Calabria is a bit of a site seeing desert. There are plenty of beaches, but most of them are spoilt by shoddy development. The Michelin Green Guide dedicates a whole 6 pages to Calabria out of 672 pages for the whole of Italy. As I said a bit of a desert. I’m not sure whether that is fair or not because we only have the guide books to judge Calabria by. It could be that being so far south, poor and isolated, guide book writers don’t give it it’s due weight.
Likewise our books on campsites and motorhome stopping places show large gaps on the map. So today we decided to make a jump along the coast. Not that many miles but because the roads are bad it is difficult to average more than 30 mph. Many Italian roads also have unrealistically low speed limits, which I have not seen elsewhere in Europe. Many perfectly good straight roads in the countryside have a speed limit of 50 kph, which is only 31 mph. The result is that everyone, including us, ignores it, many Italian habitually driving at double the speed limit.
The journey up until lunchtime went well. Again we followed the coast road with pretty views over the sea, only spoilt by blocks of scruffy flats, many uncompleted.
Another great lunch spot
We found a picturesque site next to an empty beach for lunch. Sarah took the dogs for a romp on the sand. Coming off the beach required climbing a fairly steep sandbank. Melek had me in stitches as he struggled to get up. He took two steps forward only to sink into the soft sand and slide one step back. He made it in the end.
Mabel makes the sandbank look easy – poor old Melek
The afternoon turned into a bit of a driving nightmare. I had identified two official motorhome stopping places. The first one required a descent down and narrow mud track and under a railway bridge. Sarah had to walk in front to make sure that the manoeuvres were even feasible. We made it with difficultly only to discover the stopping place wasn’t where the book said it should be. We then had to repeat the tricky driving again, in reverse.
We then moved on to the second place I had identified only to find that the GPS co-ordinates were incorrect and when, half an hour later, we found it, the place was so poor we decided not to stay.
By now I had been driving for 5 hours on the always slightly difficult Italian roads and was getting tired. We therefore just turned off the main road at the next seaside town we found and have now just parked on the seafront, somewhere near Lazzaro. There does not seem to be any restrictions and so I hope we will be OK for the night.
Our overnight spot
One upside of our location is that we are now only a few miles from the toe of Italy and so we can see Sicily and Mount Etna from Basil’s window. You may have seen in the news that Etna has erupted recently injuring some BBC journalists. From where we are we can see a small stream of smoke coming from the volcano, but nothing major.
Mount Etna
Another plus of our stopping place is that there is a Pizzeria just along the road, which is actually open! Most restaurants are closed for winter so it is quite unusual. I have just been to enquire, in my best Italian, whether we can eat there tonight with the dogs. The dog issue seemed to cause a bit of consternation, but I think they have agreed. We will go over in an hour and if I am wrong about the dogs it will be back to Basil for a quick pasta with pesto, which I bought a week ago from a deli.