Tag Archives: History

We met Nuccio again the next day, along with Graziella and Nuccio’s mum, who we took an instant liking to, although she didn’t speak English. She had a friendly, playful demeanour that was very disarming. Our plans for the day this time were to visit Etnapolis, a shopping centre south of Etna — Italy’s largest shopping centre, Nuccio told us … 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 had just left Scopello after a very enjoyable week spent developing software and painting: We wanted more! But it was also time for a change of scene, so we drove on towards San Vito Lo Capo, another town that sounded quite promising. A short and picturesque drive inland through pretty, rocky mountains, through a rather sad-looking town amusingly called … 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

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

The ferry from Dover arrived in Calais, and we headed down the stairs back to Nettle on the car deck, and followed the stream of cars off the ferry and onto French soil. Repeating the ‘drive on the right, drive on the right’ mantra, we followed Nigel’s directions towards the centre of Calais and drove around aimlessly for a little … Continue reading

Our first stop towards Dingle was Inch, a place recommended to us in Galway. A little narrow road took us in, and we were met by the sight of a long sweeping sandy beach with mountains wreathed in cloud behind. We were excited to see a host of motorhomes parked on the beach and, thinking we’d found a pretty cool … Continue reading