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Published: April 15th 2011
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Leaving Nice was a pleasure as it was not my idea of great but there you have it, we were looking for a camping Store to replace one of the wheel levelers, Mark had forgotten to pick one up several nights ago and now we couldn’t level the camper if needed so we were headed to Nice Caravans some 12kms away from where we were, cruising along the coast road we found the turnoff we needed and headed out. No problems finding the place we got a few supplies for the van and retraced our steps. That was when the trouble really began, being stubborn we refused to use the Autostrade and wanted to cruise the coast road however we found ourselves on the wrong side of the road we needed and could not for the life of us get to the correct side, a bloody great medium barrier was in the road and the only access to it seemed to be under a bridge some 2.4m high, only problem we needed 3.3m and old Tomtom just couldn’t figure it out. Two hours later and many subsequent arguments we finally found our way out of the trap we found ourselves in
by pulling a U turn in the middle of a main street. This was, to be honest was our first real barny and it was a beauty with not many spoken words for some time, still like mature adults we sorted things out and moved onward and upwards. Our memories of Nice are not great and despite our hassles there is not much there we found inspiring, it is a place for the “beautiful people” really. We stuck to our guns and traveled the coast road for around 3 hours and making about 60kms, the road was terrible, narrow, very busy and absolutely nowhere to stop at all, I mean nowhere. Finally arriving on Monaco, well what a surprise we were in for, it was complete bedlam with works starting getting ready for the F1 and so many people, cars, bikes, buses and trucks crowding the very narrow streets. Again nowhere at all to stop a car, let alone a camper van, we just kept on driving around looking until we got sick of that and headed off, not much else to say but it is very flash and as you would expect having seen it on the TV, we
did however drive some of the F1 circuit, the tunnels and some of the front straight and corners, very cool really.
Leaving Monaco behind we came to a seedy little town that had a Vodafone shop, so it was in there to sort out mobile phone and computer data foe the next 4 weeks. If anyone tells you cell and data is cheap or any good in Europe, don’t believe it, the connections are poor, slow and expensive when compared to good old NZ. That chore done we decided to make some time and miles up and used the Autostrade for a while. By now of course it was getting late and we still had 150kms to go, so we wound the old Fiat up and hit the road aiming for La Spezia or at least a place to stop for the night on the way, nothing to be found at all until we hit Chiavari, by now it was around 7.45 and I had been driving for around 9 hours and was trashed. We found by pure luck a worn out old sign with an arrow pointing to a camp ground, some 10kms and 25 mins later we
pulled into the drabbest looking campground you could imagine, the vans were packed in like sardines but we had somewhere to stay. Not a great start to Italy but the little pizza place we found down the street made up for it a little.
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Dawn
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arrrhhh what a great adventure your having.... enjoying reading your blogs Mark... and lovely photos Pam !! Dawn