We bought The Beast to escape Brexit and travel to Mongolia. Since that trip requires us to drive through Russia, which had just started its ‘Special Operation’ (war) in Ukraine, we opted for a Plan B… The Balkans, which is conveniently outside Schengen to facilitate our 90-day Shengen Shuffle.
Beasting It – From Newhaven to Briare
All that worry about pet passports, bacon, and a bottle of milk lurking in the back of our fridge was unnecessary. At the ferry port in Newhaven, The Fab Four’s French passports were given a rudimentary check, and customs waved us through. I guess anyone running a post-Brexit meat and dairy smuggling operation might consider…
No Frites at Trièves – Briare to Savines-le-Lac
On our morning walk, our little black pooch, Lani, rolled in a dead fish. It wasn’t the best start to the day! We were already preoccupied with the thought of driving our 16-tonne Beast back over the small canal bridge. Nevertheless, it was a lovely, if pungent, stroll between the banks of the Briare Canal…
We Join The Mile High Club Twice In One Day – Savines-le-Lac to Staffal
We are all pilgrims who seek Italy. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe As we passed the sign, I had a strange sinking feeling. It felt odd coming back, because the last time we’d been in Tschaval – Staffal, we were absolutely desperate to get away. High in the Italian Alps, this small ski village has long…
How Many Adapters Do You Need To Fill An LPG Tank? Ivrea to Casele Monferrato, Italy
In Ivrea, our mission was to get pet food, find a vet to administer rabies boosters to The Fab Four, and score an Italian data SIM card. This was because our proposed destinations of Macedonia and Montenegro don’t recognise the validity of a 3-year rabies vaccine, and because one of the many benefits of Brexit…
On the Tuscan Run – Evicted Twice in Two Days!
Piedmont into Liguria was the exact opposite of the previous day’s pancake-flat jaunt across the Italian plain. The Autoroute Azzura, through the Appenine mountains and Genoa, presented us with a hair-raising few hours of tunnels and vertiginous viaducts. Impatient truckers, who objected to our top speed of 45 mph (70 kph), added an extra frisson…
Saturnia – Under The Tuscan Sun
“Mark. Are you listening?” I asked. I was admiring Peter’s wagon, particularly the epithet ‘Travel Endangers Prejudices’, which he had emblazoned on the back. Peter, Beata, and Alex had just come from Albania. “Don’t go in the mountains,” Peter told me. “We struggled with our trucks!” His small truck camper and his friends’ Unimog were…
In Search of the Flying Phallus – Sovana & Pitigliano, Tuscany, Italy
What did the Etruscans ever do for us? Well, for more than half a millennium, they wore togas, brewed wine, built aqueducts and roads, founded hilltop city states and created sculpture and art. They practised human sacrifice and sometimes made prisoners fight one another in a sort of gladiatorial combat. That might sound a lot…
The Necropoli della Banditaccia, Cerverteri & Ceri, Italy
In my previous post, we discovered that the Etruscans became the Romans, but where did they come from? I’m not talking storks or cabbage patches here. I mean where in the world did they come from? In around 400 BC, ‘Father of History’, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, declared the Etruscans invaders from Lydia, on the west…
Mobster Moggies & The Origin of Pizza, Gaeta, Italy
Since we were approaching the Phlegraean fields – the second largest volcano in the world, which lurks just west of Naples – I was not surprised when we experienced a major eruption. What was unusual was the location of the epicentre; a truck in a campsite in Gaeta, a small seaside resort to the north.…
Vesuvius: Fear, Fascination & An Eyewitness Account
The cloud was rising from a mountain … I can best describe its shape by likening it to a pine tree. It rose into the sky on a very long trunk from which spread some branches. It appeared sometimes bright, and sometimes dark and spotted with patches of dirt and ash … Broad sheets of…
Pup Pompeii – The Closest You Can Get To Time Travel
Everything aches! I couldn’t sleep because my back, hips, and feet were killing. That’s two days of sightseeing for you – Up Vesuvius and Up Pompeii! For those of you who remember Frankie Howerd and the 1970s comedy Up Pompeii, Pup Pompeii is my worst pun yet. Just think yourselves lucky that there wasn’t a…
Paestum, Italy – Sun, Sea & A City from 500 BC
As ever, it was a long and winding road to Paestum – a beach resort with the added charm of a Greek city and three Doric temples, dating back to 500 BC. During the journey, the feel of third-world poverty that we’d noticed around Naples changed. “This part of southern Italy looks so much cleaner…
Magical Matera: Italy’s 9,000-Year-Old Cave City
Sometimes, a place you visit really gets into your heart. That happened to me in Hawai’i. There, they call it ‘aloha’. You might be familiar with aloha as a greeting. A way to say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’, but it is much more than that. To the Polynesians, aloha is a state of being. One that…
Matera: A Stroll Through Italy’s Stone Age City
I have discovered a new Pan Tone; Magenta di Matera. It relates to the colour of my face after scaling the Gravina gorge to the ancient City of Matera in a temperature of 28°C (83°F). From our campsite at Masseria Radogna, we walked to the Belvedere, where Christ was crucified in Mel Gibson’s film The…
Matera, Italy – Preparations To Enter Albania
Our visits to the vet in Matera became a bit of a soap opera. The Fab Four, our four pooches, needed various inoculations and an Animal Health Certificate (AHC) to enter Albania. Paolo, the campsite manager, first ferried us there and back in his minibus one wet Friday morning because, “The streets are narrow there,…
Overlanding in Albania – Bari to Durrës
We weren’t sure what to expect in Albania. At the end of WWII, Albania became Europe’s equivalent to North Korea; a secretive, closed and isolationist country. Albania spent four decades under the iron grip of paranoid extremist ruler Enver Hoxha. As a communist state, Hoxha aligned Albania first with Russia, then with China, but broke…
To catch up with the rest of our trip, slip over to the A to B (Albania to Bosnia-Herzegovina) page!
A taste of things to come a little later in our trip…
Welcome To Kosovo – Creative Writing Showcase
I am delighted that ‘Welcome to Kosovo’, a snippet from our very recent travels (about a week ago!) has been featured on author Robert Fear’s ‘Fred’s Blog’ Creative Writing Showcase. Please click the link below to read my piece on this somewhat lesser-known destination.…
World Wide Walkies 