savour the view and our picnic. It was quite a spot, and it is easy to see why Hitler and his cronies chose it. For those that are interested, the Nazi history of the area is detailed in a museum down at the staging area in a building removed from the main fray, deliberately putting distance between the regime and this beautiful place. Three buses took us home. We are getting quite expert in the mysteries of public transport.

From here, one has little choice but to go to Austria, and that’s exactly where we were headed. Germany had suprised and delighted us. It is all the expected things: tidy, organised, sensible and logical. Most things – except for the trains apparently – are reliable and dependable. The food isn’t fancy, but it is hearty and tasty and consistant, if not a bit pork heavy and plant light. (“What’s the problem with that?!” exclaims Nick. ) The language is decipherable, pronounceable and our Germanglish has come along in leaps and bounds! The weather has been amazing, the scenery lovely, the old towns beautiful, the lakes warm, the cycle paths ubiquitous, and they certainly know how to serve up a delicious cold beer to a thirsty tourist in a scenic spot. The people have been happy, helpful, warm and welcoming and we have come to realise that many very nice Germans have natural ‘resting grumpy faces’ and are quite reserved when out and about. This was after several weeks of us trotting about, calling out cheerful’Guten Morgan!’ to all and sundry that we passed and getting vexed by the lack of any greeting/smiles/eye contact in response. Now we just do it for sport.

The things that suprised us most about Germany were:

1. There is a lot of smoking here. It was quite obvious compared to all the other countries that we have spent time in. A lot of chuffing by old and young alike. There are also tobacco vending machines on the streets, thereby offering no barriers to young people purchasing cigarrettes. Seems weird when most other countries are really making an effort to protect their youth from the habit.
2. There are still a suprising number of places that don’t accept card payments. Cash is still really important here. Compare and contrast the UK when it is all about the plastic fantanstic and unexpectedly offering cash can lead to a expression of panic across the face of a cashier.
3. Not everyone is thundering around at 160 kph on the autobahns. Except us of course. Davide is a Grand Tourer in disguise.
4. There is an infinite number of varieties of sausage.
5. It is fabulous country and one that we hope to return to, especially as we have made some good friends here. You know who you are!!