Sarah and I were going a bit stir crazy in our hotel room, but the dogs were really beginning to settle in. Mabel had found a favourite chair to sleep in and Melek had even got used to using the lift.
Hotel dei Duchi deserves top marks for the way it has accommodated us and the dogs. Its a four star modern hotel in the centre of the town but it didn’t blink an eye over Mabel and Melek. On its front door was a sticker proclaiming it was pet friendly and it certainly was.
For what we hoped would be our final night in the Spoleto we decided to leave the comfort of the Hotel and return to the lovely family restaurant Angolo Antico. This time we forced ourselves to avoid the Pizzas. I had a plate of anti pasta which was a meal in itself and followed this up with Papparadelle with Wild Boar sauce, delicious. The lady owner, who speaks no English, came over and spent about a quarter of an hour showing us photos of her many dogs and cats, including a Shih Tsu who looked just like Melek.
This morning I was on the phone again to our breakdown service, who apart from arranging the initial call out of the breakdown truck have been hopeless. I suspect the problem lies with their Italian agents. Again I asked them to confirm that Basil would be ready to pick up at 11am as the garage had confirmed to our hotel. In the end I gave up and asked the hotel to check and having confirmed Basil was mended organised a taxi to take us to Basil’s hospital. It is now 6.35 pm, we are 150 miles south of Spoleto, and we still have had no word from our breakdown service. As I said hopeless.
We settled the bill at the garage with the, by now, familiar faces in the garage office and confirmed through drawings that they had definitely changed the timing belt. The price was €870, but to be fair most of that was parts. The garage charged for eight hours labour at only €26 an hour. I can’t complain at that.
Our drive today was through the Apennines, that chain of deceptively high mountains which runs more or less the length of Italy. The tops of the peaks were all covered in a thick layer of snow but fortunately their was a way through without going above the snow line. The road into the mountains was a well maintained modern road – straight and not too steep making plenty of use of tunnels and viaducts. Then, for reasons best known to the Italians, the road ran out and and we were back on tiny, broken surfaced roads with tortuous bends and vertigo inducing drops.
At this stage the villages we passed though all seemed to have been virtually demolished. Initially I thought that perhaps they had been subject of compulsory purchase because the Government was intending to complete the modern road. Then my mind turned to earthquakes, because I remembered from the news that there had been at least one devastating earthquake in Central Italy recently. Tonight I have looked up the details of these earthquakes. There were a series in August and October 2016 in exactly this area, several villages were completely destroyed and over 300 people were killed! I suspect also that this is why the nice new road had come to an abrupt end – because severe structural damage had occurred and not yet been repaired. A photo Sarah took at the time we came off the new road seems to confirm this.
We finally reached the motorway which runs down the Adriatic coast and sailed south for another hour or so with the snow peaked mountains of the Apennines on our right and the turquoise blue Adriatic on our left.
Finally we plonked Basil on a pleasant, but relatively expensive, aire (42.240866, 14.529757 €10 plus €2 if you want electricity, full services) adjacent to a stony beach and the sound of crashing waves. Rather worryingly I checked the level of the coolant in the holding tank and it had dropped a little below the minimum line. I have done some research and it could just be that coolant has been replacing pockets of air in the radiator and cooling systems but I will have to keep an eye on it. I could see no signs of a leak and I had a good look round with the engine up to temperature so fingers crossed!
