4th May 2000 Avignon to Rapallo
Trip Start
Apr 27, 2000
1
8
81
Trip End
Aug 09, 2000
Avignon and Rapallo,
France
Sunday, February 16, 2003
We spent two hours in Avignon the next morning. What an absolutely stunning old town. Retraced our steps from the previous evening's disaster, which brought us to the base of the city walls between the town and the river. By 10.00am, every parking space outside the walls was full, so we drove over the bridge to picnic grounds on the other side, parked and walked back across the bridge and straight through the gates to the city. Picked our jaws back up off the ground and spent a fabulous two hours. Only wandered around the Palais de Papes and the immediate vicinity-which means we probable only saw 10% of the town. No longer motivated to go inside every historic monument, we were happy to stroll the back alleys and gardens, and sit in the main square for half an hour. Loved it so much, we priced real estate in the area-$100,000 buys a lovely old apartment, $200,000 a small house in the country-all hundreds of years old.
By mid-day, we battled our way through the ugly outer industrial/business districts, and onto the N7, a country road that would take us to Aix-en-Provence. A lovely drive at reasonable speed through the Provence countryside. All those picture post card cottages and farmhouses, rolling hills, mountains and cliffs in the distance, castles on ridges, vineyards-stop to buy strawberries which we eat as we drive-then we are back into serious traffic, divided highway, two lanes, then three lanes, and we have bypassed Aix-en Provence entirely, which upsets Cheryl greatly as she had been waiting months to see it.
Motorway to Cannes, which we actually drove through-including right along the waterfront. Gold Coast with streets half the width and five times the traffic. Can't say that we had more than a glimpse of the marina or the water itself. Still, we did see all the expensive waterfront hotels, and lots of traffic. Decided to head on to Nice, and after some difficulty, especially in selecting between routes back to the A8 or whatever we were on , we made it back into the high speed traffic for a brief while before pulling over at a service station. Best views of any service station in the world. It looks down on Monaco. Sadly it was still misty. Nevertheless, took the obligatory photographs and video.
On to Italy!
It was only in retrospect that I remembered Mary Pellegrini (Whom we will stay with in Pescia), advising that this was the fastest way into Italy and fine if you liked spending half your time in tunnels. I had envisaged long tunnels-say 10's of kilometres at a time. What she meant was say 500m to a kilometre of roadway soaring above great ravines leading down to the coast, and then a tunnel of the same distance, through the ridge of the mountain running down to the sea. In each of the ravines was a town or at least dense settlement. For at least twenty kilometres it was glasshouses on every available speck of terraced slope. This used to be the cut flower capital of Europe (that's loosely called San Remo). Now I'm beginning to worry about Pescia, which has supposedly overtaken San Remo. I can't imagine what that many glasshouses will do to the landscape. Driving the tunnels isn't a great experience. Spatial discrimination is still difficult in driving on the left side of the road, and with the darkness of the tunnel it's even more difficult. Cheryl said she had a sore right hipbone from pressing her elbow in as I passed all the trucks in tunnels. She expected me to take the side mirror off at any time. From my perspective, I was worried about slamming the left side of the tunnel, not to mention looking in the rear view mirror only to see a car coming at me at great speed. Scary when you are already travelling at 150kmph. I can't imagine how fast they are travelling, as they seem to come out of nowhere. The scariest thing is that everyone has gleefully told me about getting knocked sideways by the air pressure from passing Ferarri's and Porches, and this hasn't happened yet.
7th May 2000 Walked the Piazza Navona and Northeast Rome districts, Now I'm in 8th heaven! Cooked and ate dinner, finished our bottle of Valpolicella Classico Santepietre 1999, and used our new espresso maker to make a coffee. Now on with the journal. After a half-hour of editing all prior entries, let's try again!
After many hours travelling at high speed (140kmph plus) through tunnels, and approaching 7.00pm, we decided to call it quits for the day. Weren't prepared to stay in Genoa-heavy industry has overwhelmed the historic centre, and as we later discovered, it has just spread out along the coast to overwhelm everything else. Rapallo looked like a quiet seaside town, so we left the motorway. Guess what, another tollgate to get into the town. To be accurate, you are issued with a ticket when you enter a motorway, and every exit from that point on, has a tollgate, and they calculate how far you have come and therefore the toll. It is just that quite often, the tollgate appears to be at the top of the main street of the town, and you go from 140kmph to 20kmph and thousands of vespas and pedestrians that threaten your existence. Anyway, into Rapallo and a frantic drive down the main street with me trying to avoid pedestrians and vespa's and shouting at Ches to keep her eye out for accommodation-she was too busy identifying supermarkets etc. As it turns out, the pensione we stayed at was in fact the first one you come to as you enter the town. The owners, who turned out to be an Irish woman and her Welsh husband, said that they did good business not only because they were the first, but because they were more welcoming to visitors. He had worked for many years in Genoa for an American company, and taken early retirement. Initially, I thought we had made a major blunder, as our room faced the street and the noise from thousands of vespa's was deafening. By 9.00pm it quietened down, and didn't start again till around 8.00am. Room was basic but very clean, but at 100,000lira, probably overpriced by 20,000lira. I think she plucked the price out of the air when we enquired. Ches was struggling to structure a semi-sentence in Italian, when the woman said with a broad Irish accent, "what language would you like to use?". Anyway, we took the room, and left our car in the car park over behind the buildings on the other side of the street. Very safe she said-even left all our luggage in the car and only took in an overnight bag. Car park was next to a Boche club. Guess they are like our bowling clubs. They had both an indoor (although one side had large open windows into the car park) and outdoor area. Hard packed earthen floor, with two or three lanes (if that's the correct description). They seemed to play outdoors during the day and indoors at night but I think they had lighting outside if there were large numbers playing and the weather was favourable. Much more voluble excitement than you would see at a Bowling Club.
Went for a walk to the waterfront (definitely not beachfront). Some three hundred metres down the street, in what to that point had looked like a pretty dirty, basic little town, was the waterfront, with dozens of hotels and restaurants wrapped around a stunning 1km waterfront. Large boulders formed the seawall, behind which was a wide promenade, which in turn was backed by gardens, palm trees with burgundy flowers growing out of the base of their fronds (we guess seeded by birds), with plenty of benches to sit upon and watch the passing parade (which we did on several occasions.). Behind this again was a narrow street separating the gardens from the hotels and restaurants. We walked the length several times before settling on a bistro for a light dinner. Vesuvius Pizzeria is more bistro/restaurant than a Pizza joint. The headwaiter worked us very well. We ordered a Seafood Risotto, which had to be ordered for two, and which cost significantly more per head than most other dishes on the menu. We had this with a beer, and a half carafe of the house red. Good but not great risotto, and when we congratulated the waiter, he made a big deal about something special. The word "birra" kept coming up, and Ches suggested that he wanted to serve me a special beer. After waiting another 15 min., we twigged that it was another dish. Probably cooked in beer. Swordfish steak in a tomato sauce, with a large claw from an unidentifiable crustacean. Again fine, but nothing special. I don't want to be the "Ugly Australian Tourist", However! as I said to Ches, when it comes to seafood, the rest of the world has a hard job in matching our own standards. Not just in the quality of the seafood, but in its preparation. Who would dare drown fresh swordfish steaks in a tomato sauce-they probably use imported frozen seafood, and it's the most appropriate way to serve it. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant evening, and as we headed home, I kept thinking of a remark our host had made about staying on for an extra day, and taking a boat trip to Portofino. Ches had picked up on it, and later said, wouldn't it be nice if we could make this another Polpero. This was in reference to our UK holiday, 12 years ago, when we had discovered Polpero on the south Cornish coast, and abandoned our itinerary to stay on an extra day. Ten minutes after my head hit the pillow, I rolled over and said to Ches, "go to Portofino tomorrow?" Done.
