Tag Archives: Friends

When we started thinking and talking about travelling, one of the things that really interested us was meeting people from other countries and cultures and forming friendships as we went. It was something that really appealed, but it wasn’t really something I was expecting that we would successfully do: We admittedly aren’t extremely social, and we couldn’t really imagine doing … Continue reading

For the final time, we met Nuccio and Graziella in Linguaglossa in the morning — Our plans for the day were to visit the Roveto wetland reserve way down to the south, a spot Nuccio was fond of. It’s quite near the south-east tip of Sicily, and just a short hop over the ocean was Africa (!), and many migratory … Continue reading

We met up with Nuccio again for the next rally, this one outside of a town whose name I never ended up discovering; Carmelo couldn’t make it, but we picked up a friend of Nuccio’s, Salvadore, who we had met briefly on St Martins’ Day, and his son André to join us. Salvadore was a meteorologist, interestingly; the language barrier … Continue reading

With some time to kill before we were to meet up with Nuccio and Carmelo again, we decided to see if we could find a caravan park to spend some time hooked up to electricity to do some work. I spent some time finding possibilities online, then we proceeded to spend the next five hours or so driving around being … Continue reading

After a day of downtime, we drove up from the caravan park on the coast to Linguaglossa, north-east of Mount Etna, where we were to meet up with Nuccio and Carmelo. We parked Nettle by a park in the town, and were shortly joined by Nuccio, with warm greetings all round. Nuccio drove us around the corner to pick up … Continue reading

We awoke on the mountain, breakfasted, and drove down the road a little to the start of a walking track we had planned. We were met with quite open, grassy terrain, dotted with autumnal birch trees, and the bald grey hills of ex-craters poking out. And the faint smell of sulphur (not, as it turned out, Nettle’s grey water tank). … Continue reading

Our exodus from Rome was marked by some fearful Roman traffic; we crawled out of the city and finally reached the motorway. A quick detour while I attempted to find the Apple store that so eluded us in the city centre: Further research (that is, Apple’s website instead of Google Maps) had indicated that it was actually located outside the … Continue reading

Rome! How exciting! This was our original point of entry into Europe, before we chickened out and changed our flights to London. And just as well, too — we simply couldn’t imagine landing straight from Australia and getting ourselves set up here in this bustling, bewildering metropolis! The drive from Tuscany was quite long but scenic for the most part; … Continue reading

Leaving Cinque Terre, we drove out along those winding roads, and back onto the freeway, Michael Jackson and Queen belting out from Jen’s laptap. We drove for quite a while, passing the exit to Piza, and for a time with quite impressive mountains in the distance. Following Nigel’s directions, we eventually found ourselves driving amongst grape vine and olive tree-covered … Continue reading

Having taken a windy little road down through the mountains, switchbacking through ramshackle villages, we stopped for lunch with a view down through pine trees and vineyard-strewn mountains to the azure-coloured sea. With the plan to find a wild-camp in the village of Monterosso al Mare, the first of the five villages that make up Cinque Terre (“Five lands”), we … Continue reading

From the ex-battlefields of the Somme, we drove in the direction of Paris, taking the back roads at a relatively leisurely pace. We encountered some trouble when, after seeing a number of route bloqué signs, we eventually realised they were talking about our route, and had to retrace our steps for a considerable distance, in traffic that went at a … Continue reading