Today when the alarm went off we had to drag ourselves out of bed as we had a big day ahead, we hope to see the rest of Italy today and be in Switzerland for tea! We got our running shoes on and ran through Rome (up the Spanish steps) to the car park, retrieved poor old dusty (yep, 15 days in and we have named the car!!) and headed back to the hotel. Showered, ate, packed and were on the road by 9am! Our plan is to do a drive-by photo/cultural/scenic whistle stop, pop in, looks good wham bam thank you mam tour of Tuscany; Florance, Pisa, Lucca but avoiding Milan like the plague. Discussions for today’s itinerary were lengthy but we have (I think) settled on Interlaken in Switzerland which is about 500 miles to do today in total. (177 done as I am typing this)!!
Florance was pants, we drove in, got lost, took one picture of a woman balancing a guy on her head (nothing even remotely scenic), found ourselves on the map and left!!
We hate the Italian road signage system, it’s also pants! The map is always different to the actual road layout (maybe it’s because the map was printed in 1982???) at important junctions and they never put anything useful like a road number or junction number on the signs. Maybe they aren’t so hot with numbers!
We didn’t go into Lucca as we needed to make up time! We missed Pisa because we went the wrong way on the motorway! Our opinion is that if it’s not big enough to see from 15k’s off then it’s probably not worth seeing at all!!!!!
It started to rain just as we got to Parma, the first rain we have seen all trip! Boo!! (camping tonight will be fun!!)
The rain continued. Made it across the Swiss border without an eye-batted. Rain was still heavy as we headed up through Switzerland towards the infamous Gutthard tunnel (at 17KM it’s the longest tunnel in Europe… we think). Temperature outside the tunnel had surprisingly dropped to 5C but inside the tunnel it steadily rose to 29C! Out of the tunnel we decided to take the shortest route to Interlarken which happened to involve going over the Susten Pass. In hindsight this was not the most thought-out of decisions as we ended up climbing so high in still miserable weather conditions until the temperature dropped to -2.5C. What we forgot was that at low temperatures rain turns to snow! Driving conditions were interesting! Good job we had a competent bob sleigher at the wheel. We felt rather like the Jamaican bob-sleigh team in the film ‘Cool Runnings’ when they were up against the Swiss!
Campsite found eventually and we pitched the tent in the dark successfully – thanks Steve. Headed into Interlarken for supper and unadventurously selected a Pizza place called ‘Piz Paz’ which for it’s name excelled itself… and had the best toilets in the world … we’ll just say they were robotical and leave the rest to your imaginations J
Got back to the tent prepared for a noisy night’s sleep.
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