Travelling down Italy

Travelling around Italy

On Monday we had to go to the airport and find the car we had booked over the internet. Rather to our surprise it was all waiting for us with no drama at all. It even had a built in satnav which we decided was an essential if we wanted to avoid the sort of problem we had on entering Lyon.

Getting into the car was easy but we had to launch straight off onto the Italian Autobarns, and we had already had one experience of Italian driving to make us wary. Luckily Edd quite likes this sort of challenge. It certainly prevents you worrying about anything other than the moment at hand!

We had booked for the night at a place Edd found called San Marino so we had about four hours driving to get through. The traffic was heavy but our car was young and strong. After a bit I could relax enough to look at the scenery. The sat nav had no instructions with it so the first few days we just had to experiment until we had worked it out.

Mostly I noticed the oleanda. Everywhere down the sides of the roads it was planted in endless banks of all shades of pink. Beyond it we could see land being lived in and farmed but there were no ox carts in sight now-a-days. Modern machinery seemed to have totally taken over and there was almost no-one to be seen working the land.

Every country house seemed to have at least ten olive trees, all pruned back to low height and once I saw a grove of stone pines which interested me because I am planning to plant more on our farm. We found some unexpectedly good food for lunch at a motorway café or Auto grille as they are called and then the interesting bit came when we had to leave the autobarn and look for the hotel we had booked into.

It did not matter what we did the sat nav in the car would not accept the hotel address. This left us back to basics again but as San Marino was signed up we just followed the signs and kept going. The streets got progressively narrower and it started to rain but the signs kept coming and we kept going…mostly up as we had begun a mountain climb.