Sorry this post has taken so long in the making, but - excuses, excuses etc., I've been working on my website...
I've been plastering the posts with photographs rather than text, so I hope to remedy things a bit here as this will be the last post on the theme of our trip to the UK. After driving through the Saint Gothard Pass Tunnel - 10.5 miles long - we decided to take what looked like a short cut using one of Italy's "red roads" and not the motorway system that would have taken us around Milan - not a great idea! As it turned out taking the red road wasn't such a good idea either. We somehow forgot that we were in north Italy, the foothills of the Alps, and, yes, there are hills and valleys and endless little villages dotted along the red roads! Needless to say, at times, the Venice ferry looked a very distant vaporous idea that we had dreamt up more than one month past. As we trudged through yet another village and drove up hill and down dale along seemingly endless zig-zag roads, the zig-zags didn't appear on the map, we started thanking God that we had actually booked a hotel in Padova for the night, hoping to see Padova in the evening! - Wishful thinking!
Now Padova would have been a very interesting place to visit hadn't our hotel been somewhere in a commercial/industrial estate in its far-distant suburbs. Next time - yes - we'll visit Venice and Padova. Padova is the site of the first University in the western world where Galileo once lectured.
The hotel was actually very nice and they even served us a very decent dinner, when we eventually arrived. Needless to say, I was all for just getting to the ferry port first thing in the morning rather than try to do a mini-tour in the car around Padova. We had discovered that the Italian powers-that-be were actively discouraging such car-bound visits and had blocked off many towns, such as Verona, to car-bound tourists who just wanted to have a look before going on their way. So, I was in no mood to risk whatever they could do in the way of traffic rules that could stop us catching our ferry now that we were so close!!
We got to the ferry with loads of time to spare, but that didn't prevent the ferry loaders from putting us on three or four from the last. Waiting, watching all sorts of trucks, motor-homes, caravans, boat trailers, cross-country-safari-looking vehicles that could have reached the Everest base camp et al being loaded before us added even more to the frustrations of taking Italian red roads. However, sense seemed to prevail as we realised that most of those other vehicles were probably going to mainland Greece, the second stop for the ferry and that we were going to be the first to get off the damned ship! At least this time we would be three hours quicker than the last as we wouldn't have to sail to Igoumenitsa and back before the ferry landed at Corfu.
The ferry trip was an uneventful, boring 23 hour confinement broken only by some semi-decent food and a good book, plus a reasonable night's sleep.
As we approached Corfu a storm over the hills reminded us that we were returning to the Corfu winter months and we should be ready for lots of rain, electric storms, mudslides, fallen trees, people's homes being swept down hills and all the other delights we had been warned of before we left o the is trip!
Sure enough it rained and lightning struck the hills.
More to come - the plumber is knocking at the door!!
.........
No comments:
Post a Comment