When I analysed the route to our first proper stop in Italy, Pistoia, I realised that we had a choice: avoid toll roads and drive for 17 hours or pay the tolls and be there in only 7. When we last did this route we traipsed along the slow coast road through every resort on the French Riviera and it took us 3 days to reach Italy, the overnight stops were lousy and expensive and even then we eventually gave up and did the final stretch on the toll roads. So we bit the bullet and chose to pay some tolls for the first time.
A few of you may be wondering why we are going through France at all. Surely the quickest and cheapest way to get to Central Italy is to blast through Belgium and Germany on their free motorways. Unfortunately Germany introduced a rule last year that if you are driving on German roads during winter, and that lasts until mid April as far as the law is concerned, you must have winter tyres on your motorhome. Since a set of winter tyres for Basil are the best part of £800 we are stuck with driving through France.
There was a need for us to do another shop today and so, since SatNav had a database with every LIDL marked, I dialled one in which SatNav said was on our route and off we set. SatNav obviously doesn’t realise that you cannot park on the hard shoulder of the motorway and climb over the fence to do your shopping so we had to just wave at our LIDL as it flashed past at 60mph! Luckily Sarah found another one which SatNav said was just 6 miles further on. What SatNav did not tell us that we would have to do a 16 mile round trip up a motorway to Toulon – up one carriageway and back down the other – in order to reach the said shop! All in all our start to the day was a slow one.
Sarah would like me to make it clear that we do not just shop in LIDL. In fact yesterday I bought some lovely mushrooms, some tapenade and wine in the local village shop. But really it is mostly LIDL!
Regular readers may remember that we have had an intermittent fault on Basil where the airbag warning light and other lights would come on at random intervals and on some occasions the whole dashboard has gone blank. Luckily over the winter my friendly local garage traced the problem to a single wire going to the heating system. Don’t ask me why a wire going the heating system should affect the airbag warning light. The mechanic gave me an explanation why he didn’t think this wire wasn important and he simply cut it. The problems stopped and everything seemed to work perfectly. Today, however I think we have discovered the wire did do something – the air conditioning has stopped working! Luckily we are not going to be travelling in particularly hot weather, but it means more surgery for Basil when he gets home.
Our journey along the motorway was fairly picturesque for a motorway. Cutting through mountains with an occasional glimpse of the sparkling Mediterranean and various French resorts where the likes of us can’t even afford a coffee. As we approached the Italian border we started what I like to think of as the “tunnel viaduct” section of road. In order to keep the road relatively level the engineers have simply tunnelled through sections of mountain and then built a viaduct over the valley to the next tunnel. This goes on over many hundreds of kilometers of motorway, especially in Italy. This did not use to worry me but after our experience two years ago and the more recent Genoa viaduct collapse, I’m not quite so confident in Italy’s infrastructure. In 2017 we travelled down a section of autostrada from Ravenna to the South of Italy. Two hours after we went under a motorway bridge it collapsed killing three people. I have read there have been other bridge collapses in Italy over the last few years. Basil better tread lightly.
Finally we arrived on the Italian Riviera and two possible overnight stops next to the sea, which I had identified. Unfortunately we did not take account of the fact that today is a Friday and the weather is lovely. Both spots were choc-a-bloc with Italian motorhomes. This was the last thing we needed at the end of a long drive, but I found some more possibilities a few miles further on and we have found a fairly scruffy car park (43.924190, 8.104984) in San Bartolomeo Al Mare which has no services other than water, but which is only €5 a day at this time of year. We have many motorhoming neighbours, all Italian, and we are only 400 metres or so from the sea from where we have been to perform our Passeggiata* along the seafront. San Bartolomeo is nothing to write home about but it sure beats Skegness** on wet Monday in January.
* Passeggiata literally means “walk” in Italian, but it also refers to the Italian ritual, in virtually every town, of going for a walk in the early evening, often dressed in their finest clothes, to see and be seen.
** For non UK readers Skegness is a not particularly salubrious seaside resort on the English east coast.