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.