Europe part two - The Italian Alps

So, once the bride and groom were successfully and happily transformed into 'Mr & Mrs', Himself and I spent the next two days staying at the aforementioned villa in Positano, enjoying time with the rest of his family who had also made the trip. The villa is worthy of a post all of it's own and I'll get to that eventually for alone it was an experience, but suffice to say for now, whilst I hate to mention money this was a £700 a night affair and way out of our current budget options but we were very generously offered two nights gratis....and for one of them got the best room in the joint!

From there we crept out at 5am on the Thursday in the dark (trying not to fall into the pool) and set off on our escape from the heat! By now I was sporting not a beautiful all over golden tan but instead a very un-beautiful case of all over heat rash, that was fast morphing into all over eczema....me and the sun don't do too well together and whilst I love it, a spell in the not so hot Alps was looking even more an attractive proposition than it already was, given that the mountains are very high on our 'favourite places' list.


At a little over 700 miles this was to be the longest single journey of the trip and we drove for almost ten hours, through almost every conceivable landscape, from the parched dust of southern Italy, back past Napoli, Florence, Modena and Rome (too hot to 'do' cities) through beautiful muted Umbrian colours, on through Tuscany with it's fields of sunflowers and terracotta landscapes, past the magnificence of the Dolomites and finally to our destination, Laas in Northern Italy. So northern in fact they speak German not Italian! Damn.


Laas is a place we visited last year on the bike and we had a purpose for re-visiting it. Last year we rode the Stevilo Pass on the bike, Fletch of course on the front end....this year it was my turn, I might not be able to ride it myself but I was sure as hell gonna drive it, even if that meant doing it in Fletch's over sized company car!


And I did, in pouring rain and with cloud reducing visibility to approx. 10 meters in places, I drove the whole thing....and if I say so myself I got a pretty hot line on some of the corners. Wow...what an experience, it might make you very well aware of your mortality in places but hell it's fun!



The following day we were woken at 5am by what transpired, after much investigation in our very poor German, to be constant cannon fire....which continued for 3 hours!!! We had thought that given this is a marble mining town, the racket ( I mean seriously loud...the last time I heard anything similar it was an I.R.A. bomb!) was perhaps mining explosions but it seems it is tradition when a local lad is getting married that his friends in other valleys wake him on the morning of his wedding with hours of high powered home-made cannon fire! These bits of kit are serious stuff powered by gas and you have no idea how loud they were from inside a tent! The locals just seem to ignore it and were slightly surprised that we took such an interest.....telling us only that usually it starts at 3am! Too funny.

The rest of the day we spent driving two more glorious mountain passes, Passo Rombo and Passo Giovo, drinking excellent coffee (there is no such thing as bad coffee in Italy) chilling out in the cooler sun (it's was only cloudy up high in the mountains) and playing with the kittens that were resident on the camp site.....and who 'assisted' with the washing up! Amazingly these adorable kittens turned out to be the offspring of the kitten we befriended at the same site last year! :o) Kittens were a recurring theme of this holiday but again, that's another post!


And then it was time to pack up the tent again and head off somewhere else.....

(Click for the big ones as ever)