More seaside scenery and onto Torre Melissa

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Gelato flavour of the day - Didn't get to stop to buy one! and they closed too early in the sleepy town of Torre Melissa

The view of the sun rising out of the east was as beautiful as we might have expected from our 5^thfloor room and it was pleasurable to lie in bed with no pressure to get up too early as we have another straight forward drive further around the instep of Italy.

The front desk man was right and the teenage girls had had their breakfast and decamped and left on their coach by the time we made the breakfast room.

We were well looked after by Simona, a Romanian waitress, who couldn’t do enough for us. She chatted away, practising her English on us, giving us her history of the last 10 years. She had worked on cruise ships until she hurt her back requiring an operation and had to give us working on cruise ships although she wants to go back to them once her back gets stronger.

We had the feeling that between the man on the front desk who asked us, several times that we saw him as we came and went to the hotel, if everything was alright for us and the waitress who asked us in a similar way except about breakfast, that they were going for employee of the month for the hotel. We even thought we might get asked to complete a vote form as we left. That didn’t happen.

We took our first stop for the morning after an hour of driving at a place you wouldn’t want to ask for a train ticket to, at least not without practising the name first to make sure you got it all out so you could be understood. The town was called Santa Caterina dello Ionio, a sleepy seaside place that had a smart looking seaside promenade. One thing that is apparent with the beach along the coast so far is that the beaches are not as flat as say the Mount beach at home and their does not appear to be much in the way of shallows for paddling in.

The hilltop towns are still there in the distance as we have noticed everywhere we have driven although here they don’t look quite as dramatic as the hills do not appear to be as high and they are more distant from the coast road.

All was going well with the drive along SS106 until we got to the much larger town of Catanzaro Marina, a seaside suburb of Catanzaro a sizeable city about 10km inland from the coast where the hills were more rolling and mountains further away inland.

As we have discovered from time to time the road signage can get confusing and not point in exactly the way you would expect and we found ourselves heading inland towards the city where we did not want to be. For some reason Vicky had gone quiet on us and the maze of roundabouts and road going off at odd angles didn’t help. After driving around the ugliest series of apartment buildings we have seen we finally made it back to the SS106 and emerged onto the road just before a large shopping mall with an Auchan store came into sight.

The mall, which looked very new, had all the big brand shops and a huge Auchan store and as we have not yet taken our toaster back for replacement we thought we should take the opportunity to do so as we are missing our toast in the morning. It will be interesting to see how Italians embrace mall shopping which at least in the south afters to be a new phenomenon.

We were given a lesson in Italian consumer rights from a pleasant enough guy who spoke reasonable English and we now need to seek out an agent named in the guarantee booklet to get the toaster replaced. So simply taking the toaster back to the store as we would in NZ does not work in Italy. We couldn’t pass up Auchan €1 specials on the things we needed or will need so we topped up the juice and wine cellars and fresh veges and fruit.

We were late having lunch today at 2pm and after driving on a little further we found a beach location and enjoyed our boot lunch beside the seaside.

Much of the countryside has now started to look a bit of the same and it was pleasing on the eye to move a little more inland as we rounded Capo Rizzuto and there was more rural land to look at. We hope that we don’t regret having had enough of the coastal scenery when we get to places like Bulgaria and Romania which are far from the sea.

Crotone was an unattractive industrial town with a small airport on the outskirts of the town. Well we thought there was an airport as there was a control tower and what looked like a passenger terminal but the grass beyond was so tall you couldn’t make out whether there was a runway! Perhaps they don’t get many flights here.

Our overnight stop was in Torre Melissa the seaside part of the more inland town of Melissa, another name with no apparent Italian style. Torre we discovered means ‘tower’ in Italian although we didn’t find any towers in the small town. We did find a large number of wind turbines behind the town, they were very close and we couldn’t imagine anyone in NZ allowing them to be built so close to a built up area.

There were a number of relatively new beachside hotels most of which did not appear to be open for the season but other than that it was a sleepy hollow. The beach was just OK and had been created by a breakwater being built which had allowed sand to build up or otherwise it would have been another strip of beach with little shallow water.

Our apartment was new and was part of a 3 story building on a floor that was devoted to the rooms the business had while other floors had businesses and apartments owned or rented by locals.

With a small terrace we were able to sit outside and watch the traffic on SS106 motor by while we enjoyed a drink before dinner.

We have made good progress around the bottom of Italy over the past 2 days but we still have another day ahead before we will have completed the drive around the instep of Italy and heading a more generally northerly direction.

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