4th July:
Leaving Lazise on Wed, 2nd July, and heading further South, we thought we’d try to avoid the Autostrada for a while & see a bit of the Italian countryside (and save a bit of money in motorway tolls!). A couple of hours of negotiating bizarre junctions, our SatNav wanting to take us in every alternative direction but the one we wanted, and a million small towns and traffic lights made us head back to the Autostrada.
It’s starting to get late. The Italian campsite book I downloaded to my Kindle back in Heiterwang (download took 2 1/2 hrs) suggested an interesting looking campsite north of Firenze/Florence. What it didn’t say was that the climb up to the campsite – at 950m above sea level – was pretty torturous & the road surface was so bad, a blanket 30kph speed limit was in force over the entire stretch.
However, the campsite is fantastic.
We were going to stay one night and we’re still here! Probably the best campsite we’ve ever stayed at. They have a Pizzeria for when the urge to prepare one’s own meals fails us. The toilet facilities are really something else: tiled in beautiful Italian tiles, with hi-tech, self-sanitizing loo seats (a new one on me!), high-tech temperature-selectable hair dryers, and beautiful Italian design wash basins. And everything is spotless.
The views & sunsets are something else:
The staff are also the most friendly and helpful campsite staff we’ve ever encountered.
Yesterday, we got the mountain bikes out and decided to get adventurous by following a trail [sic.] leading to a section of Roman road that had been discovered only relatively recently. The staff had suggested the trail should be ok for mountain biking: the very first bit of track off-road suggested otherwise, at least for Joy. A helpful dutch lady walker we met at that point said that after this first bit it was much flatter. We believed her. She was either lying or delusional. We pressed on regardless. Even I took the safe option of dismounting at one or two sections. Worryingly, the trail seemed to be going mainly steeply downhill. The worry being the knowledge that we’d have to go back the same way!
Roman road sections discovered. Sign showed the section was dated back to 187 years BC. One really gets a feeling of the smallness of our time and space when confronted with such antiquity. The ride back did involve a certain amount of pushing uphill, but we made it without incident.
