Triumphs great and small

So, we are in the final week of our almost year out.

Basically, due to bad exchange rates, bank charges on withdrawing money, and Australia and New Zealand being pricier than we thought, we ran out of our year out cash 2 weeks ago... so it officially ends on Monday when we see the white cliffs of Dover and once again will set foot on Blighty.

We're still with Rob and Emma (www.mountainbug.com) and had a few triumphs:

• this time Martin went with an 18 year old lad and cycled up the very Col Du Tourmalet that was in last week's Tour De France. It's 18km long with an ascent of 1500m. Nasty. Luckily Rob lent him some vaseline.
• Kara has proven to be babysitter extraordinaire, looking after Jenny with a hint of panache. Successes here include: getting her to drink formula milk (a first); getting her to have 2 naps a day with minimum fuss (a first); Kara managing to change awful nappies and not vomiting (came close - the poor child looked very startled when Kara made retching noises over her); remembering to feed the child and not accidentally injure her (Kara has past form in these things).
• Martin replaced a guest yesterday and went canyoning. This involves jumping in a river, abseiling into a river, swimming down a river, and just titting around on a river.
  
• unfortunately one of Rob and Em's chalet staff has had to fly home for a family emergency. Team Stanford have manfully stepped in, cleaning, looking after guests and cooking. Our Mexican effort last night got TONNES of compliments.

It's also been pretty cool to just step outside for a quick "walk" which involves those beautiful mountains in the photos. We've got out every other day (with Jenny - she loves it) and it's been bliss.

Last post to come soon... might even do a round up of the year out... sob sob sob. if anyone wants to fund us for another month, we'll wear a t.shirt with your photo on it saying "Sponsored by..."

Merkin and Martin having a face off.

The dining room in Italy

Really cute village we went to with cute couple posing (Justine and Fatos)

The pool. Check out the setting.

Can you see why we called him Merkin?


To France... those are camper vans lining the Tour De France route up the Col Du Tourmalet. The rainbow is over the village Rob and Em live in.

If you're going to climb to the top of a mountain on a foggy, rainy day to be at the finish line of a race, take a tent, some wine and a chair. You can see one of Rob and Em's guests and Martin in there. Then show pity on an Aussie cyclist (all the hobbyists cycle the route before the race begins) who looks like he'll die of hyperthermia and let him come in.

View from the Col Du Tourmalet across the mountains.

So, they finished the Tour in this weather. This is just coming up the finish line. You can JUST see a cyclist in there, behind the car.

Better weather for our walk yesterday!

Jenny the mountain baby, enjoying being carried by uncle Martin.

A kitten called Merkin

Well, in case you were wondering, it is a LONG way from the heel of Italy to the bit near the French border... we left the dry arid land of Puglia, went through the rolling hills near the Adriatic, and ended up for the night in a town called Reggio della Emilia.

We almost came unstuck as the first 3 hotels we tried all charged E100 per night... then we found a little family run albergo for E60 and they recommended a great pizza place too.

We met our friends Justine and Fatos at a place called Taggia Di Arma. Fatos's "English" mother (long story just go with it) owns a little house in the hills, overlooking the Ligurian Sea. Fatos and J have restored the olive groves and now produce extra virgin olive oil (available to buy). Ah, it's lovely. You go up a windy, bendy dirt track of a road, which had hair pin twists and tested our clutch (some say clutch, others say driving ability) to the limit. Kara looked sceptical when Martin informed her that burning the clutch out every now and again is good for a car.

Then you come to the house. It's a one bedroom house with a shady veranda, shaded by kiwi vines growing over it. Kiwis grow like grapes do! The land has many terraces and two of the terraces were thoughtfully combined so that a gorgeous swimming pool could be put in. Ah. Bliss.

As well as the pleasure of two of our good friends being there, the house is also blessed by two feral cats; the pregnant one and the kitten. Tragically the kitten's mother got killed the other week, so this little 8 week old tyke is making his own way in the world. He had a habit of curling up in your crotch for a sleep. Merkin was the obvious name. (look it up, we're not making it that easy for you).

So we passed a lazy week in blazing heat, swimming in the pool, going to the beach, to a tiny hill side village, eating lovely food, watching a kitten, and finding novelty ways to drink vodka.

Things we learnt:

• being half Maltese does not improve your ability to cope in the heat. Kara almost died. It was too hot for her.
• Martin can tan! He is now a lovely brown colour and even has obvious white bits. The lesson is that if you spend a year slowly building up your sun exposure, even "pale and interesting" people can end up looking less sickly.
• we're suckers for a cute kitten. it had us eating out the palms of its paws.
• Fatos does nothing by halves. A drink of vodka lemonade means he gets the lemons from a neighbour, juices them up, makes his own lemon juice, then adds the vodka that has been in the freezer for two days until is is "perfect".
• If you look up "hot, sweaty work" in the dictionary, you may well find a picture of Martin and Fatos scrubbing down a (dry) swimming pool with sulphuric acid. Fun. But worth it for the beautiful blue pool glory that followed.
• Getting woken up in the middle of the night by a purring cat head-butting you is not adorable. It then loses it's appeal on subsequent repetitions.

Onwards to France

"The Tour De France is passing by our front door on Thursday" so we felt we had to get back to Rob and Em's earlier than planned to see it. In fact, we did the 7.5 hour drive from J and Fatos' to Rob and Em's in one day. It was pretty cool to drive along and see the mountains looming up. it was even better when we realised it was a good 10 degrees cooler than italy and Kara gained some energy back. We never thought we'd be so pleased to be back in a cooler climate!

Tomorrow is the Tour final... photos to come....

Mission accomplished!

We did it. After over 3000 miles of driving we have made it to Lecce, capital city of Puglia, which is the "heel" of the "boot" of Italy. And very nice it is too.

As you drive south the climate gets steadily drier, the countryside gets dustier, and the roads feature less angry men driving 10 tonne trucks. Then you get to Lecce, where the first impression is that it's kinda run-down. Lots of pot-holes, graffitti, cars out of the 80's, the full range of human degredation. But once you have checked into your B&B (bed, air-con, fridge, yay) and taken a stroll into the historic heart of the city it starts to work it's charm upon you...

• Endless ancient alleys and side streets, that don't look like they were designed for carts to get down, never mind cars (who thinks that stops the Italians?). Perfect for getting happily lost in.
• One of the best meals of the year out so far - home-made pasta, tender meat, loads of chick-peas (local speciality), washed down with the local wine Negromare. Very, very drinkable.
• More beautiful old churches than you can shake a Catholically inclined stick at.
• Ice cream worth selling family members for. [Martin rant begin] "Why is it that in Italy every local cornershop can produce ice-cream good enough to make you weep, then only charge you about 27p for it? Why can't we do this in Britain? How hard can it be? It's not like the milk comes out the cow any different just because you say "ciao bella" to it. [Martin rant end]

Today we have also visited a local beach. Well, local-ish. The local beach had a 6 mile queue heading to it from one direction, and a policeman closing down the other way in. Important point: If you see a cop closing off a road, and you see an Italian car pulling out into the oncoming carriageway to get round the blockage, this trick only works for you if you time it for when the cop's back is turned. Much Italian shouting and a hasty 3-point turn later and it was time to find a new beach.

Having finally found a beach, a parking spot, and a spare 20cm of sand, we went for a brief swim, we came out and err, we left again. Just too damn hot and crowded. We think Australia may have spoilt us a bit for beaches.

Tonight we are off into the old city again for food and the cup final. Altogether now: "Yo Soy Espanol, Espanol, Espanol" and repeat.

Having driven all this way, what next? We drive back again of course. So that's tomorrow taken care of. We really wish we had more time here, but Genoa, old friends and a vat of olive oil are calling to us.

Photos

Our lovely campsite. Note - camping chair and billy can still in tact. Note: photos have no sound. The 20.30 to Lecce was whizzing past.






The Piazza in Ascoli Picena.








Kara in Carcassone. We were disappointed to discover that much of Carcassone is a 19th century reconstruction. My wife on the other hand is the genuine article.






My husband claims that the local women "like a bit of pale blonde action". You can be the judge...hot or not?











We treated ourselves to dinner out in France. This was what we ate. Cassoulet. A lot of good ducks died to bring you this photograph.










Our peasant lunch on our walk.

Note: Martin is holding a carton of fruit juice in his hand. Kara should be so lucky otherwise.








Alet Les Bains, where we stayed.








Beautiful mountains, shopping mall and McDonalds...we must be in Andorra...







Martin's travelling companions, left to right in order of intelligence, on the French side of the Pyrenees to McDonalds.

Travels through hot lands

Au revoir France

So we headed for our trip to Carcassone which was beautiful, random, and very hot.
The next day we did part of our mega drive from near Carcassone to almost Genoa (Italy). Kara was less than impressed by the motorway going past Nice, Cannes, Monaco, the Cote D'Azure etc and said she didn't understand why so many people went there for hoilday. Martin pointed out this was a bit like judging Bristol by the Almondsbury interchange (the delightful bit where M4 meets M5).

Spaghetti Western
So what you get when you get tired and tell Sat Nav to take you to the nearest hotel is...a campsite. Kind of random. Strange little Italian town, industrial on the outside, then you arrive at a hotel that costs 80 Euros a night so you find a campsite that costs 29.

Campsite comes complete with outdoor toilet block, small pitch, English speaking young male assistant (woohoo!), a sun-lounger, umbrella and chair on the beach, and a VERY friendly Swedish middle aged man, desperate to discuss the highs and lows of West Ham united. Why do no foreigners believe us when we tell them we have no interest in the Premier League?

The Good...

• We are in Italy! It's beautiful!
• Great local food at very reasonable prices. It does still exist in Europe.
• On Tueday we went swimming in the Med, taking advantage of our free deck chair etc combo. Yesterday and today we went swimming in the Adriatic.
• The sun doth shine. Team Stanford are resembling bronzed greek Gods. Not like Zeus or anyone important, but some of the lesser ones. The God of dinner plates or something.
• We are stocked up on p*ss cheap Andorran wine.
• Had lovely lunch in the Piazza of Ascoli Picena, apparently like Sienna (we've not been there so we don't know). Beautiful old town with twisting alleys, fountains, churches, piazzas and just the type of gorgeousness you expect from Italian towns / cities.
• Against the expectations of some of our friends, we find we are quite enjoying the whole camping thing.

The Bad...

• So it turns out that Lecce is actually a sod of a long way from the Spanish/Portugese border, and indeed from our stopping off point in southern France. 1250 miles down, 250 to go, and we had basically had enough. So we stopped off at a random Italian campsite in a town called Grottamare. This led to several of the good points described above.
• The chap we were hoping to meet up with in Lecce is now no longer going to be there... still, Kara will fulfil her dream of going to Puglia (that region). Shame we chose the same holiday to fulfil Kara's other dream of going to Extremadura...so far apart.
• A certain nameless member of Team Stanford kind of accidently managed to forget his* pin number. Three times. Result: the cash card for the account with all our money in has now been swallowed by an Italian ATM, somewhere on the autopista. Rest assured, funds have now been transferred to another account with another card, so we have cash again.
• There were a tense few moments as the other member of team Stanford tried not to make the unamed fool wear the panini they'd just bought with their remaining cash, while semi-shouting things like "we're on a motorway and we don't even know if we can pay the toll with credit card".
• You'll be glad to know our marriage survived this test and good humour was restored later that day.
• We managed to burn our dinner and destroy our lovely billy can. After breaking David and Marguerite's loaned camping chair. All in the space of 20 minutes.
  

*we mean "their" not his. Obviously. That would be giving it a way.

The Ugly...

• Driving in Italy. Amazingly a lot of the drivers seem to be quite old. Which begs the question: how?
• Basically in Italy if you are driving a 10 tonne truck and you want to pull out (even from a stand still), you pull out. God will move the other cars out the way.
• In Italy, if you are behind a lorry, overtaking another lorry on a dual carriageway, a car will undertake you pulling into the safety space you have left between you and the lorry.
• It's not that the Italians don't use their indicators, it's just they seem to be several maneouvres behind what they are indicating for.
• Distressingly, one of team Stanford is becoming more like their mother. The whole tunnels/ high edges/ bridges/ twisty road combo when we first hit Italy not only brought back childhood memories but made them do the maternal thing of: tensing in the seat; suggesting ways to drive; pointing out every other vehicle and what they are doing. I am so ashamed / pissed off (depending on who you think is writing this).
• Every night our campsite holds something called "Baby Dance". It starts at 21.30 and is for the under 5s, who dance with their parents to a whole array of sexual innuendo laden music.Rather depressingly the under 5s stay up later than we do (it finishes at 23.30!!!)
• Our beautiful campsite, on the edge of the Adriatic, with the olive and eucalypt trees providing shade for us is also RIGHT NEXT TO a main train line. The advantage of this is that we can now tell you with some accuracy the frequency of trains (freight, local and express) heading south along the Adriatic Coast. Turns out most of them run from early evening to dawn. Great.

So, tomorrow we press on to Lecce, Puglia. We have booked ourselves into a hostel/B&B as we have spent 13 of the last 14 nights camping and we've also trashed a lot of our camping equipment. Ooops.

UPDATE: tonight's Baby Dance is in fact a belly dancing show involving teenage bikini clad lovelies. Strangely lots of dads and teenage boys watching tonight. But it's okay - they have a group of under 5s holding hands, stood in a circle, dancing round. So that's all good.

3 countries...

Extremadura - adventures in a dusty region
Martin turned 31 last Wednesday. To welcome in his 32nd year, we decided to go urban. Well, we went to Trujillo, a kind of large town and then Caceres. Both have beautiful old architecture, lots of storks nesting in church towers, and are great to wander round.

Fun things we did to celebrate Martin's birthday:

• stoppped a view point and saw about 20 eagels and vultures flying above us and alongside us.Pretty cool, though couldn't stay too long as we were melting into the tarmac (36 degrees outside)
• ate novelty frozen yogurt in the Plaza at Catheres
• drove through very narrow, medieval streets that you probably weren't meant to drive down, looking for parking
• drank beer, ate tapas, in a variety of establishments
• discovered that the initials "DO" when used as part of a cheese dish mean more mature than your grandma - a little strong even for Martin
• hit the sales! Which begin on the 30th of June in Spain. Kara bought a lovely new dress. Martin sulked round various shops muttering "this isn't fun on my birthday"
• repeated the conversation many times about how glad we were we'd bought a car with air-conditioning*

*for Kara's parents: how did we manage to drive to Malta, during the height of summer, THREE times in my childhood, with no air-con in the car? Were you mad?!? No wait - you must have been right all along, today's youth are soft.

The long and winding road...
we might have mentioned our ambitous road trip. Extremadura (about 50km away from Portugal) to Lecce, the heel of Italy...a nive 1500 mile trip...

We decided to drive the width of Spain on one day. So we left from near the Portugese border and drove (via the ring road of Madrid- much better than the one round Paris) to the French border. We wound up at about 7 in the evening at a little Spanish Pyrenean town of Pons (in Catalonia). We used our backpacker powers to swiftly identify the cheapest accommodation going and once again, made good use of the cool box by having our own breakfast in our room to save money (Uncle Brian - we thought of you and knew you'd be smiling at us).

So, next we hear you say...to France! But no! For in between France and Spain lies the little known principality of Andorra. Hey, if you can, why not. So we did.

Andorra is known for 3 things: Shopping; skiing; cheap petrol.

Team Stanford is in summer and have no money. Guess which of these we took advantage of....

Andorra is every bit as crass as the guide book says. Huge shopping malls, tax free cigarettes and booze, ugle ski resort buildings...but on the other hand, where else can you find a lovely mountain view with a McDonalds on it?

Onwards to France! Where we made good use of our cheap Andorran petrol and rolled down the mountains for the next 45 minutes, using virtually none of it.

Alet Les Bains
Kara has actually been here before. Last time she had money and a sister. This time she is skint and with a husband. Is this really progress? So, ignoring the guesthouse Kara stayed in before, we are at a lovely riverside camping ground. Comedy animal of choice here seem to be the caterpillar (plagued by them, in Spain it was the ant) and a large duck-thing we can't seem to identify. There was also an English chocolate labradoodle (labrador and poodle cross) with an impressive moustache but he's gone now. In fact the campsite, run by Brits, is full of English people which leads to much nervously muttering "bonjour" at each other, not quite sure what language to use.

As the temperature is a mere 26 degrees here we managed a walk round the lovely village of Arques - it even has its own lake and chateau. After 3 hours of sweaty walking, we collapsed in the grounds of the chateau to break open the bread we'd picked up at the boulangerie with some very runny camembert. Team Stanford is down with the peasant life style.

Tomorrow - to Carcassone!