Twelve months ago this weekend we set off from Amsterdam, destination and duration unknown, intention clear – to do ordinary things in extraordinary places and have buckets of fun together. With our trusted 2CV, Charlie, carrying us nearly 30,000km so far – what an amazing time we have had! Today begins our second year… destination and duration unknown, intention unchanged. Thanks to all our friends, old and new, for all your encouragement and advice and we hope you will stay with us on our next adventure.
A quart into a pint pot
Houdini and a coffin – phah. The TARDIS, yeah, yeah. Geoff Nimmo, our gear for a year and a 2CV – now THAT is a magic trick worth seeing.
Read on and you might even win something!
So, this is all we own.
Yes, we did actually unpack it all and arrange it – for YOU! Now you too can see just how many underpants and how much nail varnish you need to travel the world!
This is all we own, packed into bags.
This is the boot (trunk if you are American) of our 2CV – with 6 eggs and a coffee pot for scale.
All we own goes in there and on the back seat…. It really does. See!
Sardines quiver at the mention of Geoff Nimmo’s name.
We are often asked how we decided what to pack, so just for fun, we thought we would not just show you all we are travelling with on our Grand Tour, but give you a chance to profit too.
In the spirit of ‘guess the weight of the pig” – we challenge you to guess the amount in the ugly duck! Using the first photo from this blog and the close-ups below, see if you can guess (or count if you have small children you can bribe, are off work sick or have no friends and nothing else to do) how many items we fit into Charlie Charleston.
We are going to run this little competition until the end of June, and whoever gets closest to the number will get a nice bottle of whiskey/wine/perfume/video/book or something else of their choosing.
Post your number in the comment section below, or on our Facebook page. In the spirit of full disclosure, we should add that since these photographs were taken, we have bought a toaster, a pressure cooker, two new therma-rests, two camel and goat hair blankets and a hot water bottle (there was still snow on the Atlas mountains), but thankfully Geoff did get rid of five pairs of socks to make room.
Letting the train take the strain
Many people ask us how fast our 2CV goes. Well, for awhile Charlie was going at 160kmh and travelled a thousand kilometers. Pretty damn impressive, huh? Well, also pretty unlikely. Charlie let the train take the strain as we motor-railed our way to Amsterdam.
To be honest we didn’t realize that motor rails still operated in Europe and had come across the service by accident – but it’s brilliant! The motor rail brings together a regular sleeper train and a car carrier and leaves Italy from Alessandria, just north of Genoa. There are other services from other places as well, so we strongly recommend you check it out. The car can remain fully loaded when it is driven on, and because Charlie has a soft top, he was loaded at the bottom and behind another vehicle for added protection. At those speeds he would have had quite a nasty face lift on the top deck! It was still a pretty tight squeeze.
We left Alessandria in the late afternoon, with a five-person carriage all to ourselves. All that was left to do was sit back and enjoy the ride.
Later in the year, with longer days, we would have seen the Alps speed by, but not long after we left Italy it was too dark for a view.
The morning dawned misty and grey, but we breakfasted with river views and Rhineland castles as we rattled toward Dusseldorf.
By 10:30 we had arrived in Dusseldorf and Charlie came rolling off, none the worse for our high speed adventure.
Another three hours and we were back home to Amsterdam, with a new-found love of motor rails!
Travel is good for your health
If you don’t believe us that it is good for body and soul – just take a look this video
And here we are in Venice, with gondolas, gondolas….
Slow food, fast bikes, leaning towers and climbing cliffs
Since our mechanical misadventures when we first arrived in Italy, we have finally been able to start exploring.
We headed up the coast and inland to a lovely Agri-turismo farm.
Agri-turismo is a system of accredited farm-stay holidays. With some you can help out around the place, others require less investment from you. Often home produced and cooked food is on offer. It is a great way for small scale farmers – often promoting organic farming – to make some extra money, and for us to get a better insight into what it takes to feed us all.
We camped at Ca’ du Chittu in Carro, Liguria. When we arrived we were greeted like old friends by husband and wife team Ennio and Donatella and their son Mattia.
Although they hadn’t yet opened their camping ground for the season, they let us pitch next to the house and then use the indoor facilities.
We also availed ourselves of Donatella’s home cooking and were delighted to find that the family are followers of the Slow Food movement. Slow Food is all about growing quality, without chemicals and with attention to the whole growing, harvesting and distribution cycle, not just the profit from the end product.
Our four course dinner was a zero-kilometer meal, having all been raised, plucked, picked and harvested from their own land. Bellisimo!
While we were there, we managed to hook up with fellow travellers Pete and Frances – friends of Geoff’s who have been riding their motorbike from Australia for the last eighteen months, through Asia and the Pacific.
It was great to swap stories and experiences over another home-cooked feast.
Carro is close to Cinque Terre and many of you had urged us to go there. It is a series of five coastal towns, clinging to the rocky cliffs that run from the Apennine mountain range and drop straight into the sea.
Cars are banned in Cinque Terre – but they would be pointless anyway in these steeply stepped and terraced towns.
A train runs along the coast and through the middle of all five, but the local ferry is the nicest way to see the best of the scenery.
When we arrived in Cinque Terre it was bathed in sunshine and glowing with Mediterranean colours.
It is hard to imagine that a devastating landslide swamped the towns, killing eleven people, only three years ago.
The famously precarious coastal walk is still closed as a result.
But locals seem defiant, and after generations battled just to carve a life out of these rocks, it’s not surprising they are determined to rebuild and go on.
From coastal paths and rural idylls, we hit the road again and headed to Bologna, a classy place with old world charm, mile upon mile of porticoed avenues and some lovely laid back piazzas.
Bologna is also home of the Ducati motorbike. So of course, we promenaded the factory floor as well.
If you work for Ducati, you get a 35% discount on your bike. Your bike gets its own parking spot out front.
If you don’t work for Ducati and you don’t have one of their motorbikes, you get to peer through the railings.
The latest model is a Diavel – a beast of a bike, but not a Monster (Google this joke if you don’t get it!) that looks good in red and black. Father Christmas, take note.
Like us, you may well have thought that there is only one leaning tower of note in Italy. But like us, you would be wrong. The symbol of Bologna is not one, but two leaning towers and they have an excellent angle to their dangle.
While Bologna might have numerical supremacy, Pisa still holds the crooked crown of leaning towers. The tower began to keel within three years of the start of construction and before they had barely got four stories up.
It is amazing that the builders who produced such solid beauty in the cathedral could make such a hash of the tower.
Many corrections have been attempted and now, although it is clearly off kilter still, it has been declared to be safe for the next few hundred years.
Of course it would be a tourist tragedy if they fixed the tilt entirely. Where would our comedy photos come from then?