Finale Ligure snow and medieval villages

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We have been offline fo 4 days again- sorry all. What adventures since leaving Genova! The first B & B was in the mountains of Pareto: we drove there through snow, which was lovely to find the hostess was not there when we arrived. These places are in old villages and are often hard to find amongst little steep roads in the hills. Off to the bar! We were eventually greeted by a totally Italian, non English speaking woman who kindly showed us into the apartment! When this neighbour arrived to let us in, we went into shell shock as she rattled off sentence after sentence, of which we perhaps understood about 10%. But alas, there was NO HOT water or Internet - for two days. Oh how will we organise our next town and more importantly transfer some funds to our cash passport? - let alone upload photos and write our blog.

However, our hostests, once she arrived at 7pm, turned out to be the most gorgeous woman, still non English speaking, but she tried so hard to communicate with us and spoil us rotten, that all was forgiven! (Next day visited Alba and Bra- Lee, visited the University of Sciene du Gastronomique - founders of the slow food movement surrounded by ancient towns built over a medieval amphitheatre and City!)Finally, off we go to the coast and civilisation, or so we thought! A nice detour to one lovely mountain town, again in the snow fields where we observed a stunning medieval town, called Zuccarello. Alarm bells rang when our next host only accepted messages in Italian and we have no connectivity on our phones when overseas to translate! However, despite this, we eventually we found the 'casa' in Finale Ligure.

Now... The house is cold, it seems we have to pay extra for gas to heat, cook and have hot water. You get the picture- it has been snowing in all the surrounding mountains! Of course we were required to make our own bed! It was advertised as close to the sea but it is not! We are sure you are chuckling by now: kettle is broken (mind you not many Italian houses have one), if we wanted the TV the remote was not working and all taped up! Yes a Monty Python esque series of events. We have Internet, we think, but not the password! Eventually we obtain this only to find that it only works for instant messaging and with one leg standing on the washing machine that has no soap! Still no ability to access the web! We will be posting this at some stage when we find an Internet cafe or a hotel!! We have heated the bed and this morning our hands and toes with a hair dryer! Thank heavens for the thermals that Saraya convinced us to buy: thank you sweet girl. Oh the joys of travel: thank God for our wonderful time in Genova.

We must say that the scenery we have witnessed in the last three days has been breath-taking, including driving through the fog with our GPS taking us to a vineyard dead end and over hill and dale - so steep we could not breathe for trepidation and fear of driving over the cliff.
All in all one more drive towRds France, one more accommodation adventure, then we meet Simon, Sophie and the girls at Cabris

P.S. If your are receiving weird email links please ignore them and you can still access the blog via the main address www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Michanna

Sent from my iPad

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Photos

Snow but in Pareto
Not our lodgings!

Hot springs at Acqui Terme
We could use these here in Finale Ligure