Last day but one

---

Time flies and it was time to go towards Italy and catch the train back to Germany, WAIL!!

From Barcelonnette to Cuneo in Italy was nothing as the crow flies, the thing is that crows don't get interested in making a little detour.

I do, once over the border there was yet another Col, Col de Lombardie and who am I to fight my inner demons crave to see and drive over yet another place of fun.

Anyway there was a lot of traffic going up and I followed suit, they all went to sunday church up there in the mountains and it being sunday there were a lot of sunday drivers about, aka slow going.

I went up there with them and they got the word of the Lord and I got a nice view.

The road ended there so I had to double back for a bit until I hit the road to the Col.

I went back to France with the intent of a nice shortcut that would put me on a nice road back to Italy.

No such luck, they had closed of some roads due to a car race which fu..e up my plans, big time.

I had to stop for some kind of parade where the were celebrating the end of the second world war with army vehicles some contemporay some not.

The going was good anyway but it felt as if I was driving in treacle up and down around and around.

My low fuel level lamp lit up and the only gas station was closed so I just had to keep going sooner or later one was going to pop up.

Finally I was down in a valley and hit a wider road going back into Italy, the first petrolstation had very long queues.

As there was enough petrol to take me another 25 km I took a chance and went on, 10 km later another petrolstation, closed!!

Finally I put 29 litres of petrol in my tank.

Loads of traffic some fellow motorbike riders did some hairraisng lane splitting, the gaps were to narrow for my beast of burden and my balls at that.

The road started to go up again and suddenly it was tunnel time, the tunnel of Tende, all the cars had to stop due to a long queue and all the motorbikes passed them on the outside.

The tunnel was quite long and I took the opportunity to pass a lot of cars.

It used to be a twoway tunnel but now they had trafficlights at each end so lots of place to overtake.

The law aka Carabinieri was on the far side so everyone, including me took it very slowly.

Some Italians I spoke with told me to skip Cuneo s it was a boring industrial town so i went to Alba instead.

In alba I got stopped by a police on a motorbike asking me if i needed help and I could surely do with a hotel, once there I got the last room and the cop informed me in no uncertain ways that he did NOT get a kick back from the hotel.

Alba is a pretty town with lots of old buildings and the had some kind of festival where they had converted the square into a horse racetrack loads of people lots of shouting and my camera was back in my room but I could not be bothered.

Believe me it was nice and after 9 hours on the bike I wanted beer badly.

---