Category Archives: Italy

Our next day of driving began with our finally leaving Italy, or at least its official boundary. We drove by the lake near the border, emptied for some works on the drained lake bed and looking rather forlorn compared to the beautiful images Google Earth had shown me the day before while I was searching for potential wild-camps; then we … Continue reading

Sadly, our 3 months of Schengen time was again all used up! We’d booked a ferry from Dunquerque to Dover on the 19th, and we’d left ourselves a week to get there from Padova. So with some wistful thoughts, and looking forward to coming back to spend some time getting to know Andrea, Silvia and their friends better, we set … Continue reading

Apparently in centuries past this city glowed with bright colours. What a site that must have been! The romantic decay of the city recalled to my mind the Japanese philosophy and style called wabi-sabi. As described by artist Serena Barton, wabi-sabi refers to the qualities of imperfection, aging, cycles of nature, and cycles of life. It values rust, patina, burnishing, … Continue reading

There’s something about being in a place with friends who are locals to the area — it anchors the place, makes it feel more real and accessible than just being a visitor, on the outside looking in through the distorting filter that is tourism. So, we’d leapt at the opportunity to visit Venice with our new friends Andrea and Silvia, … Continue reading

I’m doing some post-processing of our recent photos, and thought I’d share some of the excitement that we still have from our new discovery. A late-afternoon landscape photo before HDR – There’s a choice of, say: With nice sky and sunny mountains in the background, with a black gaping void in the foreground, or, say: With visible foreground but overblown … Continue reading

We had a whole weekend with our new friends all to ourselves in store and we couldn’t wait! We hadn’t spent a good amount of time with people our own age – or close enough – since we traveled with friends in Italy very early on in our trip. This is one of the downsides of motor-homing – whilst most … Continue reading

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

We struck gold at our next place to stay in Poggibonsi, a town that sounds like it should consist entirely of jumping castles. It was a free, green area sosta with 1€/12 hours electricity and 3G coverage. Very pleased with ourselves, we settled in, door open to let in the beautiful spring day (this is as ‘outside’ as we tend … Continue reading

Against our better judgment we decided to do a 20km hike around San Gimignano in Tuscany. We’d been leading quite the sedentary lifestyle so were relying on our youthful vigour to pull us through. I happily anticipated a gentle pastoral stroll through a relatively flat landscape. In the end it was more the marked lack of alternative transport back to … Continue reading

Hooray – this blog is about to get another perspective, and probably a much more interesting one than I usually come up with! My partner Katherine is going to start writing entries here, and this is the first of many to come. Read on: We’ve been travelling through Europe for seven months now and have developed a sort of astronomically … Continue reading

We left our friends Bruno and Elena in Preggio and headed onwards across the green hills. On the way, we were excited to spot clusters of poppies growing on the side of the road. As we passed alongside one hill-top town, we were waved down a different road by a police officer — the later appearance of some guys in … Continue reading