Under The Tuscan Sun

Monday 24th August

Florence is beautiful, Rome is in ruins!!!

Well Florence – what a beautiful old renaissance city….lots of statues, stonework and wrought iron! We did the hop on hop off bus tour which once again gave us all the sights we needed to see including the pretty town of Feisole and the Di Vechio Bridge which was the only bridge in Florence to have survived World War 2. The temperature was 42 degrees so very very hot for these two kiwis. We meet a great German couple Roy and Grid and daughter Kimberley at the camp ground and went for a really memorable meal with them. Brent and Roy had the bistecca alla Fiorentina (a huge 1kg steak) – and they both couldn’t eat it all – believe or not. After dinner the 5 of us went to Piazzale Michelangelo where Roy and Grid produced a lovely bottle of red wine which we enjoyed whilst overlooking Florence at night and watching people tango dancing – this truly was a night to remember!!
From Florence we drove through the beautiful Tuscany region to Lake Terasimeno – where we were relieved to have a swim as the temperature was in the very late 30’s. From Lake Terasimeno we travelled through the Tuscan Hills where we saw lots for rolling valleys, grape vines, olive groves and sunflowers – to Lake Bracciano which is the lake that supplies water for Rome. Lake Bracciano whilst providing us with a way to cool down was also a good place to see Rome via public transport rather than driving!!
Saturday saw us leaving camp ground at 9.00am to catch the train into Rome…. Rome – amazing to see and hard to believe that some of the things we saw were built BC – whilst now they are in ruins we could imagine what they were like in ancient times. We did a guided tour of the Colosseum and Palatine Hill with passionate guides who loved telling us both the history and their stories – the Colosseum which is probably Rome’s best known monument and which was a big arena which could cater for over 50,000 spectators watching gladiators, crocodiles, lions fighting men and they also housed the public executions – today you need a good imagination to picture all this or a very animated guide as most of it is in ruins.
We also did the Hop on Hop off bus tour and saw the other sights that Rome has to offer including St Peters Square and Vatican City. The temperature whilst in Rome was 46 in the sun and 39 in the shade – so very very hot…. you can survive a day on water and ice-cream – the only challenge is to eat and drink faster than they melt or get warm!! We arrived back at the camping ground at 10.45pm so a huge day out for us.
We are tonight in San Felice Circeo which is out on the coast, so not quite as hot as inland – probably only 36 degrees. We are in a very small camping area across the road from the beach and where the owner has been bringing us food to try – such as last night a home-made spaghetti with fish eggs, prawns, chilli, parsley…yum yum yum. This morning he bought us bread with a home-made confit.

Our next stop will be Pompeii….

From Sloping Hills to Sloping Building

Monday 17th August

Buonasera

It seems quite some time ago that we wrote the last blog – this won’t be a long one as we have had a reasonably quiet first part of the week staying in Torre Daniele until Wednesday morning.
We headed south on Wednesday travelling on some lovely country roads, lovely but narrow and windy with oncoming buses etc testing our nerves. We stopped in Trino at a market where we purchased our fruit, veges, pasta and meat for a couple of days. The food in Italy is exceptional – not sure how good for the waistline it is! We carried on down to the coast and spent the night in the seaside town of Albissola Marina, then the following day we drove through some very narrow steep roads into the coastal town of Delva Marina. The roads were so narrow and windy that it took us 4 hours to do 130kms. Delva Marina was definitely a favorite place for us so far and we enjoyed it for three nights. The town itself is quite small with only restaurants, cafes, bars, apartments and camping grounds. The camping ground we stayed in ran a bus down to the beach and the railway station. The beach whilst very full of people was a great place to loose a few hours just swimming in the warm water and reading our books. At one stage the girl beside us asked us the time – we knew we arrived at the beach just before midday – so Brent said to her he thought it was about 3.00pm – turned out to be 5.00pm. Delva Marina was also a great place to explore the Cinque Terre (Italian Riveria). The Cinque Terre is made up of 5 tiny villages on Italy’s most picturesque coastline – the easiest way to visit these villages is by either walking the 12km or by train. As the temperature was a good 36 degrees and the walking up some steep coastline we opted for the train! We had a great day hopping on and off the train visiting Riomaggiore – where they sold great gelato and provided some wonderful scenery over the marina for us to enjoy. Manorola – which was great watching the people jumping off some huge rocks into the very clear waters below. Cornigila – which was the only village that didn’t have direct beach access but had a great old narrow village to wonder around. Vernazza – a picture card perfect village, with the old very colourful houses along with a beautiful beach (our favourite). Monterosso – which had a parking area for campervans, so we decided to head there Sunday morning to have a day on the beach – however this wasn’t to be as by 9.45am the town was full and we were turned away at the top of the hill by the local lady cop.
We then decided to continue driving the beautiful busy coastline into Pisa. At one stage of the drive we encountered a stretch of coastline which was about 30km long and the whole place was just bursting, boiling, seething with people – the only comparison we can think of to describe it is – New Brighton beach on guy fawkes night only on a much bigger scale. A zebra crossing every 100 metres ensured very slow progress. This drive really did highlight the Italian road habits, the drivers are reasonable, the pedestrians frustrating and the cyclists arrogant. Not uncommon for a pedestrian to just stand in the middle of the road and ignore you, how with a 3.5 tonne camper bearing down on them we don’t know, brave or stupid?? The cyclists own the road, god help you if you think otherwise. They ride 2 or 3 abreast on narrow roads, the middle of the road when they feel like it, they own the road and all the drivers know they do and drive accordingly. All in all Italian drivers have a lot of patience.
The camp ground we stayed in Pisa was only 800 metres away from The Leaning Tower. Sunday night that we arrived we did a Pisa by night tour on a small motorized train – this gave us a great insight into the city which is really there for the tower and the university. We then headed back into the town in the morning on our bikes for another look around before we had another swim and then onto Florence. Rae has a good souvenir of Pisa – a bathing cap which was compulsory for all people with hair to wear in the swimming pool!! Brent didn’t require one!!!
We are now in Florence in a camping ground that has a wonderful view over the city – and we are looking forward to exploring the city tomorrow. Brent’s Mum’s name was Dorothy Florence so whilst exploring this city she won’t be far from our thoughts.

Ciao

Back on Tour

Monday 10th August

We are back in Italy after an uneventful 40 hour journey.

We have arrived back with lots of mixed emotions - feeling sad as well as happy that we managed to spend time with our girls, grandson, family and friends.

We have had a quiet time today and will travel again tomorrow heading towards the coast. We will update the blog again in about a weeks time.

Thank you to all for you messages and kind words we have received over the last two weeks - this is something we will always treasure.

The blog we have just updated was from a couple of weeks ago before we headed home.

Tour de France

Saturday 25th July

Buongiorno (Hello) from Italy


We have had a quiet week from travelling this week but a very full on week socialising. We arrived in Annecy as planned on Monday afternoon. We hadn’t expected a traffic jam with the majority of traffic being campervans. At one stage we counted 10 campers within about 50 metres of each other! We finally drove to the lake edge where we had planned on staying – after stopping at 3 different places and finding out they were all fully booked, we spotted a car park with a spare place right by the lake and also the road – we pulled in for the night – we were welcomed by a Welsh couple who were camping beside us and then a group of 3 Brit guys (Dad, son and friend) pulled in on the other side of us – there were about 35 campers squished into the car park and everyone was there to watch the Tour de France time trials around Lake Annecy which were on the Thursday – so we decided to stay put as presumably we had a great park and we wanted to be part of all the hype. We had a great 4 nights there and really loved Annecy. Annecy is a very pretty town with a river running through it, the bridges all have flower pots over them and the old part of the town is narrow with lots of restaurants and is closed off to traffic. We biked in the town as we were scared of losing our car park – we were the only ones not in lycra – the whole place was full of budding cyclists and cyclist enthusiasts. The lake was pretty and lovely to swim in. The population of Annecy is approx 160,000 – on the day of the time trials they were expecting 1million to be there so you can imagine the amount of people around.
On Thursday, the day of the time trials, we were up early putting out our chairs and tables right on the roadside behind the camper in preparation of the cyclists biking through – what a great spot – 4km from the start line and the camper right there for refreshments. The road was closed at 7.00am and the procession of all the sponsors started about 9.30 - they were all throwing give-aways out of their car windows – talk about a scramble of adults all running/charging to get things we will never use – needless to say the kiwi competiveness was out and we have a collection of lovely sun hats, fridge magnets, key rings….etc. The first cyclist came past us on about 11.15am and the last one at 5.00pm – there were 158 cyclist all biking the 40.5km around the lake at approx 2minute intervals and the average time for them to complete this was 49 minutes. We had our kiwi flags out for our kiwi riders, Julian Dean and Hayden Roulston, we got the thumbs up from Hayden has he flew past and the people around us were most impressed by this. All in all it was a great day and we ended it by going out for dinner with an Australian and an American couple whom we met during the day. We also look forward to following the rest of the race.
We left Annecy with everyone else on Friday morning – thankfully we were heading the other direction than most people as they were all following the tour. We crossed over the border into Italy by going over the French Alps (2200metres) high and we are now staying a lovely campsite at Torre Daniele. We have decided to stay for two nights here as it is very pretty, surrounded by mountains and very quiet after 4 very noisy nights at Annecy. Tomorrow we are planning on heading towards the south & west coast of Italy (Clinque Terre) then inland to the Tuscany region.


Ciao