2010 blog

April 16

     Always excited to be on our way again, we had forgotten what jet lag feels like and how heavy our luggage could be. It is a simple thing to prepare for a road trip when your motorhome is sitting in your driveway. It is altogether another thing to take everything with you, all at once, out the door into a taxi and onto an airplane. All, we’re guessing, 180 lbs. of it--at least one-third of which were maps and books. David’s suitcase was overweight at the airport, so Susan added the 6 lb RV-waterpump to the 21 lbs of books in her backpack and we were on our way.

     Two hours after landing at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam, we were in Rover, looking for a gas station. Gas has gone up since last year: 1.46 € / liter (about $7.50/gal.)  And then it was on to Waalwijk, an hour away. to pick up--and pay for--our new AGM batteries (including a nearly 20% value added tax!) But that’s OK, because everything works!

     It was our plan to get the batteries, stop at a grocery store in Waalwijk, and camp nearby, so we could unpack. But it turned out to be market day and there was a line of cars waiting to get into the grocery store parking lot and we knew it would be impossible to put Rover in there. So we gave up on the groceries and, with jet lag closing in on us, decided to find a campground. We wandered around the countryside for a few miles until we came upon a small campsite with a little store attached. There was no way to take a nap with our luggage still all over the place, so we unpacked, organized, ate a sandwich, and fell into bed exhausted.

The next day we headed off to Germany, getting “lost” again trying to get east from the campground. (It had us wondering what had happened to our GPS: if hadn’t shown up when we unpacked.) Our destination was the home of the American/German friends we had met last year. Still jet lagged, it was a long hard 253 miles. But good German hospitality, beer, and wine helped us make a great recovery and we are blessed again to have this oasis in such a handy location.

     After a trip to the store on Friday to replace our missing GPS, we were on our way south and east on German autobahns. There were no speeding cars passing us here--we were all going bumper to bumper for miles, usually in the slow lane with the trucks until we went up a long hill. The whole 150+ miles were very congested. The price of gas doesn’t seem to bother anyone here.   

     We found a campsite near the highway on top of a hill in a tiny town that translates “high town.” The campground owner was very excited to have his first American campers. When we tried to hook up the water, it wouldn’t work. “It’s too early in the season, it was only 4 degrees C last night.” The little restaurant there (where the waiter spoke Italian!) served us schnitzel and pommes (potatoes), and when he brought us two kinds of mayonnaise for the french fried potatoes, we knew for sure we were in Europe again.

April 17

April 17

     This was one of those days we have been secretly waiting for--the “what if something really awful happens” kind of day.  It’s Saturday. We had just stopped at the last service area in Germany to purchase our “vignette” that allows us to travel in Austria and automatically collect tolls. We were less than 12 miles from our campground destination when we heard loud repeated banging that just couldn’t be something simple. David looked in the rearview mirror and saw something large and black lying on the pavement behind us. We pulled over on the Austrian equivalent of the autobahn and very quickly were able to figure out that one of the right rear tires had just lost its tread.  Remarkably, we were within 50 yards of a emergency road phone, so David put on the obligatory safety vest, set up the obligitory warning triangles, called for help (“Ich bin Amerikaner. Sprechen Sie Englishe, bitte?” “Ja, gewiss.”) and  was able to pull the large piece of steel belted tire from the roadway.

     Within about 20 minutes a young man who said he had followed our motorhome in Germany came to offer assistance. He had exited the highway at the next exit and drove around next to where we were and came through the bushes to ask if he could help.  He knew we were very close to the exit to Wörgl and he also knew where there was a tire store in town. While we were talking to him a tow truck appeared, and it was decided that since we still had one good rear tire, we should try to drive into the town and park by the tire store until Monday morning. So with the young man showing the way, flashers going, with the tow truck following, we drove to the tire store and parked behind it, off the busy street.


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 This was not where we had expected to spend the weekend.  But the gracious help of this young man was wonderful. (“Your German is very good,” he said, lying through his teeth; “welcome to Austria.”)

April 19

    We spent a day and a half parked behind the tire store in Wörgl without incident. We saw no one, and probably no one knew we were there. There was no light at night at all.  On Sunday morning we went to a packed Catholic church service (since we had much to be thankful for!)  It was first communion for about 30 7-year-olds . . . but not a frilly white dress or veil in sight. And Susan thinks she was the only woman there in a skirt.

    In the afternoon we biked around the town and along the river, watching a flock of swans take off from the water--a noisy undertaking. In the evening we were visited by the young man who had helped us the day before and his wife. He was just checking to see if we were all right. He brought us juice; we shared our wine. 

    On Monday morning we left the parking lot behind the building and parked in front so we could be the first in the door at 8 a.m. The man at the desk said he had nothing to fit our 16” rims, but he made a call and sent us another kilometer down the street to an even bigger truck tire store. We arrived about 8:30 a.m., and they had us on our way by 10 a.m. with two new tires. In the process we discovered that the we had been driving on two tires that were 10 years old, probably original to the vehicle with 58,000 miles on them. We were grateful to learn that we had had good reason for our trouble and that it wasn’t a newer tire gone bad too soon. For all the trouble it could have been, we came through it about as easily and cheaply as we could.  And now we have new friends in Austria.

    We are now camped just south of Innsbruck by a small lake, surrounded by mountains. The view is arresting, to say the least. We are tempted to stay a while.


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April 22

    We decided to stay an extra day at the campground above Innsbruck. They had wonderful new facilities, excellent wifi connection, and an easy bus into the city. But instead of a relaxing day, we, of course, walked five miles and exhausted ourselves hitting the high spots. The Tyrolian Folk Museum tickets turned out to be half price for seniors and included admission to three other museums, so we visited more than we had planned, including a quite incredible tomb for Emperor Maximilian, who was never actually buried there (but arranged to have larger-than-life statues of his fellow European monarchs clustered around the tomb as if he were). 

    When we purchased our two new tires, we were told to have someone check the lug nuts after 100 km or so, so when we left the campsite we first headed back to Innsbruck to find a tire place. The first one we found didn’t have the right kind of wrench and sent us to a motorhome repair place about 10 miles west, where a mechanic had us park barely off the road and did the job for us. Then it was south to the Brenner Pass over the Alps to Italy. We expected a hard climb, but the uphill parts were interspersed with plenty of flats and even downhills, all accompanied by trucks, trucks, and more trucks. There was a lot of snow on the mountains around us but none near the road. The views were spectacular, and on the other side of the pass we descended into a flat valley between mountains. It was about a mile wide and went on for miles and miles. And then suddenly the mountains all around us ended and we were in very flat (like Kansas, only with trees) farmland. Lots of vineyards and blossoming fruit trees everywhere.

    Since we are trying to get to the south of Italy before the heat and crowds, we are driving on the Autostrada. The driving is sometimes tense. Susan reports that gritting her teeth and holding on tight has no effect on David’s driving (you may take that as you will). We are usually in the right lane with the trucks, passing only on long uphill climbs. There are frequent places to stop, many rest areas (sometimes every couple of miles) and truck/restaurant stops. The condition of the roads is very good, but there’s lots of repair work in relatively small patches that doesn’t seem to slow anyone down.

    We paid € 1.33 for gas this morning (about $7/gal.) and we are using it at a rate of 9 -10 mpg! The cost doesn’t seem to reduce the amount anyone drives around here.

    At the end of the day we spent far too much time driving around Verona looking for a place to stop for the night. The GPS claimed to have found two campsites, but after much city driving, we discovered that both were closed, so we headed about 15 miles west to Lake Garda, where the lake is lined with campgrounds and is a total tourist trap. The campground we found had 1200 sites, about a third of them for motorhomes and the rest little cabins to rent. We were surprised to see how full the motorhome section was this early in the season. Rover attracted a little attention. and we gave a German couple a tour inside. After a hard day on the road, we decided to eat in the campground’s restaurant where the Cokes cost more than the wine. So we bit the bullet. And also bought a three-pack of Heineken's in the store.


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    Today we left the flat land and headed south, eventually coming into the rolling hills of Tuscany that really do look like the Italy we see in pictures. But from the autostrada it often looks industrial and commercial, not to say run down, and we are looking forward to getting off the busy highways that really aren’t much wider than the local ones. Tonight we are in another large campground with very tiny sites that is mostly empty. The farther south we go, the more Spring has set in, and it is a green and lovely place.


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April 26

     We drove 255 miles in light rain to get through Naples and all the way to Pompei. We are in the Spartacus Campground, a little place with tiny sites. We have other campers within ten feet of us in three directions, but it is in a great location, literally just a few hundred feet from the exit of the autostrada and directly across the street from the Pompei ruins with Mt. Vesuvius in the distance. The main entrance and the train station are just a short, but dangerous, walk up the hill. (In fact, it is necessary to walk across an entrance to the autostrada! What were they thinking!)


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    If there are five inches, drivers will take four of them. They do stop for pedestrians in crosswalks, but will fly past in front of you if they can make it and will pass a foot behind you. It is exciting just to cross the street.

    On Saturday we took the train to Naples. The city was a big surprise and bigger disappointment. It is teeming, full of litter and grafitti and chaotic traffic. People sell everything imaginable from every corner and doorway, especially knock-off purses, watches, shoes and sunglasses. We had to walk through a pretty scruffy part of town to get to the Duomo (their cathedral), which was like being in another world: very clean and well kept. Beautiful paintings everywhere. There was a wedding just finishing up and before we left another was beginning. What a wonderful aisle to walk down. The bride came in on her groom’s arm. She was obviously pregnant and wore a skin tight strapless dress, fitted over her hips and belly, which then flared out, above the knee in front with a 6-8 foot train behind covered in ruffles. It was the most awful, inappropriate wedding gown Susan had ever seen. We apologize for not taking a picture. The street outside was lined with wedding shops with gorgeous dresses and lots of little white communion dresses.  

    We caught a bus to the big city park along the Mediteranean Sea and discovered we were in the midst of a Formula One Show Run with crowds forming and blocked off streets barricaded. But when we figured out it was going to be just one vehicle showing off (sponsored by Red Bull), we decided not to stand around and wait for it to happen. So we went to the arts district where they sell nativity sets like doll houses: huge things where you can populate whole towns around the “Holy Family.” And of course they sell all the pieces. All very charming. But since the city was not charming we made our way back to the train station and back to Pompei.

    The showers at Spartacus Campground leave a little to be desired. There is only one hook inside the shower stall and no half wall or baffle to keep everything from getting wet. Imagine taking a shower with your clothes and towel inside the shower stall with you. It also takes about 5 minutes before any hot water arrives. We considered moving on, but the location is just too handy and helps us avoid driving anywhere. (And did we mention that there is a fairly big grocery a short walk down the street?)

    Sunday we took the train to Herculaneum, another town destroyed by the Mt. Vesuvius eruption in 79A.D. It is much smaller site than Pompei. It had been buried under yards of mud before the ash and lava came, so some of it is very well preserved--even some food and fabrics survived.

    We spent Monday at the Pompei ruins. It is a huge and impressive site, and you can easily lose yourself for a day. There is still more to be uncovered, but the archaeologists are now concentrating on restoring parts of it. The larger theatre (which we couldn’t get into) is going to be used for outdoor concerts.

    It was difficult to walk. There are narrow sidewalks, but the streets were sewers, paved with large stones. It is a totally handicapped inaccessibe place. The houses line the streets: tiny room and large gardens.  Much of the stuff that survived being buried under ash and lava for 1700 years was sold to the wealthy in Naples before archeologists and historians took charge. But there are still frescoes on some walls and beautiful tile floors. We could pretty much go where we liked (us and hundreds of school children and lots of well behaved stray dogs.)  Mt Vesuvius looms over it, but it really doesn’t look that high or impressive any more. Its last major eruption was in the 1600’s. No one seems to mind that it is there. According to a guide book, 600,000 people live within 7 km of the summit today. For the moment, we are among them!


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April 27

    A few months ago we heard Minnesota humorist Kevin Kling read from some of his stories. One of them gave us our tag line for this year. When asked if his bus driving job was boring because he drove the same route day after day, the driver replied ,“Not a day goes by when I don’t say ‘Well, shoot, I ain’t never seen that before!’” Well, not a day goes by when one of us doesn’t get to say that to the other. Today we could have kept repeating it while we did the Amalfi Coast.  

    We took the train to Sorrento and got on a bus and then gave thanks, often, that someone else was doing the driving while Rover could stay parked safely in Pompei. There is simply no way we could have driven her over that route. There isn’t a tenth of a mile of straight road: it continuously twist and turns--first up over some low mountains and then the along the coast--and we do mean RIGHT along the coast. It was an incredible, scary, beautiful drive. The driver blew the horn going around blind curves, which meant about once a minute. We got off the bus in Positano and walked down streets of steps,


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had lunch, and walked some more. Then we got on another bus to Amalfi. This time we sat on the road side (so we weren’t looking over the edge down to the sea) and watched small cars barely squeezing by the bus.

    Amalfi is quite a small town. It used to have 70,000 residents, but most of it and them slid into the sea in an earthquake in the 1300s. Today would not have been a good day for an earthquake. We bought some gelato and got on the next bus (the only way out) that took us to Salerno, where we walked around some more to settle our stomachs and get our weak knees functioning. Since this is a big city, stores were just reopening at 3:30 PM from their daily lunch break! We have now seen the burial vault of a pope: Gregory VII is buried in the cathedral in Salerno, along with the bones of St Matthew, we are assured.


                                                   St Matthew, Salerno


We then made our way to the train station and came back to Pompei, completeing a circle of spectacular sight seeing. Well, shoot, we ain’t never seen that before, and quite frankly, we will never see it again. Once on that road is enough.   

April 28

    Travel is supposed to be broadening: the traveler visits strange lands, hears new sounds, observes unfamiliar customs, and emerges from the experience refreshed, enlightened, more appreciative of the variety of ways people may organize their lives together. And so we have nearly always found it to be.

    But.

    Southern Italy is . . . uh . . . difficult.

    It may be particularly so for those of us who are of the Northern European Persuasion (NEP). Brought up by Dutch Calvinist parents, latterly a part of Norwegian / Swedish / Danish / German Lutheran environments, we have absorbed the social teachings of those traditions, and by now we’re too damn old to change.

    Among the NEP social teachings we’ve become aware that others don’t share over the past few days are:


*whether there should be a difference between one’s behavior while, on the one hand, drunk in a bar or attending a sporting event and, on the other, while interacting with others, sober and in public (the NEP answer: yes, there should);

*how one should walk down a crowded sidewalk (NEP: to the right, in a straight line, at a more or less constant speed);

*how one should wait for tickets to something (in a line, with due regard for those who got there before one, without shoving);

*what the odds are that strangers fifty feet away are interested in hearing one’s opinion about anything, including one’s family or friends who are five feet away (NEP: really long);

*and (at the risk of putting too fine a point on it) what are the chances that one really is the center of the universe and that everyone else recognises the fact and will unhesitatingly defer as one sails through life (NEP: not bloody likely).


    So: we are finding southern Italy to be warm; lots of it is wonderfully beautiful; the sea is a gorgeous blue, and the food is delicious . . . and it’s also . . . uh . . . difficult.

    Much of this was reconfirmed for us yesterday when we took a jampacked ferry to the Isle of Capri. We are here now because this is considered low season and we thought we would be avoiding large crowds. Wrong. Ferry after ferry comes from Sorrento or Naples and dumps loud crowds, who all press forward to the funicular which brings us, 50 at a time, to Capri Town on the top of the hill.

    Capri Town is an insanely expensive tourist town, immaculate, covered with flowers. There are only half a dozen actual two-lane streets on the island. The rest are 8 or 10 feet wide and meant for walking. Little three-wheeled trucks maneuver around the pedestrians as needed. To escape the crowds, we took a 90-minute walk toward the south end of the island and the nature park. The path was never more than eight feet wide (sometimes only two) but always paved. And after a mile or so we started to encounter small flights of stairs (significantly, they usually went down, toward the sea).


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We passed homes and could not figure out how people got to them regularly with groceries and such (possible answer: that’s why God invented servants). And how were they even built?

    It was quite a lovely walk, looking down on the sea until we came to the end and found about 300 steps taking us up to the main road at about a 10% grade. We took it very slowly; David’s heart surgeon should be proud of his work.

   The town, while lovely, is basically a shopping center for all the big designer names from Paris and Milan. One store showed an $1100 pair of shredded blue jeans, and there were lots of outdoor cafes and plazas with amazing views. We took a crowded little bus to Anacapri, a couple miles away. Big buses would never make it around the hairpin curves.

    Anacapri is an even smaller town and we visited a little church with a tiled floor depicting the flight of Adam and Eve from the Garden. It was charming and worth the trip.


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We bought some more limoncello and some lemon chocolate and took an even more crowded bus (think sardines, hairpins, and bumpy pavement) back to the port and the ferry to Sorrento. There we had to climb 130 steps to the main street, collasped in an outdoor cafe, had fish for dinner, and after recovery took the train back to Pompei. It had been a lovely day in an especially lovely place, but tomorrow we have decided to stay “home,” avoid noisy crowds, do some laundry, get some groceries and plan our next move.  And Susan is trying to get up enough nerve to restring one of the window shades. 


May 2

    Uploading the blog is increasingly a problem for us. When we were in Pompei we had wireless access at our site but apparently wiped out our website trying to load it. We walked all over town asking at big hotels and tourist offices where we might find strong “wifi” and finally ended up trying Burger King with free wifi access. It took almost an hour to upload the blog, but we were delighted it worked at all. A couple of days later before we left Pompei we were able to upload several days more. So if you are following our journey, please be aware that we may be uploading several entries at a time.

    The night before we left Pompei we spent a pleasant hour visiting with a British couple who spend most of their time on the road. Later we met an American couple from New Jersey who also own a Born Free and were shocked to see one just like theirs in Italy. They are touring for 10 weeks in a rented German “camping car” and wished they had their own. We were able to warn both couples to avoid driving the Amalfi Coast.

    We finally left Pompei after seven nights, with a newly strung window shade that works! (OK, only the two broken strings were replaced.) We drove 50 miles south to Paestum, where there are Greek temples in the middle of acres of Roman ruins.


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We camped at a large place on the sea that has many permanently placed grimy trailers taking up all the good spots and lots of loud people and music. We were in a short row of unhappy overnight campers parked on a sand lot. We rode our bikes to the ruins and around the town and watched the sun set over the Mediterranean.

    We were glad to move on on Saturday, which was May Day, a national holiday. As we were driving away from the coast, the rest of Italy was driving, impatiently,  bumper to bumper, toward it. We drove east, crossing 3/4 of Italy. It is such a varied country. Sometimes it looked like the scraggly brush of Utah or Wyoming. And we went up to 2700 feet crossing mountains. It was a pleasant ride on good roads with little traffic, until we got to Matera. The GPS wound us into a housing project, claiming we were a few feet from a campsite. So we parked Rover and walked the route. Three people stopped their cars and offered help. One showed us down the hill where we were supposed to be--on another road. So we turned around and were walking back to Rover when a car pulled up next to us with one of the men who had tried to help us. He gestured for us to climb inside, drove us back up to Rover and then led us out to the road we needed to be on, where we found one of the nicest campsites we have ever been on.

    David may curse the drivers and the loud music and talking--and then feel silly for characterizing an entire country on the basis of those experiences--and then some people go out of their way for us, like this man did. There was also the girl in Pompei who walked us a block down the street so she could point us to the Tourist office, a gas station attendant who gave a pen and window wiping cloth to David to give to “your wife” when he saw Susan washing the windows, and the waiter at the campground restaurant in Matera who went out his way to make sure we understood what we were getting.

    In Matera we walked to the Sassi, a tumble of old cave homes, lived in for years (from the 8th century to the l950s!) by the very poor. There are over 3000 caves and churches carved into the hillside. 


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It was the set for Mel Gibson’s “Passion of Christ.”  Really a pretty horrible place . . . and it just went on and on. We walked back to the motorhome--about a mile and a half uphill and downhill--on a very hot afternoon. We decided to have dinner in the restaurant at the campsite and went in just before 7 p,m., only to be told to come back at 8. So, quite hungry, we showed up then. There was no menu, no prices. We were fed what they had--first a bowl of olives and a basket of bread (no butter), then a delicious meat and vegetable stew, then a pasta dish with mushrooms and tomato sauce. We declined a second pasta dish with vegetables and had gelato with fresh fruit instead. All this with a carafe of wine and a large bottle of water came to €38--about $50.  We were very pleasantly surprised. (And several families with four small children showed up after 9 p.m. to eat.) Each course was preceded by a conversation with the waiter we mentioned above, who wanted to practice his English and tell the American tourists about the time he’d spent in Toronto. He seemed disappointed when we told him we’d be leaving in the morning, because he’d been thinking about what he would feed us the next evening. He also hoped we’d let people know about the restaurant and camping site, so here it is (and if you’re in the area in a motorhome, it’s well worth staying there):

    Masseria del Pantaleone

    C. da Chiancalata, 27

    75100 Matera

    The next day we drove to the big port city of Taranto, right on the Mediteranean Sea where the boot of Italy meets the foot. We couldn’t find one campground mentioned in a guide, and a second one was closed--this after some frightfully tight city streets and traffic.  So we left Taranto and its traffic behind and drove north to Alberobello where little trulli houses dot the landscape.  Well, shoot. . . .

May 3

CHARM ALERT:

This is a trullo house.

    

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The little town of Alberobello has more than a thousand of them, quaint and cute as can be. This morning we drove from the crummy unlevel campground just up the hill on the outskirts of town to a large, level motorhome parking lot practically in the middle of town. Who knew?

    The unique architecture of its trulli makes Alberobello yet another another complete tourist town. It is set on several small hills with the houses on stepped or steep streets on either side. The north side has hundreds of trulli houses still inhabited, while nearly all of those on the south side have been turned into shops selling little trulli houses, trulli dish towels, trulli paintings, trulli manger scenes, trulli-you-name-it. You can even rent one for a holiday. But the houses themselves are adorable: each one about 10 feet square inside and often connected to another with open arches to provide additional space. One might expect to see little trulli gnomes walking about. This was worth the drive across Italy to see.


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    Unlike other cities that we’ve found dirty and full of litter, Alberobello was sparkling clean and full of flowers. After we spent a couple of hours walking around the town, we looked for an internet connection since we hadn’t had one since Pompei. We finally tried a computer store (down steep trulli steps to a tiny space made with  three arched roofs--probably three trulli) and talked the owner into selling us an hour of good wireless access. But he was closing in an hour for lunch, so we hurried back to Rover--only a block away--to get the computer and reconnect with the world. (We have been able to pick up BBC World News at 10 p.m. the last few nights, and that helps a lot, even though--or maybe because--it devotes only 2 minutes or so to U.S. news. “Oil spill” . . . “Car bomb discovered” . . .”Twins lose”. . .)

    After lunch in Rover (a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for Susan, as a break from the never-ending ham and cheese), we left Trulli-land, charmed, and drove north to Bari, where we are writing this in the worst spot we’ve had in three years--far worse than behind the tire store in Wörgl, which had had the additional advantage of being in the middle of a vibrant little town. This place is a motorhome storage lot. There must be a hundred of them here: it’s like an RV graveyard.


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Overnight parking is allowed--we even have electricity (this time using the old-fashioned “Italian” three-prong plug)--and it’s guarded 24 hours a day. But we are too far from anywhere to do anything. We had really wanted to visit the Basilica and  St. Nicholas's vault. (Yes, Virginia, Father Christmas is dead and buried in Italy.) Instead we took a walk and were glad to find a tiny grocery. We are surrounded by a military installation with high walls and barbed wire fencing, like a prison. But for tonight it is home. “Well, shoot. . . .”

    Readers may wonder why we don’t simply move on. First, we cannot just keep going unless we know where we are headed, especially in a crowded city: choices of camping spots around here were very limited. Many campgrounds do not open until mid-May. Second, the traffic doesn’t allow for any indecision: it can take time to find a place to safely pull over and reassess our choices (and drivers in this part of the world will let you know very quickly if they think your indecision is wasting a couple seconds of their time). And in fact we didn’t have any other choices. 

    So we are where we are. We took a walk and found a grocery store. And later another motorhome joined us in this popular place. (But its license plate has strange lettering: “CL.” Where could they be from? The Czech Republic is “CZ.” “ChiCom Labrador”? “Colder Latvia”? Clearly, we won’t sleep tonight.)

May 9

    We are in a large campground just north of Rome. On our way here, we had stayed one night at a camping “seaside resort” on the Adriatic. We were the only ones there amidst a hundred aging, rusting trailers. It was run by a friendly family busily working to improve it for the high season. And while it appeared to have a good internet connection, no one there knew the password or how to make it work. So after coffee on the beach in the morning, we drove the 200 miles back across the mountains (3000 ft.) and through many tunnels (one of them 3 miles long) to Rome in an occasional rain.


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    We expected a jam of traffic like we have found on the Paris ring road, but everything moved smoothly, and although our exit was not numbered (not at all, unlike every other one!) we had great directions and arrived quickly at the campground, with only one near-fatality involving a motor scooter passing us on the right just as we were about to take an exit.

    Tiber Camping is a really nice place. For $20/night (electricity and hot showers included) we have a free shuttle bus to the train station 5 minutes away. The train takes about 20 minutes to get into the heart of the city; at least equally important, there are very nice clean toilets (with paper and seats!) and showers, a pool that is actually open for use, a market, laundry, and a very good and reasonably priced restaurant and bar with free wifi. We will probably stay here a week. The only downside is the large number of huge cottonwood trees shedding their fluff. And we have had a fair amount of rain, turning all the sites into swamps. If we hadn’t had the awning down (collecting fluff) we would have needed boots to get out the door.

    We are findng Rome difficult and amazing all at the same time. Never have we seen such a concentration of domes, obelisks (dating back to Cleopatra’s day), monuments, statues, fountains, spires…. and then, around the corner, a building dating from the Renaissance with a view of ancient ruins behind it. But getting anywhere is a challenge. The signage is terrible: usually non-existent and, when it does appear, often contradicting other signs; even the main throughfares have narrow sidewalks; tourists are everywhere, puzzling over their maps and posing for pictures; buses are crowded; traffic is ridiculous; only along the newer streets (like the one Mussolini put through the heart of the ruins) are there wide sidewalks.

    The Colosseum is much smaller than we’d expected--about a quarter of the size of a football stadium--but with its upper and lower concourses, it is obviously the basis for modern stadiums’ design. The ruins of the Roman forum and various emperors’ houses go on for blocks in the heart of the city, some of them three or four stories high and many accesssible to the public.


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We have been to five museums, one great castle with impresssive views of the city, each of the seven hills at least once (at least it feels like it) and many churches, including the Pope’s own. This last is not St Peter’s but San Giovanni in Laterano Plaza: a massive, extravagant place with huge statues of all the apostles. And the skulls of St Peter and St Paul are supposed to be above the Pope’s ornate altar in the center of the church. (Well, shoot….) As we entered, a service was just beginnng, so we couldn’t get too close to the altar. It is interesting how services go on while tourists just kind of mill around on the sides and members of the congregation greet one another. We were hoping for music but didn’t hear any at all. We haven’t seen the Vatican yet, but this wil be hard to top. 

    On Saturday we thought we had the bus system figured out as to how to return to our train station, but the bus made an unexpected couple of turns and stopped well short of the station. This was when we discovered the main street had become a pedestrian avenue--just for Saturday night--jammed with people, musicians, mimes, sellers of everything. So we just bought some gelato, hung on to our wallets and enjoyed being part of it while we made our way on foot back to the station.

    Today we walked down blocks of markets--antiques, clothing, shoes, linens--kind of a WalMart spread along one long outdoor aisle, except that the sellers are calling to you to buy their purses, bags and underwear (and nobody is claiming the stuff was Made in the USA). We keep our money safely zipped away and so far people have only tried to talk us out of it. 

May 12

    Arrivederci, Roma. We didn’t throw coins in the Trevi Fountain because we probably won’t return to the city (note the cause-and-effect confusion there). We spent seven nights in the Tiber Camping and had no trouble filling our days with easy trips into the city. One of the museums on our list--the Borghese Gallery--was booked until Tuesday, so we decided to make a reservation and do everything else at a more leisurely pace while waiting for Tuesday to come. The museum is in a large park, originally owned by a noble family intent on impressing other noble families, and the collection includes some of Bernini’s most famous sculptures (David, The Rape of Persephone, and others so famous they won’t let you even take a camera in with you). Equally memorable was David being shat upon by a pigeon roosting above the entry door.

    On Monday we visited the Vatican, thinking everyone else in town would have been there on Sunday to see the Pope. But apparently the other Lutherans in town hadn’t bothered either, because we stood in a line a quarter mile long on Monday to get into the Sistine Chapel. The line moved quickly, and, remarkably, they just keep the doors open and keep directing people in. It is a labryinth path to get to the actual chapel, through musuem rooms, tapestry rooms and art galleries, with as much art on the ceilings as on the walls. 

    The chapel itself is not overly large, but we must have shared the space with at least a thousand other people. We are told that 25,000 people visit the Sistine Chapel every day (at €15 or $20 each). It was dismayingly crowded but impressive nonetheless. After lunch with a British couple who shared our table, we visited St Peter’s.


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It’s simply big: very, very BIG, and full of buried popes in every side chapel. We had to go through airport type security in both places, but were free to wander once we were inside, especially in St. Peter’s where there was plenty of space for the crowds. No one was selling anything inside, but you didn’t need to get very far to find the bookshops and official and unofficial souvenir shops (Pope John Paul still has his own shop). So for a couple of days we returned to the campground a bit earlier than usual and a bit less exhausted, did some more laundry and relaxed.

    Before we left the campground we were able to give Rover her first real bath in a long, long time. This is the first campground that provides a place for camper washing, and it’s a good thing it did: the cottonwood trees had really made a mess. It rained almost every day, and when it rains on cottonwood fluff it turns to a slimy, stringy mud (not unlike pigeon s--t).  Our awning was full of it. We swept off as much as we could and then  rolled up the awning a few inches to sweep off some more . . . all this standing in swampy grass. Then we took Rover to the camper wash and put the awning down again to hose it down. It was quite a messy wet job and we both got soaked and took showers when we were done.

    Most Americans are not aware that many campgrounds in Europe offer rentals of small bungalow cabins. The cost is very reasonable compared to a hotel. The cabins at Tiber are around € 40 ($52) a night.  We paid € 105 (or $135) for our seven nights for the motorhome site. We would not have found a hotel in the city for one night for that price.  And of course we didn’t buy gas for six days in a row.

    On our way to Assisi today we paid $7 a gallon for gas. Along the autostrada we heard a loud bang and immediately our hearts stopped. We neither saw nor heard nor felt anything, but we pulled over at our first opportunity (after driving through a tunnel).  We found nothing, but in the distance we could hear fireworks. We don’t know why, but we often hear fireworks during the day--the loud banging ones, not the colorful ones we associate with the Fourth of July. We heard them every night in Pompei. So we decided nothing had exploded, we still had all six tires,our hearts resumed a healthy rhythm, and we continued on our way.

    We have a beautiful view of Assisi, this town on a hill, right out our front window from the campground.


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We visited the crypt where St Francis is buried. When he died in 1226, a modest little crypt was built around his grave. Later a small but impressive church was built over the crypt, and later still, a basilica was built over the church, after which Giotto filled it with murals of scenes from Francis’s life. It all attracts thousands of visitors and pilgrims every year, but today wasn’t at all crowded. The city is very hilly, clean, quaint and lovely. It was a welcome change from the busy-ness and litter and grafitti of Rome . . . in spite of the wild taxi/bus ride we had from the campground into the town.

May 14

    It’s nice to know Italy can do something besides Baroque. Something like . . . oh . . . Gothic:


                                                   duomo


    Or maybe it’s only Siena that can do Gothic: the Lonely Planet guidebook says the city’s economic decline in the 1500s meant that nobody could be bothered to tear down its medieval buildings and replace them with up-to-date ones. And a couple centuries earlier, because of a plague, they had never gotten around to enlarging the cathedral. So it has stayed like this. Beautifully so.

                                             

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    We left Assisi, planning to spend a couple of days in Perugia before then driving to the route of Saturday’s stage of the Giro d’Italia bike race. But after navigating the steepest city streets so far, we found the gates of the campground closed. “Next month open,” said the workmen. “Now open,” we muttered, quoting the camping book. When we asked if there was another camppground, he pointed further up the hill, but then looked at Rover and shook his head and said he wouldn’t try it. We scraped bottom turning around in their camping entrance and  headed for Siena instead, where the GPS sent us up more unnecessarily steep urban hills to a campground terraced on a hillside, complete with its own hairpin curves.

    We caught a bus into Siena and spent a few hours visiting their great city square


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and incredible cathedral, via twisting streets lined with shops selling souvenirs, pastries, and expensive shoes. And no graffiti. (Susan certainly wishes she needed shoes.)

    On Friday we drove 20 miles to get close to Saturday’s race route. We’re at a resort campground on top of another Tuscan hill: more terraced camper pitches, a big open-air swimming pool (very cold), an enclosed spa (tepid), a restaurant with linen tablecloths, and a wifi that won’t assign us an IP address. We’ve run into that problem before but don’t remember how to fix it. The view from up here is wonderful, but it started to rain last night around 10 pm and hasn’t quit yet. So we really can’t see anything and it is going to be a miserable day to wait for a bike race.

    So we have two questions: is there anything we can do when a campground’s wifi won’t recognize our Mac’s network settings? and can we convince our Garmin Nuvi GPS to keep us on less challenging city streets instead of directing us to steep, narrow ones in order to save us a few drops of gas or 30 seconds of driving time? Anybody? (Oh, and a  third one: how are the Twins doing against the YankeeScum? The BBC shortwave won’t say. It seems to think oil spills and Falling €s are the only things worth mentioning.)

May 15

    The rain started around 10 pm on Friday night and didn’t stop for 24 hours--a nice, gentle, steady drenching. We spent most of the damp and chilly Saturday inside Rover until around 2 pm, when we put on our waterproof shoes, raincoats, ponchos, gloves and pink (!) Giro hats, took up our umbrellas and headed out to that day’s Giro d’Italia’s bike route, about a mile downhill. We got there just in time to watch the sponsor parade of decorated cars speed past--without tossing out any merchandise, the pikers--and then we found a wet curb under a tree to sit on for an hour to wait for the riders.

    A couple of hundred people had gathered just outside the little hill town (Casina) and spread out along the road lined with parked cars. The road takes a pretty sharp curve right at the turnoff to the town, so we crossed it to get to the inside of the curve so no one would go flying off the road into us as they went around that corner. 

    The riders came up the long, steep hill, looking throughly miserable in the cold and wet, accompanied by the many motorcycles, helicopters and support vehicles. They were strung out over quite a distance, but it was all over within ten minutes.


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    Then the second event began: The Departure. It consisted of people running back to their cars, determined to be the first on the road, pulling out at the same time, nosing their cars onto the crowded street, heading in all directions, pushing pedestrians out of the way, honking their horns, creating an instant traffic jam . . . and taking it all very seriously. It was as enjoyable as the race (and lasted longer). Those of us on foot just kept walking around the cars, through the rain and up the long hill. We had considered driving Rover out to the route because of the rain, but we were glad we hadn’t, and the rain wasn’t much of a problem until we had to find a place to hang our wet stuff when we returned. 


    (PS. The first of 2010's "Things We Have Learned" is now on the menu.) 

May 19

    We are in Florence. Well, shoot. . . .

    It is truly a lovely city. (So is its name in Italian: Firenze.) We drove straight to Camping Michelangelo (!) from Casina with no detours or problems. The campground is quite large and spills down the hillside on the south bank of the Arno River, overlooking the city. Quite a remarkable view. It is just about full, even though we are weeks away from the beginning of the official “high season.” 


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    Since we expect to be here for a few days, we emptied our tanks and filled up with fresh water before we settled ourselves. But we soon discovered an electrical problem: we kept blowing the circuit breaker on the outlet pole we were plugged in to, even when we had shut off everything electrical. A neighbor told us we had only 2 amps of service! (Could it be that our converter/charger’s attempts to recharge the batteries were drawing too much current?) We finally saw the campground guy who had directed us to our site and asked him if there was a solution. He showed us another site 50 feet away where there was 10 amps. We first tried to string another cable but didn’t have enough of the necessary adapters, so we just packed everything up and moved Rover to the new site, which solved the problem. (We had actually begun to look for alternative camping sites, with all the navigation problems that would entail, so we were really relieved that it turned out OK.)

    This is a great location. It is about a 20 minute walk into the city center (first up the hill in the campground and then down the hill to the city (David counted 500 steps of the latter). Fortunately there is a bus that lets us avoid walking back up those 500 steps at the end of the day and drops us off right at the campground gate and then it is all downhill to Rover.

    Sunday we walked into the city, reserved our museum tickets for Tuesday and Wednesday and just walked around absorbing Florence’s ambiance. It is a very well kept and lively city, with lots of open plazas and narrow streets. During the Renaissance the wealthy tried to outdo each other in building extravagant palaces, most of which are now museums or exposition halls. Only taxis, tiny buses and bicycles are allowed in the city center. It is full of gelato (ice cream) shops--even more than pizzerias--sometimes two or three on the same block. The Ponte Vecchio was a disappointment, however. Every shop on this covered bridge was an expensive jewelry shop--every single one: very boring and unimaginative. Florence is known for its leather work, and Susan not only wishes she needed expensive Italian leather shoes, but possibly a purse or jacket to match. It is gorgeous stuff. 

    Because all the museums were closed on Monday, we went to churches instead. It is hard to beat Santa Croce. This is where the really famous Italians (those who were not popes) are buried: Galileo, Fermi, Machiavelli, Rossini, and Michelangelo himself, to name a few. It is a huge and beautiful place filled with paintings, sculptures and monuments to everyone. We also visited the cathedral, which is even bigger than Santa Croce, but doesn’t have nearly the claim to fame, except for its painting of the Last Judgement on its massive dome.


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A flood had covered much of the area in 1966 to about chest height. Many places have the level permanently marked on their walls. So the city has recently been cleaned and repaired. Damage is not at all evident except in the case of some of the paintings and the like that have been moved to museums for safe keeping.

    On Tuesday we went to the Accademia Museum to see Michelangelo”s David--17 feet tall and wonderfuly positioned at the end of a long gallery. (To get close to it, you walk past at least ten tour groups, each with a guide declaiming in a different language.) We had followed the advice of our Lonely Planet guide and reserved tickets ahead of time, so we didn’t have to wait in line at all. As you move down the corridor toward David, you pass by four other unfinished Michaelangelo statues with figures emerging from the marble.  The museum also has a unique collection of 500-year-old musical instruments because of the interest of one of the Medici rulers of the city. 

    Finally, on Wednesday we had tickets to the Uffizi, known as Italy’s greatest art museum. It is a huge and impressive gallery, and it is easy to be surprised by some of the originals we saw there: some of Michelangelo’s, da Vinci’s, Botticelli’s, and even a couple of Rembrandt’s. We also appreciated that there was much written description in English. However, we have seen enough versions of the Virgin Mary with Baby Jesus to last us a lifetime, and probably enough crucifixion scenes as well (although we’re sure to get another dose of both in Germany). Photographs were not allowed in either museum, which really helps to keep people moving instead of posing for endless pictures.

    Later in the day, we actually found a smaller sculpture museum more enjoyable than the overwhelmingly large one. Early in the afternoon, between the two, a little rain cooled us off when we were not prepared for it, but as soon as it stopped the plazas were again full of picture-taking people again. But the rain held off long enough for us to catch the bus to the top of the hill and the campground. And once again we are grateful Rover is not a tent.

May 24

    The weather finally cleared to beautiful sunshine. Our next visit was to Pisa, just a few miles east of Florence. Our stopping point there--”The Leaning Tower Campground” is how it translates--is only about a quarter mile from the Tower, so we parked Rover and walked to it.

    The medieval city planners must have had tourists in mind because the tower, cathedral and Baptistry are all in a row down a wide lawn about three football fields in length; alongside runs a pedestrian street lined with market stalls of all kinds, mostly souvenirs of little tiny leaning towers (this is a great timesaver for the busy tourist: up one side, down the other, and back on the bus to your hotel).


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    Pisa’s cathedral was once the largest in Italy and is absolutely beautiful. It is interesting to see very modern additions to some of these 1000-year old places: here it was a new altar and pulpit, both very different from the originals. We did not go up the tower and we resisted having our picture taking in what appeared to be the obligatory stance of pretending to hold it up (obligatory not only for tourists but for Snoopy and Disney characters on t-shirts). 

    We walked around the city a little, dodging the crowds of students in the afternoon, and then stopped by a grocery store on our way back to Rover. Later we shared a glass of wine with a couple from Florida who are touring for six months using a very affordable buy-back program from an RV dealer in the Netherlands.

    The next day we traveled only 16 miles to Lucca, whose claim to fame is the 2.5-mile long 13th century wall that surrounds the old city. It is topped by a paved road in a parklike setting used by walkers, runners and bikers and giving very peaceful and lovely views into the old city. We walked around and through the city and then back to Rover. We’d parked her in a camperstop (a parking lot for motorhomes, usually with few or no services) that we shared with 15 other for the night, just a couple of blocks from the city wall in a nice neighborhood.

    The next day we got back on the autostrada and headed north along the coast, looking at mountains again. We had located a campground that would serve as  starting point for visits to the Cinque Terre and Genoa, as driving to the former is impossible (no roads) and to the latter is difficult (big busy city). We had picked out Sestri Levante because it was very close to the  autostrada, in spite of the fact that it did not have any internet service (surely there would be some in town).

    But just a few feet after leaving the autostrade tollbooth, we were about to make a turn when we saw the campground sign accompanied by a “2.5m” overhead sign (Rover is 3.05). So we had no choice but to go straight instead. Then we saw a second sign for the campground, followed it around a long block and under the autostrada no less than three times, avoiding the low overhead (but introducing us to a one lane bridge--always fun), 50 meters up a steep-ish hill . . . and arrived at the campground.

    This one was the tightest place yet. The spot the owner put us into was fairly large, but by evening we had been joined by two Dutch couples and their cars and trailers. They fried up a huge amount of fish for dinner just outside our door and kindly gave us a plateful for our dinner. They were supposed to be leaving before us, but one of them had car trouble, so when we were about to leave a few days later, it involved a bunch of trailer shifting.


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                                              (Rover's the one waaaay in the back, center.)


    This campground was a little too far from the town center for easy access. We walked in and out the first afternoon, but once was enough: the next two days, we took up the owner’s offer to drive us to the train station and pick us up on our return. Oh . . . and no Wi-Fi in town.

    The first day we took the train to the Cinque Terre, the five fishing villages along the sea that are (mostly) inaccessible by cars. We were expecting a gorgeous ride along the sea, but the trip was literally about 90% in tunnels, from which the train emerged only to stop at tiny stations. The villages are absolutely overrun with tourists. Just getting off the train at the first stop was really difficult, because way too many people had to funnel from the station platform up a flight of narrow steps, and into an even more narrow street. The towns are undeniably lovely and charming, but they seemed overwhelmed by the weight of tourism.

    We walked from the first town to the second along a paved walkway above the water’s edge, with gorgeous flowers blooming all along the way. Between the other towns, though, we took the train and managed to visit all five in one day . . . including the 382 steps up to Corniglia, where we rewarded ourselves with lunch.  And we managed to hit “Lemon Days” in Monterossa, where we were given free tastes of limoncello.


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    The next day we took the train in the other direction to Genoa, the home of Christopher Columbus and now a busy port city of 600,000 with its own old center. We walked all over, avoiding every Renaissance museum and palace, and when we discovered the cathedral was closed--with nary a sign about open hours--we got back on the train. We got off again at Santa Margherita Ligure, a small, moderately charming, total tourist beach resort town. From there we took a tiny bus on a scary ride along the cliffs to Portofino, an even tinier, considerably more charming resort town, with yacht harbor, fancy shops and cafes (this is the harbor you see in pictures of the Italian Riviera). We saw the whole thing in an hour, bought some gelato and a t-shirt to spur the Italian economy to greater heights, and took the bus and train back to Rover.


                                                 STA_1247


    With the possible exception of Pisa, none of the places we’ve visited the last few days has lived up to our expectations, and none has tempted us to stay longer. And doing without internet for five days has not been easy. On the other hand, we have been on the road for six weeks now, so maybe we are just tired. So we are headed north to the lake country, where we hope to relax for a few days, avoid crowds, and add to our list of Things We Have Learned.    

May 29

    Getting to the Italian lake country is not relaxing. The mountains along the coast provide few opportunities for going north. So David got to drive his favorite road, the breath-taking A-12 tunnel/bridge/tunnel/bridge, for about 50 miles east before we could turn north and get through the mountains. Then the country turns flat . . . so flat that they flood the fields and grow rice. We also saw corn and wheat, real midwestern farms instead of the usual vineyards and olive trees. But for all the cheese this country eats, we have never seen a dairy cow and for all the ham they consume, we have never caught sight of a pig farm. But today we smelled one. Must be an all-inside operation.

    When you travel by RV, three concerns predominate: food, gas, and dumping. Just before we arrived at the camping ground where we stayed two nights, we found a huge supermarket and got well stocked. The campground itself was kind of an unkempt place on Lake Maggiore. They were trying hard to get the pool open for the high season instead of bothering to cut the grass. But it was clean and we had enough electricity to run the vacuum cleaner, so Rover got a thorough cleaning. And the wi-fi was pretty good as long as we sat by the unopened pool to use it.

    Then we moved on to what has probably been our favorite place yet. If you come to Italy, forget about Rome, Florence and Venice (well, truth be told, we’d been to Venice already, and Florence really doesn’t deserve to be entirely ignored). Go to Iseo, a pretty town on Lake Iseo, with Covelo Campground about a mile from the center of town and right on the lake, run by a young couple whose workday runs at least 14 hours. The brochure of the local tour boat company has quotes from writers of the Romantic era, swooning about the mountains, the mists, the crags, the “irregularities,”  . . . all of it is true, and the place could generate countless metaphors for German Romanticism (end of pedantry, thank you for tuning in.)

    Rover is parked about 10 feet from the lake and we have a wonderful view of the mountains all around.


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And at night the many little villages sparkle on the mountainsides and reflect in the lake. It is just gorgeous. Our first view of it (“well, shoot. . . .”) was coming out of a tunnel above the town and seeing the whole lake and the mountains spread out before us. It was unexpected and wonderful. And the campground has free unlimited Wi-Fi!

    Our first day here we took the train into Brescia to see the end of another Giro stage and walk around the town. There are ruins of Roman buildings there, including a theatre, and with the Giro ending and starting there the next day, there were lots of festivities going on, most of them involving 50% sales, loud pop music, dancing girls, and much tossing of souvenirs into the crowd.

    The next day the Giro went right by the campground on a long straight stretch, so we could see them for quite a ways. It was very early in the day’s stage, so they were still all together and not really racing too hard--only going 20 mph or so (!) 


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Then we rode our bikes into town at a considerably slower pace and discovered some local fete being set up--apparently involving the desecration of the city father's statue with lacy drapings and an unimpressed pigeon--


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so we waited for that to begin (ribbon-draped Italian dignitaries--instead of local beauty contest winners--and TV coverage people, all being ignored). We wandered through the displays, tasting wine, cheeses and jam. We decided to stay another day and take a boat to an island where we walked around and up and down into still more tiny villages: just houses, a few restaurants, a few fishing boats, and--believe it or not--only a few tourists. It has been too cloudy to get really clear pictures of the views, so you’ll just have to believe us, it is gorgeous and peaceful here, even with yesterday’s arrival of thirty motorcycle club members at the campground.


                                              IMG_1323

June 3

    We hated to leave the beauty of Iseo and the lake country, but we haven’t seen quite all of Italy yet. So we drove a long way (for us): 103 miles to Modena. The campground there is practically within the cloverleaf exit of the Autostrada--lots of traffic noise, but great wifi. We rode our bikes the 3 miles into the city. (It was Sunday, so the traffic wasn’t too bad.)  And we ended up riding the bike path around the old city center and riding into “Ferrari/Maserati Days,” featuring a group pretending to race about a 10th of a mile along city streets, vintage cars reving motors and backfiring and delighting the mostly older men crowding around. 

    The next day we drove to Bologna, where the campground has been modernized quite a bit: Good sanitary blocks/sites separated by bushes/nice restaurant/ open pool. But there were few places to get water and the only place for us to hook up a hose was at the dump, which was configured in a way we couldn’t use. So we just didn’t bother with either. (A heads-up for those of our readers thinking of taking their American RV to Europe: although we have been pleasantly surprised by how many campgrounds have had dump stations that accommodate the American-style black and gray water tanks, and while we can also often find one at the big truck stops on the Autostradas, still we’ve found it best to use a dump when we find one  rather than wait until our tanks are full before searching one out.) 

    Bologna is a beautiful city once you get into the old city center. Many of the buildings are built with long arched porches / colannades / galleries across the front. (There are 25 miles of these covered galleries in this city!)  They are about 12 feet wide, wide enough to walk comfortably side by side and still pass other walkers . . . and no motorcycles or cars are under them. They would be a great place to be on a rainy day.


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    Bologna is a university town and has a history of left-wing, even Communist, local government (there’s a street named after the WWII Battle of Stalingrad, for instance). We arrived in the city center just in time for the sort of rally you’d expect of such a place: anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, with lots of flags and shouting and police standing around the edges. It was right in the square in front of the unfinished exterior of their wonderful basilica. It is the 5th largest in Italy and had been planned to be even bigger than St Peter’s at the Vatican when finished, until a Pope decided it was big enough and had a university built in its way. It is obviously unfinished on the outside, but the inside is bright and clean and contains a wonderful meridian line that marks time and helped to discover the need for a leap year day for our calendar (so we’re told, but we had precious little astronomy in our education, so we’re taking it on faith). We missed seeing the sun shine on the line because (of course) the building closes like everything else for early afternoon naps.


                                          IMG_1334


    This city also boasts two leaning towers--in fact, 22 towers, built by competing wealthy families in the 12th and 13th centuries, have survived. 

    We decided to stay a third night as June 3 is Italy’s Independence Day, since we knew much of the city would be open. (Also, our experience driving on May Day, another holiday, had convinced us not to be going anywhere near a coast on a holiday.) On that day we saw another pro-Palestinian rally blocking the streets, and we walked around a huge open air market.  

    Then we headed toward Ravenna. The city has no campground, so we ended up a few  miles away, on the Adriatic Sea again . . . this time in a campground that has a nudist section. We were asked at reception if we wanted “naturist or textiles?”  Well, shoot….  Since it was in the 60’s and raining, and also because our children are reading this blog, we opted for textiles. As a result, we have yet to see a single nude individual, even on the beach where the most visible things were the off shore oil rigs.   However, all was not lost, for the site had water and a dump station we made use of right away. (Once again,the water we are finding is wonderful. We do use a filter on the hose before we put it into our fresh water tank, and so far we have not had any problems.) However, the bus that the guidebook had assured us would take us into Ravenna had been permanently cancelled, so we were forced to take a day off: a cool day of relaxation alongside a nudist camp. We’ll drive into the city tomorrow, find a place to park, get our fill of Byzantine mosaics, and move on.

June 5

    In a stunning departure from their history of closely fought battles, Italy devastated the team of David and Susan in two consecutive contests, Ravenna and Padua.

    Utilizing their nation’s traditional strengths--lunatic drivers, serenely unhelpful “service staff,” treacherous roads, tawdry campsites, inaccurate information and oppressive weather--the home team easily turned aside the visitors’ attempts to fully enjoy the splendors of Ravenna’s Byzantine mosaics and Padua’s medieval/Renaissance paintings and architecture.

    Only in the presence of Giotto’s magnificent frescoes in Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel, cited by Michaelangelo as his greatest influence, did the overmatched Americans manage to eke out anything close to the sort of pleasure that had motivated them to come to this d... country in the first place. (No pictures allowed, of course, so the memory of this experience will quickly fade, while the fresh scrape on Rover’s portside mirror will remain all too tangible.)


    (Spoiler alert: it gets better when we get to Venice.)


    It was just a short drive into Ravenna. Even though we had a camper parking location on our GPS, we drove into the city with more apprehension than confidence. (After all, this is the same GPS that on the previous day had insisted we were 200 yards to the right of the autostrada, ploughing through farm fields, and kept trying to get us to make a left and then a right to correct our path.) Today, however, it seemed to be right with us and brought us right to the parking place . . . which was barricaded at the entrance. But no problem: we could see RVs parked there, so we proceeded around the block (not as simple as it sounds) and approached the parking lot from the other side. A couple of tight turns later we were parked in a fairly large lot with half a dozen other motorhomes that looked like they had been there for a while. We locked Rover up tight and in 15 minutes had walked into the city, where we were rewarded with the sight of 1500-year-old mosaics on several church and basilica domes and walls. They are bright, clear and shining and must be well cared for since they don’t look a day over 1400 years old. Most of the city’s crowds consisted of students, and there wasn’t a tourist market stall in sight. Ravenna is a lovely place with many modern buildings, even in the old city, where they replaced ones lost to bombing raids in the war.


         IMG_1383        IMG_1389


    We left the city without too much difficulty and drove up the coast through swamps and then inland toward Ferrara and the autostrada to Padua. The road to Ferrara was in poor condition, with lots of ruts and grooves in the road and plenty of patches to bounce over. So we were glad to finally get on the A and head north to Padua until, after about 15 miles, we came to a dead stop on the highway. A truck driver told us there had been an accident about 4 km ahead of us. Everyone shut off their engines, and people were walking around (except the motorcyclists who still roared by and the drivers who decided they could drive up the shoulder on the right). After 20 minutes or so we started inching forward and were able to exit into a small town where we found a large grocery store and waited for traffic to clear. But it did us little good: the road north out of town was just as slow and crowded as the highway had been, and when traffic did get moving it stayed very busy all the way to the campground.

    Italian drivers apparently don’t understand “busy” (OK, OK . . . some Italian drivers--well, OK . . . make that many Italian drivers). Regardless of traffic conditions, some of them still pass when there is oncoming traffic and still push their way out in to the road from side streets. At one point the road narrowed where a bridge abutment jutted close to the shoulder and a truck came flying at us, never slowed down or pulled over, and hit our left mirror with his. Fortunately, the mirror gives when it is hit so it just moved in a bit, but it was frighteningly close and made a nasty whacking noise. We arrived at the campground in a pretty frazzled state, where we discovered there was no internet and no convenient bus service into Padua.

    We usually travel in the morning and do tourist things in the afternoon or the next day. Because this campground was 8 miles from the city center, that’s what we would have to do the  next day also: drive into the city and find a place to park. This time we had the added tension of having reservations for 11 a.m. to see Giotto’s frescoes. Once again we had a GPS for a parking place.  And, once again, when we got there it was barricaded. Once again we did the “around the block” thing--only this time it was about 12 blocks. And to no avail: the parking was reserved for buses since it was some kind of fete day (we keep hitting these). When Susan asked the guy in charge where we might park he suggested the campground we had just left, 8 miles back down the road. So we were on our own. We drove around town, heading in the direction of the frescoes, and stumbled upon an unused parking lot within walking distance of the church (maybe a mile or so). We arrived at the church at 10:50.

    The frescoes (paintings on wet cement) are in a chapel built by a man repenting for his sins--he was a usurer! what an idea!--and trying to save himself and his father from hell by building this incredible chapel and then hiring Giotto to fill its walls and ceilings with frescoes. The effect is not unlike the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, but these were done about 200 years earlier, in 1303-05 (end of history lesson). The chapel’s temperature and humidity are carefully controlled. We were first ushered into an anteroom for 15 minutes, then brought into the chapel for another 15, and then, at the sounding of a buzzer, quickly ushered out. This is the same way the crowds had been handled to see The Last Supper in Milan a few years ago.  (Having visited Milan 5 years ago we decided to skip it this year).

    We also visited the Eremitani Church, where other frescoes have been pieced together and restored like an 80,000-piece puzzle after being destroyed by bombing in 1944. These are by Andrea Mantegna, who liked to paint his figures from extreme perspectives. The effect is startling, even without much color.


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    After walking around the city center and buying some vegetables in the market, we hopped on a bus and made our way back to Rover and safely out of Padua. It was a busy but fairly easy 25 mile drive to the peninsula overlooking the Venetian Lagoon. We are camped right on the water, where we can see Venice sparkling (looking very flat) in the distance. Almost as good a view as Lake Iseo, but this used to be (or still is?) a malarial swamp, and the mosquitoes have driven us inside. Just like Minneapolis . . . .

June 7

    We are trying to write a description of our visit to Venice, combined with a farewell to Italy, while trying to convince the campground owner’s dog to go away (the latter is harder than it might seem, because he is really good at begging for attention and we find we really miss having a dog).


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    There are several campgrounds on the Venetian  lagoon. We are at Fusina. It is a fairly large place with what are called “unmarked pitches,” i.e., not too large open spaces between trees, so pull in wherever you wish. And so people do, trying to optimize the view. There are motorhomes here bigger than Rover--something we are finding more and more often. We are parked about 20 feet from the water, with our nose facing Venice. There is a shipping channel right in front of us and we have seen several tugs guiding massive container ships and car carriers past us. Great free entertainment.

    We took the local ferry to Venice. It is right outside the campground gate: ferries every hour all day and half the night. We bought the ticket that took us to Venice and back and also gave us unlimited rides on the vaporetto (water taxi) in the city. We had been to Venice once before, but that was a cold and rainy March. Today was sunny and very warm. There were a lot of tourists, but nothing overwhelming like the Cinque Terre.  We walked and walked and took the vaporetti five times , including to Murano, another island where the beautiful glass work is done: factory after factory and store after store selling gorgeous glass jewelry, dishes and imaginative art pieces.


                                                                IMG_1492


We returned to Venice ,where we had dinner on a floating deck (we will have to eat in Rover for the next week to make up for that).


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    Venice is truly a unique place. Much of it looks like it is about to crumble and fall into the canals. But there are no cars, motorbikes or even bicycles. The streets wind everywhere and end at canals or go up steps to little bridges. Sometimes the streets are just narrow alleys where you can’t spread your arms out without touching the walls on both sides.


      IMG_1515            IMG_1456


    Because we’d done most of the tourist things when we were here before, this time we spent just one day in the city and then relaxed and did some laundry at the campground . We were adopted by the campground dog who wanted to play ball with a pine cone, and he fell asleep on David’s foot. Not everyone appreciates the dog, but we enjoyed his company, which he seemed to sense, for he kept returning to us.

    This campground is a very active place with a noisy bar at night, like many of the large ones in Italy. Fortunately, we are on the far side by the lagoon, about as far from the noise as we can get. Others seem to appreciate the fact as well, because if a space opens up on the waterfront, it is quickly filled by new arrivals.  

    Tomorrow we will drive along the sea and into the mountains towards Austria. We have been in Italy for 7 weeks, quite a bit longer than we thought we would be.  It has been wonderful and exasperating all at the same time. We know we are blessed to have this opportunity. But the opportunity tomorrow will be to get out of the country alive and well . . . and move north. 

June 11

    Arrivederci, Italia. Guten Tag, Austria. From Venice we drove on the Autostrada along the coast almost all the way to Slovenia before heading north toward Villach (the traffic-stopping accident being on the other side of the road this time). First swamp land in Italy and then the low, camel-humped mountains leading into Austria.The mountain passes we had worried about are not a problem on the interstate-like roads: the highest was 3400 feet, and the gradient was always manageable. (But then we aren’t in the really big mountains yet.)

    As soon as we crossed into Austria we stopped to put more money on our “vignette,” the windshield-mounted toll counter. Austria knows how to collect tolls. In Italy you need to take a ticket from a very narrow toll booth and pay as you leave at another narrow toll booth. And sometimes instead of an attendant, you deal with a machine that speaks Italian in a tinny accent. But in Austria you prepay on this little gadget that beeps at you every few miles on the toll roads as it encounters a sensor above the highway. We were told it would cost us € 80-90 just to drive the 250 miles to Vienna. So we just put € 100 on the thingy and drove on.

    We stayed at a huge campground on the Ossiacher Sea, a narrow, pretty lake surrounded by very high wooded hills trying to be mountains. The water in the lake was clear and warmer than the pool in Bologna. It was only about 5 miles off the toll road, through a tiny town to the campground, but already we can tell that drivers act differently. In an attempt to save some toll money and see a little more of the countryside, the next day we chose to drive about 30 miles on a “red road” (i.e., red on the Michelin map, meaning “secondary, not divided”) through some small towns. The experience confirmed our observations of Austrian drivers: David defined them as “predictable”: they do what you expect drivers to do--like stopping 3 or 4 feet back when approaching an intersection with a through road, passing only when indicated by the center line, staying in lanes . . . it makes quite a bit of difference in the driving-anxiety level.

    We arrived in Graz, Austria’s lovely second largest city. We are at a campground that is an easy 15 minutes by bus from the center. It is very hot--90s during the day and mid-70s at night. But we are camped right next to the largest, nicest municipal pool we have ever seen anywhere--bigger than some Minnesota lakes. It is 3-4 acre pool, we estimate, with cement sides and loose smooth river stones on the bottom. The water temp is cool, but just fine for this hot weather. Best of all, access is free for campers.


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    The first day we arrived fairly late in the afternoon, so we just cooled off by the pool. The second day we spent in the charming city. It is a mix of new and old (the latter meaning “baroque and fru-fru”), but much of the look of the city center is spoiled by the ugly power lines and trolley lines that hang in the middle of many streets.


                                             IMG_1600

                                            (The blue thing is an art museum, nicknamed "The Friendly Alien.")


The third day we packed up Rover and drove 20 miles back to the little town of Bärnbach to tour a glass factory and see a crazy little tiled church (apparently when the building needed refurbishing, the town had voted overwhelmingly to give some “artistic” up-and-coming architect free rein on the project). After we’d seen the town, we decided the heat was reason enough to return to Graz and its pool for a third night.

    

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    However, when we had arrived in Bärnbach we had forgotten to turn Rover’s lights off and when we returned to her after a few hours she wouldn’t start. We walked a few blocks to a large auto service place, and they sent us back to Rover with a young man and jumpers cables. He had Rover started in about 30 seconds and wouldn’t charge us anything, but David insisted he take a good tip. We have learned that if you are going to have any mechanical trouble, Austria is the place to do it.  Meanwhile, Susan is lobbying for a new chassis battery.

    P.S. One of our Faithful Readers has asked about our favorite foods and wines. A couple things come to mind: (a) we’re eat-to-live-ers, not foodies, so our favorite meal tends to be the one we just ate. And (b) we really do drink cheap wines (€ 2 or less from a supermarket!), so anything we mention probably has too little profit margin to make it worth anyone’s while to export it to the U.S.

    But having said that: we’ve enjoyed Le Terrazze Sorelli and Grillo Villa Altichiari for white wines--along with any Soave we’ve had--and, for reds, Nero d’Avola (from Sicily) and Barbera d’Asti Soldo. For meals, just tonight we had big salads, the one garnished with fried chicken (!) and the other with German potato salad. Both were out of this world. But we’re not particularly adventurous when it comes to food, so we had skipped the octopus and squid along the Italian coast. 

June 16

    Susan did not lobby hard enough for a new battery, and David did not think enough about the accessories that could drain one that was weak. We are such a team.

    We drove the 125 miles from Graz to Vienna without incident, but when we got there, all it took to kill the chassis battery once and for all was using the hydraulic leveling system. We had just enough power to raise the windows and here we are. We couldn’t go farther without some kind of help.

    Someone is watching over us, because we got it: the closest commercial establishment to Camping Wien (Vienna) West is--drum roll, please--an American auto parts store. The proprietor searched his catalogues and computer and shook his head, suggested we go to a nearby Midas shop “just two kilometers away” and said he would make some phone calls. Our problem is the specific size of the battery and the amps it needs to start a 10-cylinder 6.8-liter engine. After one bus and two tram rides, we found the Midas. They actually had a possible contender, but they would not deliver it, the garage door would not accommodate Rover, and the parking options on the busy street  were not good. Still, it was a possibility. Back to the auto parts man, who had learned nothing helpful from his colleagues around western Europe. This time we asked whether there was a battery store--someone who could figure out what we actually needed, not just look for a copy of what we had. (For example, we are not in Minnesota any more and do not drive Rover in extreme cold conditions, so we do not need the cold cranking amps we had had in the old battery.)  One bus and one subway ride later, we arrived at a battery store and within 10 minutes the woman placed a battery before us (she lugged it out from the stock room herself--an impressive feat). The dimensions were good, but the posts were reversed. “No problem, I can get another one that’s right, today.” And since she lives--drum roll, please-- about two blocks from the campground, she delivered it late that afternoon on her way home, picked up the old one for recycling, and stayed around long enough to make sure it would fit and work. It did and it does. 

    All of the above happened during a stretch of four days while we were trying to enjoy Vienna--all the while with a dead battery in the back of our minds. But € 177 later all is well, danke.

    Vienna is a beautiful city, especially in June with flowers blooming everywhere. It is obvious that many buildings have been cleaned and repaired and many more are covered with scaffolding that indicates they are in the process of being cleaned and repaired.


         Stephansdom Vienna        IMG_1701

         St Stephen's church, with scaffolding for cleaning.              Rathaus (City Hall)

  

Buildings built before and after the war stand side by side. The former have the lovely Baroque carved garlands draped above their doors and windows; the latter are plain and flat. Almost everything in the city center is less than five or six stories--the limit to what was useable before elevators were invented--while taller modern buildings are found on the outskirts of the city.

    We have been to palaces, museums and churches. One day we took 13 separate bus, train and tram rides (fortunately, we had bought a transport pass that allowed unlimited rides). The city is full of tourists, but not overcrowded: it makes for a bustling downtown pedestrian area. Strains of Mozart seem to come from everywhere. There is also a fair amount of horse poop, as horse carriage rides are a popular tourist item. We checked the various concert, theatre, and opera schedules but found nothing that interested us sufficiently. For one thing, many of the productions start quite late, which complicates the process of getting back to the campground with limited bus service at an even later hour. Also, we tend to tire ourselves out by walking around during the day and campgrounds are usually outside a city’s center, so the prospect of getting back to the campground, cleaning up, resting, and then making our way back into town can be daunting.

    So here we are in the city that was home to the western world’s greatest musical composers; it is synonymous with the Habsburg dynasty (about which we have learned waaay too much, having  toured two of their palaces, with free audio guides); and, because most of the imperial architecture dates from the 1800s, a lot of what is on display is original, including some of the clothing and massive amounts of gold and silver table service. Nevertheless, despite all this grandeur, our two favorite experiences were much more mundane. One was our visit to the exhibit at the Austrian furniture museum, featuring the history and philosophy of IKEA, including a collection of many of its pieces over the years. This museum also has furniture available for film use and showed clips of movies highlighting their pieces. The other was the sight of people standing at crosswalks: the street is a minor one, there is no traffic coming….yet they are actually waiting for the traffic signal to change. Forty people of all ages, standing even in the pouring rain (as it did all day today); in Minneapolis you would be standing on the sidewalk alone.

    (And if our preference for IKEA isn’t lowbrow enough, we must report that we have found four Starbucks and have had coffee at three of them.)


    P.S. We’ve aimed this blog at people who are considering shipping their American RV to Europe, like we’ve done, and like Ron and Adele Milovsky did before us. Lest you be taken aback by our mechanical problems on this trip (the tire that lost its tread and today’s report on the battery that was difficult to replace), remember that both these problems could have been avoided had we taken a few precautions. For instance:

--just because the four tires you can see are four years old, don’t assume that the two rear inboards will be that fresh, too--ours weren’t, and it was one of those ten-year-old inboards that lost its tread;

--if your RV is 6-7 years old and its chassis battery is original equipment, and if the battery would be hard to replace on a continent that has rather few 10-cylinder gasoline engines, then replace it before you ship the RV to Europe; and

--if your battery shows signs of weakening, don’t have the engine turned off when you begin leveling your RV with your hydraulic levelers.

June 23

June 23

    Batteries charging away, we drove the 50 miles from Vienna to Melk, a small town on the Danube River with a massive Benedictine abbey towering above it. We stopped in a small campground on an island in the river. Usually campgrounds run a small snack shop or restaurant, but this time the popular restaurant was running the campground. It was simply a grassy field (the campground, that is) with a few electrical posts and water faucets. The weather was very windy and threatened rain, so we abandoned any idea of long bike rides along the river and instead just rode our bikes into the town and climbed up to the 700-year-old abbey.

    The guide books told us that the abbey’s chapel is an extreme example of Baroque architecture. Well, shoot. . . . We overheard a guide telling her group that baroque church architecture tries to convey the artists’ impression of Heaven. Well put: it was full of garlands, angels, flowers, and statues, all painted in shining gold. Above the altar, the gilded Sts. Peter and Paul shake hands for the last time before going off to their individual martyrdoms. Very definitely over the top. The abbey’s two-story library was a movie set marvel of dark wood and hidden windows covered by moving shelving . . . and we were told there were six other stories.


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The place was packed with tourists who arrive by river cruise ships at a pier right outside our campsite, are bussed up to the abbey, where they meet a tour guide, and then get on the bus to go back to the ship, pretty much avoiding the cute little town below. “Why aren’t there any places like this back home?” we heard a tourist (American, college-age) ask a friend. He was able to point out that the US isn’t old enough to have places like this. So American history education batted .500 for the day.

    In the morning, quite early, we awoke to the sound of a weed eater. Someone was trimming around the electrical posts and water faucets in the campground. Within a few minutes everyone was standing outside their tents and trailers glaring at him. Soon he was joined by a man on a riding mower, who surveyed the acre or more of grass awaiting his attention . . . and chose to drive directly to our space where he mowed around Rover, maneuvering carefully to avoid our door mat and electrical cord. We saved our electrical cord from catastrophe and got out of there as soon as possible.

    Then it was on to Linz. The owners of the campground there had chosen to erect a scary overhead at the entrance, but Rover cleared it with a good 6” to spare.


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It was a nice place, but a bit time consuming to get into town: a long walk to the bus stop, then a 15-minute bus ride to a 30-minute tram ride to the center of the lovely city. We stayed two nights and did the usual walking tours and riding the steepest electrical railroad in Europe to the top of their highest hill for a great view of the city, as well as a cup of coffee with a piece of Linzer torte. We also visited a fun interactive technical  museum. It rained every night, but we were lucky to avoid it during the day and especially on our long walk to the bus stop and back. The weather has turned quite cool and we have been using the furnace occasionally to take the chill off. (Had it really been 90 degrees in Graz?)  

    When we left Linz we had to add more money to our Austrian toll road vignette. We have now spent € 255 ($330) on Austrian tolls! (However, we are told they will refund any money we do not use.) So we made our way on these expensive roads to Salzburg, Mozart’s birthplace, where we joined swarms of other tourists to visit the bedroom where--we are assured--he was born. Salzburg is just a lovely small city on the edge of the mountains, and there is just too much to see and do. We bought the tourist’s Salzburg card that allows unlimited transportation and free admission to almost all the museums, palaces, a river cruise, and the huge 400-year-old fortress watching over the city.


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Included in the price was a cable ride up the Unterberg, a mile high mountain: scary but with a great view even among the clouds. Susan was able to throw a snowball at David on the day of the summer solstice.  We also visited the Hellbrunn Palace, where the highlight was the tour of the 400-year-old trick fountains. (The trick is on the visitors, who have several opportunities  to get wet.) We walked all over the gardens, acres and acres, and eventually found the unusual natural stone theatre.

    Still, Salzburg primarily sells itself as Mozart’s Birthplace--conveniently overlooking the fact that he seems to have done everything he could to get to Vienna--and the town does Mozart Mania about as well as Stratford-on-Avon does the Shakespeare Industry. Signs abound: here Mozart was born; here he lived; here his longsuffering wife lived with her second husband. . . . 

    And, just as Stratford does Shakespeare’s plays in a Globe-ish theatre, so Salzburg does Mozart in period costumes, with instruments of the period, in (more-or-less) historically appropriate settings. Lucky Salzburg can also claim to be the home of “The Sound of Music,” and they ride that one for all it’s worth, too.

    (Pedantic digression: David has often thought it unfair that musicians can choose something out of their vast repertoire--including solos, if their friends are busy that night--and whip up a satisfactory evening’s entertainment of 5 to 105 minutes’ length at a moment’s notice. They can even read from their musical scores while they perform! Theatre people, on the other hand, almost always have to  have other actors join them, usually rehearse for days, if not weeks, and can hardly find something worthwhile to perform that takes less than an hour. And they have to memorize their lines and leave their scripts offstage.)

    Anyhow: we splurged on a Mozart dinner concert that helped pay the rent for a lucky string quintet and two soloists. It didn’t start until 8:30 pm and, although our eating pattern has changed to later evening meals--most restaurants don’t open until 7:30 (when we do eat in restaurants)--still, not being fed anything until after 9 pm had us pretty hungry. And because of the late hour we missed the last bus back to the campground and had to take a taxi (driven by a young man who clearly had learned to drive in Italy.) We will have to eat in Rover for the next TWO weeks to pay for that musical event. 

    We have decided to head towards Rotterdam by going west through Austria, into Switzerland, and then up through France . . . probably ensuring that we will have to add even more money to our Austrian vignette. It is impossible to get from Salzburg to Innsbruck on autobahns without going through a bit of Germany, covering some of the same roads we drove on eight weeks ago, which bothers Susan a great deal. But we are surrounded by real mountains again, the sky has cleared, the sun is shining, and our laundry is flapping in the breeze outdoors.


PS--for all you fans of “Things We Have Learned,” there are new entries posted today!

June 27

    We tunneled our way to Switzerland: tunnel after tunnel, several of them 2 or 3 or 5 miles long, and one of them a full 10 miles. It is not our favorite way to travel. Really long tunnels give one too much time to think about exactly what it is that is above one’s head . . . and pressing down . . . and subject to shifting . . . and Europe has earthquakes, doesn’t it? Add to that the mesmerizing repetition of the lights and wall markings flashing past and . . . 

    Fortunately the longest tunnels did not have oncoming traffic to add to the drama, and generally the traffic was light. We stopped before leaving Austria and got a € 22 refund on our toll vignette; then we stopped at the Swiss border and paid a € 20 road tax toll for 5 days. € 233 for Austrian tolls; € 20 for Swiss tolls.

    We drove towards Zurich to a campsite supposedly on a lake southeast of Zurich. It was a cramped, unshaded place full of old trailers and half a dozen short-stay motorhomes. It had about 20 feet of swampy, rocky shoreline and no good transportation into the city. But it did have accordion music and raucous singing at a party that quieted down promptly at 10 pm. So we stayed the night because we were hot and tired and in the morning moved to another Zurich campground 12 miles away.  This one was pretty big, shaded, busy with touring vehicles and had good bus service right outside the gate. And at night there was always a group gathered to watch the “fussball” games on tv. Access to the city was so easy that we went in for the day and visited churches and a great art museum and the birthplace of the Dada art movement in 1916 (and subject of a play by David's favorite playwright, Tom Stoppard).


  IMG_1969            IMG_1962

  "We have Monet Water Lilies and Rodin sculptures. . .                  Cafe Voltaire, birthplace of Dada

  I know--let's put them in the same room!"


We then returned and rested and went in again for dinner in the evening at a big beer hall restaurant. That night Switzerland was playing soccer, so there were tvs set up at the outdoor bars attracting lots of attention. 

    Zurich and Lucerne, our destination the next day, are both located at the end of a lake. Both city centers stretch around the end of the lake and make the most of their locations with tour boats and buses, fishing and swimming. Lucerne has the advantage of being surrounded by tall mountains. At Lucerne we were camped across the street from the main swimming beach. We could not make our electrical connection work and didn’t know exactly what wasn’t working, so we decided to give our house batteries some exercise and they performed well. We could see the top of Mt. Pilatus from our campsite, and we were able to walk to town along a paved walk all along the water’s edge, past homes and hotels, all of them covered with flowers. All of the waterfront is public. Once again we discovered we had come to a town on the day of its summer fest. As we get closer to the center there were food and drink booths everywhere and stages set up for musical performances that went on all day and half the night all over the city. We were especially intrigued by their new performance space (which we could not get into) since it was designed by the architect who did the new Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis--they share some of the same outward features. 

    We joined the crowds crossing the wooden bridge and walked all over town.


   IMG_1988            Waterfront


At night we walked back over to the beach at 10:30 pm to watch a half hour of fireworks over the darkened city. Even the fireworks were a bit unusual in that they tended to be grouped by color: red, red, red and then silver, silver, silver, over and over again, 20 or 30 in a row. After the fireworks were over we watched the city lights come back to life and reflect in the lake. It was a beautiful sight. We didn't learn until the next day that, while we watched, the US soccer team had lost to Ghana in overtime.

    Today we left Lucerne and the mountains and drove our longest day yet--275 miles to Metz, France. We had two detours that frustratingly added to the length of the day, but since it was Sunday the traffic wasn’t too bad. We are camped along the Moselle River on an island in a city campground where we stayed when we first visited the city last year. We met a retired couple from Iowa who have biked around Europe for years--this year’s trip began in Amsterdam, will go to Rome, and back again. Even after having dinner with them and hearing their stories we can not imagine it.

    The weather for the past couple of weeks has been either cool and even rainy or extremely hot and humid. The last few days have been the latter, which makes it hard to relax after driving or walking around. But by 8 or 9 pm the sun is usually behind trees or mountains, a welcome cool breeze arises, and, while the Europeans in the campground watch fussball or play petanque (?), we can log on and learn how far the Dow and the Twins have plummeted. Lately the answer, in both cases, has usually been "holy c---!"

Semi-final assessment

Once again, in a spasm of pedantry he cannot resist, David is driven to look at this year’s trip in light of Henry James’s epigraph on our homepage: 


“My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile going thirty miles an hour on a smooth road to a twelfth-century cathedral.”


(But first, a confession: I cannot make myself enjoy Henry James. With that out of the way):


“A perfect automobile”

    We had more Rover-related problems on this trip than on the first two, but they were all avoidable. For instance, if we’d been suspicious and checked the manufacture dates of the inboard rear tires before we left the US to see whether they were as new as the four whose dates we could see, we would have discovered they were ten years old (!). We’d have replaced them and avoided the loss of a tire tread in Austria.

    And we could have noticed that the chassis battery was Motorcraft, therefore probably 8- or 9-year-old original equipment, and unlikely to be forgiving if I left the lights on for three hours--which I did--and we could have replaced it before we left.

    (Incidentally, it was disconcerting to learn how unavailable a Motorcraft 750-amp battery could be even in a large city like Vienna. Yes, Ford is all over Europe; but parts for a V-10 Triton gas engine are much less available than I’d thought.)


“Thirty miles an hour”

    Our travel this year has been much faster than on our first two trips because much more of it has been on Interstate-type highways. This, in turn, is a result of the fact that we travelled much farther this year--all the way from Amsterdam to Naples--before starting back again.

    Besides that:

(a) Italy is full of mountains, so any travel on an east-west axis involves climbing and descending (and travel in the northwest in any direction does, too);

(b) Italian autostradas through mountains are already about as scary as I can stand, so there’s no way I’d want to use the 30-mph alternatives;

(c) in Italy, Austria, and Switzerland, places we wanted to see tended to be right next door to the campground (which meant taking a bus or train) or a hundred miles away, not 30-40. The latter meant a choice between two hours on an Interstate-type highway or 3-4 hours on a scary, tiring “red road” or even “yellow road” (Michelin map readers will know what that means).


(About driving:


(As soon as we crossed the border from Italy to Austria, I found the driving easier because there were fewer stimuli-per-second assaulting me. Austrian drivers pulling up to intersections from side roads did not poke their noses beyond the white line; they did not pass on curves and expect oncoming traffic to accommodate them; Austrian pedestrians did not jaywalk; most astonishingly, Austrian motorcyclists obeyed the same traffic rules everyone else did. The more predictably they behaved, the easier it was to deal with the ordinary European driving challenges: chicanes in towns, narrowing roadways, tram tracks, etc.


(Another thing: we’ve learned that road maps are practically useless unless they are in a scale of 1:200,000 or bigger. The Michelin spiral-bound France map is that big--buy it; however, Michelin also publishes a spiral-bound Germany/Austria/Switzerland/Czech map which sounds like a great deal until you realize that even Germany is 1:300,000--barely adequate--while all the others are 1:400,000. Not good.)


“A smooth road”

    Many of the autostradas/autobahns were smooth, which reduced the stress of driving nearly to zero, except for tunnels, absurdly high bridges, etc. Red and yellow roads were often rutted or patched, which made driving them all the more difficult. There was more road construction on this trip than we encountered on the earlier two, but it was usually well-marked.

    We became thoroughly mistrustful of our GPS on this trip, especially in towns and cities. By mistake we had left our original one at home when we flew to Europe, and even though the substitute we bought was the same model as we’d had before, it seemed more determined than ever to take us to campgrounds via what it thought were the shortest or fastest routes . . . even when doing so meant abandoning major roads and going up steep hills on narrow streets. We think we need a GPS that gives us a “truck route” option.


“A twelfth-century cathedral”

    In Italy and Austria, the churches were usually not that old, although often their foundations were centuries older. The default style, especially in Italy, was Baroque, and I rediscovered that I prefer Gothic: in Italy, that means Pisa and Siena; in France, anywhere you look. 

    We also saw some spectacular museums (especially the new Pompidou Centre in Metz, France) and some  great collections: we’d expected to find treasures in Rome and Florence and Vienna, and did, but Basel’s museums were a great surprise on the last two trips, as was Zurich’s this year.

    Europeans we met in the campgrounds often asked why we went to the trouble to visit Europe when we could be exploring the US: “it’s so big,” they’d say. Well, yes--but Europe is where things happened 500 and 2000 years ago that helped determine what Americans would be like 300 years ago . . . and today. “Ah,” they would say, “you are interested in the culture.” We’re interested in walking where our ancestors, broadly conceived, have walked and seeing what the giants of Western civilization have created--and, often, destroyed. If you take an RV to Europe, you not only get to see some of that, you get to see how your reactions to that experience differ from those of people who have lived among them all their lives. Great fun. And you provide them endless entertainment as you try to speak their languages, which is all to the good.

July 5

    Metz is a small walkable city, and the municipal campground is right in the city and on an island on the river. It’s one of our favorites. We returned because the new Pompidou Center had finally opened and we were not disappointed. It is an unusual and beautiful structure, and the art chosen for its premier was wonderful. We were glad we had made the effort to return. We had several more conversations with our new Iowa biker acquaintances and also with the Danish family parked next to us, exchanging camping stories and places we must visit. It is always fun to have someone else to talk to at length.


                                               IMG_2032


    We stayed two nights in Metz, recovering from our long day and then headed north towards Luxembourg. We needed gas and groceries. We exited the Autoroute when we saw a large commercial complex and bought just a little gas (at € 1.45 per liter) since we knew we would soon be in Luxembourg where it is much cheaper. But the shopping center had erected 2.5-meter high barriers at the entrance, so we were unable to get our vehicle into the parking lot to buy groceries: these are huge shopping complexes that apparently don’t want any money from people in camping cars (as they are called in Europe). We got turned around heading back to the A and got trapped in a detour and about 15 miles later we were finally on the right road headed in the right direction. As soon as we crossed the border we exited to a small town and bought gas (€ 1.17 / liter). Luxembourg proved to be one big road construction zone. We were headed north to Ettlebruck and the George Patton Museum, but first we had to travel about 20 miles through small towns and several detours and road construction zones. In road construction zones they like to make one of the lanes 2 meters wide--Rover is 2.5 meters wide --always exciting.

    We finally arrived at the campground in Ettlebruck, high on a hill up a tight winding road. The owner gave us a map directing us to a grocery store where he knew we could park and showed us where the museum was (where we could not park). So we drove back through the town, found the grocery store and did what we hoped to be our last grocery shopping. Then we drove back into town and found a place to park about a 15-minute walk from the little museum, which proved to be a collection of things that had been dug up after the war and correspondences to and from Patton. Then we made our way back up the winding hill, hot and exhausted. We opened a second bottle of wine that night and actually had enough electricity to turn the AC on for a few minutes. But at night it cooled off nicely. We are surprised how far north we are and how late it stays light. We can sit outside and  read at 10 pm.

    The following day we drove to Bastogne, Belgium, where there is a large American Memorial and War Museum. Getting there was not without incident. We relied on the GPS, which again took us through ridiculously tight streets and dumped us onto the main artery through town, where a large parked truck took up 1/4  of the roadway. The regular cars could pass each other, but we needed someone to stop to let us pass. This wasn’t happening. So finally David just took his turn, forcing the oncoming car to stop, back up the few inches he had available, and pull far to his right to let us (just barely) get through. Except for the line of cars behind us, we probably didn’t make any friends in Bastogne.

   Then it was off to the museum and the memorial. It is quite a special place, remembering the Battle of the Bulge, where 76,000 American soldiers lost their lives over Christmas 1944. The museum tells the story well (and in English) and the memorial--in the shape of a huge star--looms over the beautiful countryside.


                                             IMG_2043


It is always amazing to see a lovely little town in France or Belgium and then see the pictures of its destruction during the war. We made it out of Bastogne without going through the center again and drove all the way to Ghent, Belgium (but not without bypassing Brussells on the ring road, accompanied by a million trucks that all had the same idea). It was around here that we started to see signs warning of future road closings for the Tour de France. Another long hot day.

    So we stayed in Ghent two nights. We had been here before also and had missed a few high spots in the city, so it was a natural stopping place on our way to Rotterdam. We are having unknown electrical problems. The transformer shuts itself off, so we are running a lot on the house batteries and LP gas. The campground was even nicer than before with the absence of hundreds of soccer players who had been here previously, but the city was a dusty mess of--you guessed it--construction. And again it was very hot. So we visited the 13th century castle we had missed the last time and returned to Rover to keep an eye on our electrical problems (and did a lot of laundry of things we intend to leave behind.)

    Then it was off to Rotterdam, where the city is hosting the start of the Tour de France.  (But not before another bout of road construction and a complete absence of detour signs messed us up again.) Susan had worried about getting a spot in the Rotterdam campground ever since they told us they wouldn’t take reservations for what would be a very busy weekend. But we arrived early in the afternoon and they had a lovely shaded spot for us. (Many people prefer treeless places that allow them to get satellite reception.) And then we watched a lot of people arrive the rest of that day and into the next.

    Rotterdam was hopping. The day we arrived The Netherlands soccer team won a semifinals spot and the place erupted. David was watching it in the bar and Susan could tell they won by the hundreds of horns that started blowing on the nearby roads. That alone would have been enough to make it a festive place (orange flags everywhere), but the Tour festivities for “Le Grand Depart” were spread over three days.


   IMG_2222       IMG_2257_2

    Orange flags in a Rotterdam sports bar                                Le Grand Depart


We went into the city on Saturday. Unlike much of Europe, Rotterdam is a very modern city, completely rebuilt after the war: wide boulevards, public art, pedestrian shopping streets. We walked through the market and then headed for the bike route for the prologue time trial for 193 riders, each starting one minute apart. We found a place under a tram underpass where the cyclists rode by on our right and five minutes later came past on our left just before the finish line. It was a good place to be because clouds moved in and it started to drizzle just as the race started. The temperature dropped from the upper 80s into the low 70s with a cold breeze off the harbor. And the one accident that we know of happened right in front of us--a cyclist sliding on the wet pavement into metal fencing, injuring a couple of bystanders. We could see the grimace on his face, but he got up and continued on his way. The crowds were amazing--people everywhere. But our space was not easy to get into, so it remained not too crowded. The only downside was the ever-present loudspeakers. The Dutch cycling fans really know their Dutch riders, and they also gave Lance Armstrong a wonderful welcome. It was really fun and exhausting to be part of it. 


       IMG_2218         IMG_2233

              Lance Armstrong in the Prologue time trial                                            Le Grand Depart, Stage 1


    On Sunday the race began with a ceremonial group tour of the city, and again we found a good spot in the shade to watch them go by. Then we were able to hurry a couple of blocks to see them go by again--this time with thousands of people. Then the riders disappeared into the crowd on the bridge. All of this was over by noon, so we spent the afternoon cleaning and packing and making notes for next year, with a break to watch the campground’s TV to see the day’s stage end in Brussels.

    We had returned Saturday to find we had left a light on for 12 hours and the circuit breaker at the campground’s plug-in point had shut off, and the refrigerator had run off the batteries, which were showing very little charge.  So we ran Rover’s engine several times to recharge the batteries. We don’t know what the problem is, but suspect that the transformer is fried. We have refrigeration (on LP gas) and enough electrical to run the water pump, so we can winterize the plumbing system before we put Rover into storage. 

    The campground was pretty empty on Monday when we did one last load of laundry and headed out. We were within 2 miles of the storage facility when we hit our final road construction/detour. It was really tricky to get there. And it was a good thing we didn’t have a flight to catch until the next morning. It is hard to believe that our twelve weeks is over and we are heading home. We’ll post again when we have added up all the numbers we have collected over the last 4783 miles (at least 500 of which were totally unnecessary!!)

Final Reckoning

    Well, shoot….we haven’t seen these kind of figures before. We “budget” $1000 per week, but our initial look at the bank account showed we used $14,063 in 12 weeks. Still, a closer look shows we really weren’t too far off the mark. Here’s the breakdown.

    We traveled 4753 miles, averaging 56.6 miles per day. We spent $2910 on 462.5 gallons of gasoline, at an average price of $6.48 per gallon. Rover gets about 10 mpg, our payoff for staying below 55 mph (except when passing the occasional truck or car going even slower than we are).

    We were expecting the house batteries expense of $780, but the chassis battery at $225, two tires at $375 and GPS at $200 were unexpected. Without these costs, our expenses for travel/living/sightseeing would have been $12,400--much closer to our estimate.

    We paid to camp every night but four. Campground expenses were $2055, an average of $25 a night. We could have free camped more often but we prefer the security of a campground. The most expensive was in Rotterdam at $50 a night--but that was in July, which is considered “high season.” If we had done this trip in June, July and August, our camping expenses would have been considerably higher.

    Our food costs were $3247. This is probably at least $1200 higher than we would have spent at home over the same period. We did not find the food costs particularly high, and when we ate out we rarely paid more than $50--total, for the two of us--for a meal with a glass of wine.

    We paid $582 for tolls (!)--much more than we’d anticipated. Austria alone was $296, while Italy was $198--not too bad for 7 weeks, when we did a great deal of our traveling on the autostradas. The three-tunnel complex under the Antwerp harbor in Holland cost $23. We could have avoided all tolls by driving on red and yellow roads, but the heart problems that would have generated would have cost more than the tolls.

    Additional transportation expenses--bus, taxis, trams, trains, subways, funiculars, cable cars and boats--were $593. This included getting to and from the Amsterdam airport to Rover.

    We bought LP gas only once ($20.45 in the Netherlands), and we still had 1/3 of a tank left at the end of the trip. We used it primarily for cooking, a few hours of furnace and occasional running of the refrigerator. We rarely used the hot water heater.

    Internet access was often free, but we spent $68 on it when we needed to. Newspapers were $100; laundry $110; Rover insurance (collision, comprehensive, and liability) $1128 for the three months on the road. We have prepaid 10 months of inside storage ($889), anticipating a later start of our trip next year, when we head for the Scandinavian countries with their later spring.

    In preparation for the trip we spent $250 on travel guides and maps. Good maps and guides are expensive but necessary. In the last few years there has been some renumbering of highways, and up-to-date, detailed maps are essential.


                                                IMG_2048


    We also had airfare expenses and bought a few t-shirts and gifts. We spent $1000 on museums, ruins, castles and other sightseeing (worth every penny). We saw everything in Italy we had ever heard of and many more things we hadn’t. It is a surprisingly varied country: more mountains than we expected, wide, flat plains, rolling hills and vast swamps. And, of course, the incredible coastlines. The campground facilities were usually better than we’d expected, although finding a campground or public toilet with a toilet seat was very unusual. And our biggest complaint would be with aggressive Italian drivers.

    European RVs have chemical toilets, but we had no trouble finding dump stations for our American waste tanks. We do not have a macerator and were concerned about what we would find, and in fact some campgrounds could not have accommodated us. Still, we dumped our tanks a total of 16 times (is it too weird to keep track of that?), by just keeping our eyes open to what was available and using it before it was critical. In Italy many of the rest areas on the autostradas have dump stations, and we used them three times.

    We watched the Euro rise and fall, mostly to our advantage. We tended to withdraw € 400-500 at a time: this cost us $60 less in June than it did in April. ATMs are everywhere, and we never had our card refused (we’d read that it’s important to have a card with a four-digit PIN). We never had a serious problem finding gas stations, ATMs or grocery stores, and only once were we desperate for a toilet. Our biggest challenge was remembering to have our shopping done before Sundays, when everything is closed (except on the autostradas.)

    We managed to go 12 weeks without illness or injury of any kind. Our tire and battery problems were solved with time and money and the help of some kind Austrians. We never had to back out (literally) of any tight situation, but we did turn around a whole bunch of times and got caught up in more detours than we care to count. The mountain passes in Italy, Austria and Switzerland proved to be non-issues. Rover took them in stride. Our Ford E-450 gave us no mechanical problems, and our Born Free remains comfortable and dry (and we had plenty of rain to test it). We cannot blame our electrical problems on Rover or anyone else.  But time and money will solve these problems, also.

    We are blessed to be able to take this third trip and blessed to have done it safely and in good health. We feel we have a few more trips still in us. Next year we will aim for Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway and hope to find storage in Norway so we won’t have to return to Amsterdam at the end of the trip. We have had an astounding number of hits on our blog so we know we have faithful readers out there. Please look for us later in the spring of 2011 and join us on our next adventure. Ciao.


        nap                fixing.dinner

April 16

     Always excited to be on our way again, we had forgotten what jet lag feels like and how heavy our luggage could be. It is a simple thing to prepare for a road trip when your motorhome is sitting in your driveway. It is altogether another thing to take everything with you, all at once, out the door into a taxi and onto an airplane. All, we’re guessing, 180 lbs. of it--at least one-third of which were maps and books. David’s suitcase was overweight at the airport, so Susan added the 6 lb RV-waterpump to the 21 lbs of books in her backpack and we were on our way.

     Two hours after landing at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam, we were in Rover, looking for a gas station. Gas has gone up since last year: 1.46 € / liter (about $7.50/gal.)  And then it was on to Waalwijk, an hour away. to pick up--and pay for--our new AGM batteries (including a nearly 20% value added tax!) But that’s OK, because everything works!

     It was our plan to get the batteries, stop at a grocery store in Waalwijk, and camp nearby, so we could unpack. But it turned out to be market day and there was a line of cars waiting to get into the grocery store parking lot and we knew it would be impossible to put Rover in there. So we gave up on the groceries and, with jet lag closing in on us, decided to find a campground. We wandered around the countryside for a few miles until we came upon a small campsite with a little store attached. There was no way to take a nap with our luggage still all over the place, so we unpacked, organized, ate a sandwich, and fell into bed exhausted.

April 17

April 17

     This was one of those days we have been secretly waiting for--the “what if something really awful happens” kind of day.  It’s Saturday. We had just stopped at the last service area in Germany to purchase our “vignette” that allows us to travel in Austria and automatically collect tolls. We were less than 12 miles from our campground destination when we heard loud repeated banging that just couldn’t be something simple. David looked in the rearview mirror and saw something large and black lying on the pavement behind us. We pulled over on the Austrian equivalent of the autobahn and very quickly were able to figure out that one of the right rear tires had just lost its tread.  Remarkably, we were within 50 yards of a emergency road phone, so David put on the obligatory safety vest, set up the obligitory warning triangles, called for help (“Ich bin Amerikaner. Sprechen Sie Englishe, bitte?” “Ja, gewiss.”) and  was able to pull the large piece of steel belted tire from the roadway.

April 19

    We spent a day and a half parked behind the tire store in Wörgl without incident. We saw no one, and probably no one knew we were there. There was no light at night at all.  On Sunday morning we went to a packed Catholic church service (since we had much to be thankful for!)  It was first communion for about 30 7-year-olds . . . but not a frilly white dress or veil in sight. And Susan thinks she was the only woman there in a skirt.

    In the afternoon we biked around the town and along the river, watching a flock of swans take off from the water--a noisy undertaking. In the evening we were visited by the young man who had helped us the day before and his wife. He was just checking to see if we were all right. He brought us juice; we shared our wine. 

    On Monday morning we left the parking lot behind the building and parked in front so we could be the first in the door at 8 a.m. The man at the desk said he had nothing to fit our 16” rims, but he made a call and sent us another kilometer down the street to an even bigger truck tire store. We arrived about 8:30 a.m., and they had us on our way by 10 a.m. with two new tires. In the process we discovered that the we had been driving on two tires that were 10 years old, probably original to the vehicle with 58,000 miles on them. We were grateful to learn that we had had good reason for our trouble and that it wasn’t a newer tire gone bad too soon. For all the trouble it could have been, we came through it about as easily and cheaply as we could.  And now we have new friends in Austria.

April 22

    We decided to stay an extra day at the campground above Innsbruck. They had wonderful new facilities, excellent wifi connection, and an easy bus into the city. But instead of a relaxing day, we, of course, walked five miles and exhausted ourselves hitting the high spots. The Tyrolian Folk Museum tickets turned out to be half price for seniors and included admission to three other museums, so we visited more than we had planned, including a quite incredible tomb for Emperor Maximilian, who was never actually buried there (but arranged to have larger-than-life statues of his fellow European monarchs clustered around the tomb as if he were). 

    When we purchased our two new tires, we were told to have someone check the lug nuts after 100 km or so, so when we left the campsite we first headed back to Innsbruck to find a tire place. The first one we found didn’t have the right kind of wrench and sent us to a motorhome repair place about 10 miles west, where a mechanic had us park barely off the road and did the job for us. Then it was south to the Brenner Pass over the Alps to Italy. We expected a hard climb, but the uphill parts were interspersed with plenty of flats and even downhills, all accompanied by trucks, trucks, and more trucks. There was a lot of snow on the mountains around us but none near the road. The views were spectacular, and on the other side of the pass we descended into a flat valley between mountains. It was about a mile wide and went on for miles and miles. And then suddenly the mountains all around us ended and we were in very flat (like Kansas, only with trees) farmland. Lots of vineyards and blossoming fruit trees everywhere.

April 26

     We drove 255 miles in light rain to get through Naples and all the way to Pompei. We are in the Spartacus Campground, a little place with tiny sites. We have other campers within ten feet of us in three directions, but it is in a great location, literally just a few hundred feet from the exit of the autostrada and directly across the street from the Pompei ruins with Mt. Vesuvius in the distance. The main entrance and the train station are just a short, but dangerous, walk up the hill. (In fact, it is necessary to walk across an entrance to the autostrada! What were they thinking!)


    IMG_0404                         IMG_0365


    If there are five inches, drivers will take four of them. They do stop for pedestrians in crosswalks, but will fly past in front of you if they can make it and will pass a foot behind you. It is exciting just to cross the street.

    On Saturday we took the train to Naples. The city was a big surprise and bigger disappointment. It is teeming, full of litter and grafitti and chaotic traffic. People sell everything imaginable from every corner and doorway, especially knock-off purses, watches, shoes and sunglasses. We had to walk through a pretty scruffy part of town to get to the Duomo (their cathedral), which was like being in another world: very clean and well kept. Beautiful paintings everywhere. There was a wedding just finishing up and before we left another was beginning. What a wonderful aisle to walk down. The bride came in on her groom’s arm. She was obviously pregnant and wore a skin tight strapless dress, fitted over her hips and belly, which then flared out, above the knee in front with a 6-8 foot train behind covered in ruffles. It was the most awful, inappropriate wedding gown Susan had ever seen. We apologize for not taking a picture. The street outside was lined with wedding shops with gorgeous dresses and lots of little white communion dresses.  

April 27

    A few months ago we heard Minnesota humorist Kevin Kling read from some of his stories. One of them gave us our tag line for this year. When asked if his bus driving job was boring because he drove the same route day after day, the driver replied ,“Not a day goes by when I don’t say ‘Well, shoot, I ain’t never seen that before!’” Well, not a day goes by when one of us doesn’t get to say that to the other. Today we could have kept repeating it while we did the Amalfi Coast.  

    We took the train to Sorrento and got on a bus and then gave thanks, often, that someone else was doing the driving while Rover could stay parked safely in Pompei. There is simply no way we could have driven her over that route. There isn’t a tenth of a mile of straight road: it continuously twist and turns--first up over some low mountains and then the along the coast--and we do mean RIGHT along the coast. It was an incredible, scary, beautiful drive. The driver blew the horn going around blind curves, which meant about once a minute. We got off the bus in Positano and walked down streets of steps,

April 28

    Travel is supposed to be broadening: the traveler visits strange lands, hears new sounds, observes unfamiliar customs, and emerges from the experience refreshed, enlightened, more appreciative of the variety of ways people may organize their lives together. And so we have nearly always found it to be.

    But.

    Southern Italy is . . . uh . . . difficult.

    It may be particularly so for those of us who are of the Northern European Persuasion (NEP). Brought up by Dutch Calvinist parents, latterly a part of Norwegian / Swedish / Danish / German Lutheran environments, we have absorbed the social teachings of those traditions, and by now we’re too damn old to change.

    Among the NEP social teachings we’ve become aware that others don’t share over the past few days are:


*whether there should be a difference between one’s behavior while, on the one hand, drunk in a bar or attending a sporting event and, on the other, while interacting with others, sober and in public (the NEP answer: yes, there should);

May 2

    Uploading the blog is increasingly a problem for us. When we were in Pompei we had wireless access at our site but apparently wiped out our website trying to load it. We walked all over town asking at big hotels and tourist offices where we might find strong “wifi” and finally ended up trying Burger King with free wifi access. It took almost an hour to upload the blog, but we were delighted it worked at all. A couple of days later before we left Pompei we were able to upload several days more. So if you are following our journey, please be aware that we may be uploading several entries at a time.

    The night before we left Pompei we spent a pleasant hour visiting with a British couple who spend most of their time on the road. Later we met an American couple from New Jersey who also own a Born Free and were shocked to see one just like theirs in Italy. They are touring for 10 weeks in a rented German “camping car” and wished they had their own. We were able to warn both couples to avoid driving the Amalfi Coast.

May 3

CHARM ALERT:

This is a trullo house.

    

                               IMG_0656


The little town of Alberobello has more than a thousand of them, quaint and cute as can be. This morning we drove from the crummy unlevel campground just up the hill on the outskirts of town to a large, level motorhome parking lot practically in the middle of town. Who knew?

    The unique architecture of its trulli makes Alberobello yet another another complete tourist town. It is set on several small hills with the houses on stepped or steep streets on either side. The north side has hundreds of trulli houses still inhabited, while nearly all of those on the south side have been turned into shops selling little trulli houses, trulli dish towels, trulli paintings, trulli manger scenes, trulli-you-name-it. You can even rent one for a holiday. But the houses themselves are adorable: each one about 10 feet square inside and often connected to another with open arches to provide additional space. One might expect to see little trulli gnomes walking about. This was worth the drive across Italy to see.

May 9

    We are in a large campground just north of Rome. On our way here, we had stayed one night at a camping “seaside resort” on the Adriatic. We were the only ones there amidst a hundred aging, rusting trailers. It was run by a friendly family busily working to improve it for the high season. And while it appeared to have a good internet connection, no one there knew the password or how to make it work. So after coffee on the beach in the morning, we drove the 200 miles back across the mountains (3000 ft.) and through many tunnels (one of them 3 miles long) to Rome in an occasional rain.


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    We expected a jam of traffic like we have found on the Paris ring road, but everything moved smoothly, and although our exit was not numbered (not at all, unlike every other one!) we had great directions and arrived quickly at the campground, with only one near-fatality involving a motor scooter passing us on the right just as we were about to take an exit.

May 12

    Arrivederci, Roma. We didn’t throw coins in the Trevi Fountain because we probably won’t return to the city (note the cause-and-effect confusion there). We spent seven nights in the Tiber Camping and had no trouble filling our days with easy trips into the city. One of the museums on our list--the Borghese Gallery--was booked until Tuesday, so we decided to make a reservation and do everything else at a more leisurely pace while waiting for Tuesday to come. The museum is in a large park, originally owned by a noble family intent on impressing other noble families, and the collection includes some of Bernini’s most famous sculptures (David, The Rape of Persephone, and others so famous they won’t let you even take a camera in with you). Equally memorable was David being shat upon by a pigeon roosting above the entry door.

    On Monday we visited the Vatican, thinking everyone else in town would have been there on Sunday to see the Pope. But apparently the other Lutherans in town hadn’t bothered either, because we stood in a line a quarter mile long on Monday to get into the Sistine Chapel. The line moved quickly, and, remarkably, they just keep the doors open and keep directing people in. It is a labryinth path to get to the actual chapel, through musuem rooms, tapestry rooms and art galleries, with as much art on the ceilings as on the walls. 

May 14

    It’s nice to know Italy can do something besides Baroque. Something like . . . oh . . . Gothic:


                                                   duomo


    Or maybe it’s only Siena that can do Gothic: the Lonely Planet guidebook says the city’s economic decline in the 1500s meant that nobody could be bothered to tear down its medieval buildings and replace them with up-to-date ones. And a couple centuries earlier, because of a plague, they had never gotten around to enlarging the cathedral. So it has stayed like this. Beautifully so.

                                             

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    We left Assisi, planning to spend a couple of days in Perugia before then driving to the route of Saturday’s stage of the Giro d’Italia bike race. But after navigating the steepest city streets so far, we found the gates of the campground closed. “Next month open,” said the workmen. “Now open,” we muttered, quoting the camping book. When we asked if there was another camppground, he pointed further up the hill, but then looked at Rover and shook his head and said he wouldn’t try it. We scraped bottom turning around in their camping entrance and  headed for Siena instead, where the GPS sent us up more unnecessarily steep urban hills to a campground terraced on a hillside, complete with its own hairpin curves.

May 15

    The rain started around 10 pm on Friday night and didn’t stop for 24 hours--a nice, gentle, steady drenching. We spent most of the damp and chilly Saturday inside Rover until around 2 pm, when we put on our waterproof shoes, raincoats, ponchos, gloves and pink (!) Giro hats, took up our umbrellas and headed out to that day’s Giro d’Italia’s bike route, about a mile downhill. We got there just in time to watch the sponsor parade of decorated cars speed past--without tossing out any merchandise, the pikers--and then we found a wet curb under a tree to sit on for an hour to wait for the riders.

    A couple of hundred people had gathered just outside the little hill town (Casina) and spread out along the road lined with parked cars. The road takes a pretty sharp curve right at the turnoff to the town, so we crossed it to get to the inside of the curve so no one would go flying off the road into us as they went around that corner. 

    The riders came up the long, steep hill, looking throughly miserable in the cold and wet, accompanied by the many motorcycles, helicopters and support vehicles. They were strung out over quite a distance, but it was all over within ten minutes.

May 19

    We are in Florence. Well, shoot. . . .

    It is truly a lovely city. (So is its name in Italian: Firenze.) We drove straight to Camping Michelangelo (!) from Casina with no detours or problems. The campground is quite large and spills down the hillside on the south bank of the Arno River, overlooking the city. Quite a remarkable view. It is just about full, even though we are weeks away from the beginning of the official “high season.” 


                                             IMG_1002


    Since we expect to be here for a few days, we emptied our tanks and filled up with fresh water before we settled ourselves. But we soon discovered an electrical problem: we kept blowing the circuit breaker on the outlet pole we were plugged in to, even when we had shut off everything electrical. A neighbor told us we had only 2 amps of service! (Could it be that our converter/charger’s attempts to recharge the batteries were drawing too much current?) We finally saw the campground guy who had directed us to our site and asked him if there was a solution. He showed us another site 50 feet away where there was 10 amps. We first tried to string another cable but didn’t have enough of the necessary adapters, so we just packed everything up and moved Rover to the new site, which solved the problem. (We had actually begun to look for alternative camping sites, with all the navigation problems that would entail, so we were really relieved that it turned out OK.)

May 24

    The weather finally cleared to beautiful sunshine. Our next visit was to Pisa, just a few miles east of Florence. Our stopping point there--”The Leaning Tower Campground” is how it translates--is only about a quarter mile from the Tower, so we parked Rover and walked to it.

    The medieval city planners must have had tourists in mind because the tower, cathedral and Baptistry are all in a row down a wide lawn about three football fields in length; alongside runs a pedestrian street lined with market stalls of all kinds, mostly souvenirs of little tiny leaning towers (this is a great timesaver for the busy tourist: up one side, down the other, and back on the bus to your hotel).


                                              IMG_1098


    Pisa’s cathedral was once the largest in Italy and is absolutely beautiful. It is interesting to see very modern additions to some of these 1000-year old places: here it was a new altar and pulpit, both very different from the originals. We did not go up the tower and we resisted having our picture taking in what appeared to be the obligatory stance of pretending to hold it up (obligatory not only for tourists but for Snoopy and Disney characters on t-shirts). 

May 29

    Getting to the Italian lake country is not relaxing. The mountains along the coast provide few opportunities for going north. So David got to drive his favorite road, the breath-taking A-12 tunnel/bridge/tunnel/bridge, for about 50 miles east before we could turn north and get through the mountains. Then the country turns flat . . . so flat that they flood the fields and grow rice. We also saw corn and wheat, real midwestern farms instead of the usual vineyards and olive trees. But for all the cheese this country eats, we have never seen a dairy cow and for all the ham they consume, we have never caught sight of a pig farm. But today we smelled one. Must be an all-inside operation.

    When you travel by RV, three concerns predominate: food, gas, and dumping. Just before we arrived at the camping ground where we stayed two nights, we found a huge supermarket and got well stocked. The campground itself was kind of an unkempt place on Lake Maggiore. They were trying hard to get the pool open for the high season instead of bothering to cut the grass. But it was clean and we had enough electricity to run the vacuum cleaner, so Rover got a thorough cleaning. And the wi-fi was pretty good as long as we sat by the unopened pool to use it.

June 3

    We hated to leave the beauty of Iseo and the lake country, but we haven’t seen quite all of Italy yet. So we drove a long way (for us): 103 miles to Modena. The campground there is practically within the cloverleaf exit of the Autostrada--lots of traffic noise, but great wifi. We rode our bikes the 3 miles into the city. (It was Sunday, so the traffic wasn’t too bad.)  And we ended up riding the bike path around the old city center and riding into “Ferrari/Maserati Days,” featuring a group pretending to race about a 10th of a mile along city streets, vintage cars reving motors and backfiring and delighting the mostly older men crowding around. 

    The next day we drove to Bologna, where the campground has been modernized quite a bit: Good sanitary blocks/sites separated by bushes/nice restaurant/ open pool. But there were few places to get water and the only place for us to hook up a hose was at the dump, which was configured in a way we couldn’t use. So we just didn’t bother with either. (A heads-up for those of our readers thinking of taking their American RV to Europe: although we have been pleasantly surprised by how many campgrounds have had dump stations that accommodate the American-style black and gray water tanks, and while we can also often find one at the big truck stops on the Autostradas, still we’ve found it best to use a dump when we find one  rather than wait until our tanks are full before searching one out.) 

June 5

    In a stunning departure from their history of closely fought battles, Italy devastated the team of David and Susan in two consecutive contests, Ravenna and Padua.

    Utilizing their nation’s traditional strengths--lunatic drivers, serenely unhelpful “service staff,” treacherous roads, tawdry campsites, inaccurate information and oppressive weather--the home team easily turned aside the visitors’ attempts to fully enjoy the splendors of Ravenna’s Byzantine mosaics and Padua’s medieval/Renaissance paintings and architecture.

    Only in the presence of Giotto’s magnificent frescoes in Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel, cited by Michaelangelo as his greatest influence, did the overmatched Americans manage to eke out anything close to the sort of pleasure that had motivated them to come to this d... country in the first place. (No pictures allowed, of course, so the memory of this experience will quickly fade, while the fresh scrape on Rover’s portside mirror will remain all too tangible.)


    (Spoiler alert: it gets better when we get to Venice.)

June 7

    We are trying to write a description of our visit to Venice, combined with a farewell to Italy, while trying to convince the campground owner’s dog to go away (the latter is harder than it might seem, because he is really good at begging for attention and we find we really miss having a dog).


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    There are several campgrounds on the Venetian  lagoon. We are at Fusina. It is a fairly large place with what are called “unmarked pitches,” i.e., not too large open spaces between trees, so pull in wherever you wish. And so people do, trying to optimize the view. There are motorhomes here bigger than Rover--something we are finding more and more often. We are parked about 20 feet from the water, with our nose facing Venice. There is a shipping channel right in front of us and we have seen several tugs guiding massive container ships and car carriers past us. Great free entertainment.

    We took the local ferry to Venice. It is right outside the campground gate: ferries every hour all day and half the night. We bought the ticket that took us to Venice and back and also gave us unlimited rides on the vaporetto (water taxi) in the city. We had been to Venice once before, but that was a cold and rainy March. Today was sunny and very warm. There were a lot of tourists, but nothing overwhelming like the Cinque Terre.  We walked and walked and took the vaporetti five times , including to Murano, another island where the beautiful glass work is done: factory after factory and store after store selling gorgeous glass jewelry, dishes and imaginative art pieces.

June 11

    Arrivederci, Italia. Guten Tag, Austria. From Venice we drove on the Autostrada along the coast almost all the way to Slovenia before heading north toward Villach (the traffic-stopping accident being on the other side of the road this time). First swamp land in Italy and then the low, camel-humped mountains leading into Austria.The mountain passes we had worried about are not a problem on the interstate-like roads: the highest was 3400 feet, and the gradient was always manageable. (But then we aren’t in the really big mountains yet.)

    As soon as we crossed into Austria we stopped to put more money on our “vignette,” the windshield-mounted toll counter. Austria knows how to collect tolls. In Italy you need to take a ticket from a very narrow toll booth and pay as you leave at another narrow toll booth. And sometimes instead of an attendant, you deal with a machine that speaks Italian in a tinny accent. But in Austria you prepay on this little gadget that beeps at you every few miles on the toll roads as it encounters a sensor above the highway. We were told it would cost us € 80-90 just to drive the 250 miles to Vienna. So we just put € 100 on the thingy and drove on.

June 16

    Susan did not lobby hard enough for a new battery, and David did not think enough about the accessories that could drain one that was weak. We are such a team.

    We drove the 125 miles from Graz to Vienna without incident, but when we got there, all it took to kill the chassis battery once and for all was using the hydraulic leveling system. We had just enough power to raise the windows and here we are. We couldn’t go farther without some kind of help.

    Someone is watching over us, because we got it: the closest commercial establishment to Camping Wien (Vienna) West is--drum roll, please--an American auto parts store. The proprietor searched his catalogues and computer and shook his head, suggested we go to a nearby Midas shop “just two kilometers away” and said he would make some phone calls. Our problem is the specific size of the battery and the amps it needs to start a 10-cylinder 6.8-liter engine. After one bus and two tram rides, we found the Midas. They actually had a possible contender, but they would not deliver it, the garage door would not accommodate Rover, and the parking options on the busy street  were not good. Still, it was a possibility. Back to the auto parts man, who had learned nothing helpful from his colleagues around western Europe. This time we asked whether there was a battery store--someone who could figure out what we actually needed, not just look for a copy of what we had. (For example, we are not in Minnesota any more and do not drive Rover in extreme cold conditions, so we do not need the cold cranking amps we had had in the old battery.)  One bus and one subway ride later, we arrived at a battery store and within 10 minutes the woman placed a battery before us (she lugged it out from the stock room herself--an impressive feat). The dimensions were good, but the posts were reversed. “No problem, I can get another one that’s right, today.” And since she lives--drum roll, please-- about two blocks from the campground, she delivered it late that afternoon on her way home, picked up the old one for recycling, and stayed around long enough to make sure it would fit and work. It did and it does. 

June 23

June 23

    Batteries charging away, we drove the 50 miles from Vienna to Melk, a small town on the Danube River with a massive Benedictine abbey towering above it. We stopped in a small campground on an island in the river. Usually campgrounds run a small snack shop or restaurant, but this time the popular restaurant was running the campground. It was simply a grassy field (the campground, that is) with a few electrical posts and water faucets. The weather was very windy and threatened rain, so we abandoned any idea of long bike rides along the river and instead just rode our bikes into the town and climbed up to the 700-year-old abbey.

    The guide books told us that the abbey’s chapel is an extreme example of Baroque architecture. Well, shoot. . . . We overheard a guide telling her group that baroque church architecture tries to convey the artists’ impression of Heaven. Well put: it was full of garlands, angels, flowers, and statues, all painted in shining gold. Above the altar, the gilded Sts. Peter and Paul shake hands for the last time before going off to their individual martyrdoms. Very definitely over the top. The abbey’s two-story library was a movie set marvel of dark wood and hidden windows covered by moving shelving . . . and we were told there were six other stories.

June 27

    We tunneled our way to Switzerland: tunnel after tunnel, several of them 2 or 3 or 5 miles long, and one of them a full 10 miles. It is not our favorite way to travel. Really long tunnels give one too much time to think about exactly what it is that is above one’s head . . . and pressing down . . . and subject to shifting . . . and Europe has earthquakes, doesn’t it? Add to that the mesmerizing repetition of the lights and wall markings flashing past and . . . 

    Fortunately the longest tunnels did not have oncoming traffic to add to the drama, and generally the traffic was light. We stopped before leaving Austria and got a € 22 refund on our toll vignette; then we stopped at the Swiss border and paid a € 20 road tax toll for 5 days. € 233 for Austrian tolls; € 20 for Swiss tolls.

    We drove towards Zurich to a campsite supposedly on a lake southeast of Zurich. It was a cramped, unshaded place full of old trailers and half a dozen short-stay motorhomes. It had about 20 feet of swampy, rocky shoreline and no good transportation into the city. But it did have accordion music and raucous singing at a party that quieted down promptly at 10 pm. So we stayed the night because we were hot and tired and in the morning moved to another Zurich campground 12 miles away.  This one was pretty big, shaded, busy with touring vehicles and had good bus service right outside the gate. And at night there was always a group gathered to watch the “fussball” games on tv. Access to the city was so easy that we went in for the day and visited churches and a great art museum and the birthplace of the Dada art movement in 1916 (and subject of a play by David's favorite playwright, Tom Stoppard).

Semi-final assessment

Once again, in a spasm of pedantry he cannot resist, David is driven to look at this year’s trip in light of Henry James’s epigraph on our homepage: 


“My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile going thirty miles an hour on a smooth road to a twelfth-century cathedral.”


(But first, a confession: I cannot make myself enjoy Henry James. With that out of the way):


“A perfect automobile”

    We had more Rover-related problems on this trip than on the first two, but they were all avoidable. For instance, if we’d been suspicious and checked the manufacture dates of the inboard rear tires before we left the US to see whether they were as new as the four whose dates we could see, we would have discovered they were ten years old (!). We’d have replaced them and avoided the loss of a tire tread in Austria.

    And we could have noticed that the chassis battery was Motorcraft, therefore probably 8- or 9-year-old original equipment, and unlikely to be forgiving if I left the lights on for three hours--which I did--and we could have replaced it before we left.

July 5

    Metz is a small walkable city, and the municipal campground is right in the city and on an island on the river. It’s one of our favorites. We returned because the new Pompidou Center had finally opened and we were not disappointed. It is an unusual and beautiful structure, and the art chosen for its premier was wonderful. We were glad we had made the effort to return. We had several more conversations with our new Iowa biker acquaintances and also with the Danish family parked next to us, exchanging camping stories and places we must visit. It is always fun to have someone else to talk to at length.


                                               IMG_2032


    We stayed two nights in Metz, recovering from our long day and then headed north towards Luxembourg. We needed gas and groceries. We exited the Autoroute when we saw a large commercial complex and bought just a little gas (at € 1.45 per liter) since we knew we would soon be in Luxembourg where it is much cheaper. But the shopping center had erected 2.5-meter high barriers at the entrance, so we were unable to get our vehicle into the parking lot to buy groceries: these are huge shopping complexes that apparently don’t want any money from people in camping cars (as they are called in Europe). We got turned around heading back to the A and got trapped in a detour and about 15 miles later we were finally on the right road headed in the right direction. As soon as we crossed the border we exited to a small town and bought gas (€ 1.17 / liter). Luxembourg proved to be one big road construction zone. We were headed north to Ettlebruck and the George Patton Museum, but first we had to travel about 20 miles through small towns and several detours and road construction zones. In road construction zones they like to make one of the lanes 2 meters wide--Rover is 2.5 meters wide --always exciting.

Final Reckoning

    Well, shoot….we haven’t seen these kind of figures before. We “budget” $1000 per week, but our initial look at the bank account showed we used $14,063 in 12 weeks. Still, a closer look shows we really weren’t too far off the mark. Here’s the breakdown.

    We traveled 4753 miles, averaging 56.6 miles per day. We spent $2910 on 462.5 gallons of gasoline, at an average price of $6.48 per gallon. Rover gets about 10 mpg, our payoff for staying below 55 mph (except when passing the occasional truck or car going even slower than we are).

    We were expecting the house batteries expense of $780, but the chassis battery at $225, two tires at $375 and GPS at $200 were unexpected. Without these costs, our expenses for travel/living/sightseeing would have been $12,400--much closer to our estimate.

    We paid to camp every night but four. Campground expenses were $2055, an average of $25 a night. We could have free camped more often but we prefer the security of a campground. The most expensive was in Rotterdam at $50 a night--but that was in July, which is considered “high season.” If we had done this trip in June, July and August, our camping expenses would have been considerably higher.