Friday 30th October Villages of Provence in the afternoon Well as it worked out the sofa bed wasn’t too bad and so we have given it the tick of approval and we will stay put in our unit. The day started out with a heavy fog in the valley and visibility from our unit out to the farmland was about 50 metres, so we thought there was no point being in a hurry to go anywhere until it lifted. We have an almost fully equipped kitchen including hotplates and microwave so the only addition we need to make to it is the toaster. With the ability to make poached eggs again Gretchen is pleased. We haven’t done a big laundry for a while and we both have full bags of clothing to be washed. Yesterday afternoon ... read more

Wednesday 28th October Incident at the toll booth and a few hours with the rich and famous in Monaco We are still adjusting to the demise of daylight saving last Sunday and the location of our hotel high up in the hills behind Nice means there is no traffic noise so sleeping in is easy. We have one English speaking TV channel and that is the BBC but after an hour of watching it all the same news is repeated again it is just as well we can rely on Newstalk ZB from home via the laptop to give us ongoing variety contact with the outside world.The internet connection in this hotel is one of the fastest and most stable we have had on this adventure. We wanted to be a bit earlier on the road ... read more

Monday 26th October We were awake early this morning so our bodies clearly will take a day or two to adjust to the end of daylight saving that came upon yesterday as of yesterday.We had told our hosts that we would be down for breakfast at 8.30am but we were really ready for it an hour beforehand so we had to fill in a bit of time. We decided to take the SP1 along the coast rather than bother about the motorway which bypasses all the seaside towns that seem to run into each other along the coast.Genoa took a bit of time to clear as the road initially ran close to the commercial area of town and then past the port. An interesting sight that we had not noticed before in Italy was that outside ... read more

Thank goodness Gretchen has masseuse skills ,as I awoke at some ungodly hour of the night with the worst cramp I have ever experienced and she eased my pain enabling me to get back to sleep.The trial of Cinque Terre yesterday we do not want to experience again. The day dawned bright and clear and a great improvement on the overcast of yesterday and after talking to Leigh,daughter #1 online,she persuaded us to give the Cinque Terre another chance to show off its beauty to us especially as the weather had improved and hopefully the bottom path would be reopened. We decided that we would go on the basis of travelling to the further most station at Monterossa and if the whole track wasn't open then we would walk the road to the second village of ... read more

Thursday 22nd October The Leaning Tower of Pisa and onwards to Lerici It absolutely bucketed down in the night and if we hadn’t been in a room upstairs we might have had to evacuate before we were carried away in the flood.Perhaps that was why everyone checked in here are in units upstairs.As it was there was a mysterious pool of water in the middle of the separate lounge/dining area with no obvious place as to where it had come from. The weather is clearing from the west which is a good sign and the forecast is for an improvement. Finding our way back to town was simple and we took a park once we thought we had reached near the centre of town thinking that would be where the tower was located.It wasn’t possible to ... read more