The stuff movies are made of.......

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Hi again

Before I continue with our travels I must tell you about Ian's new girlfriend. She sounds rather posh and we have dubbed her Geraldine Penelope. She has been very helpful to us most of the time but every now and then she gets told to shut up and go away. She is, of course, the GPS in the car that we have leased. She keeps Ian on the straight and narrow, usually without help from me, but when she loses contact in a tunnel and tells us to "If possible do a U turn" she tends to get some abuse and she didn't seems to be able to tell us when a mountain pass was closed which I'll come to later.

So where were we? Three nights in Paris and a house sale!! Paris is a beautiful city with so many wonderful buildings and laid out with lovely avenues etc. We made use of the sightseeing bus again to give us the general layout of where we were going and stopped at the Eiffel tower where we found the queues very long so went of to the Louvre instead but by the time we got there it was late in the day so it was a quick look to find the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo before our dinner on the Seine. I actually found the building itself as fascinating as the contents.

The following day we got acquainted with the Metro to find our way around and visited the Notre Dame, climbed 284 steps to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, lunched on the Champs Elysees, waited in a shorter queue and took the lift to the top of Eiffel Tower (it was pretty cold up there), then across town to the Sacre Coeur and dinner in Montmatre. A very busy day.

An early start the next day to pick up our car near the Orly Airport and find our way out of Paris and onto the road to Germany - more by good luck than good management there as we hadn't got the GPS up and running properly by then. The French are very keen on getting extra money from you with their toll system - it cost us €25 ($50) to get from Paris to the border of Germany then didn't pay anymore tolls till we got to Italy.

First stop in Germany was at Baden Baden, a very quaint spa town in the Black Forest area, full of elderly people "taking the cure" from what we could see. Then it was onto Munich which was a bit of a disaster. We decided that we would stay on the outskirts near Dachau, rather than drive into the city, but the only accommodation we found was a Gasthof that was more than a bit suspect, where we shared rather grubby and broken down bathroom facilities with other guests, the type who left cigarette ash in the hand basin!! We did manage to get into Munich that evening for a drink at the Hofbrahaus and dinner at another beerhall but when we went to the Dachau Concentration camp the next morning we found it was closed on Mondays so we missed out there too.

So we headed south to Innsbruck through some very pretty areas in Southern Germany and Austria.
Probably not featuring high on the agenda of most NZers but very important here right now in the 2008 Euro Football (Soccer) cup and it is being hosted by Austria and Switzerland, so in Innsbruck there was a whole area of the town set up for fans who spilled over into the rest of the very quaint central area of the city and the whole place was humming, the Spaniards particularly having a great time.

Just one night there then we headed off through the mountain pass to Switzerland - was this the area that the von Trapp family climbed every mountain in? They must have been very fit as we were above the snow line. So then we were in Heidi country, lots of examples of Grandfather´s cottage up the mountains and many, many little shelters where Peter, the goatherd, might have been looking after the goats. Scenery wise, at least in Austria and Switzerland, we were definitely in areas surpassing anything in NZ.

We kept with our intention of staying in smaller places and spent 3 nights in Interlaken. On the way there we went up Mt Titlis in the cable car to see the ice cave and the incredible views, then the next day we went by train (actually 3 trains) to Jungfraujoch which is high up on the Eiger. Sadly the weather wasn´t too good but it was an amazing feat of engineering to get the rail line up there to almost as high (11339ft) as the top of Mt Cook (12349ft before a bit fell off) The Ice palace up there was also quite stunning.

It was great to stay in one place for 3 nights and relax a bit, then we were off again heading to Italy, We programming the GPS and found that relying on Geraldine Penelope is not always a good thing as we headed up a mountain pass, wondering that there was so little traffic to find, after she warned us ˝beware of black ice˝, that it was 3degrees, actually snowing and there were road cones across the entrance to a tunnel - the road was closed!!! All the way the way down again and over 2 more more stunning mountain passes and we were in Italy where it was 30degs.

We had a one night stay at Sarnico, a quaint little town on a lake in Northern Italy then we were into the real tourist areas again. I loved Florence in 1973 and we both loved it for the three nights there. The first afternoon we visited the queue to see Michelangeloś David but the queue was 2 hours long. I could not leave Florence without seeing him so we got up early the next morning and only waited 10 mins. Being so early into the town we got in a full day of sight seeing including the open topped, hop on, hop off bus. The following day we took a full day bus tour (first on so we were up the front, top deck) to Siena, with a conducted walking tour of the town, and a lovely little Tuscany hill top town called San Giminorgno. A good day off the driving for Ian.

From there we went directly to Venice where our first experience of being in the city was a violent thunderstorm and downpour - not Venice´s best look with its air of decay at the best of times. The next day was brilliantly fine so it was looking a lot better for our gondola ride along the canals and free boat ride out on the lagoon to Murano to view the glass blowing - designed to make us spend money while there. We didn´t actually buy anything there but there is a rather heavy piece of glass added to the ever increasing luggage - having a car makes additions easy at this point but I think we will have to sent some stuff home later.

And so we come to Bled in Slovenia. Stacey came here 2 years ago when she first came to this side of the world and I am not sure how she got to hear of it but it is just the most idyllic place, a small town beside a lake, with a church on an island in the middle of the lake and a castle high on a rock at the edge of the lake. No motorboats on the lake so the only disturbing noise is the bells from the church next to the hotel.

Next stop will be at Zadar on the Dalmatia Coast for a couple of nights, with hopefully some time out on the Adriatic, then on to Dubrovnik where we will catch an overnight ferry to Bari in Italy. A couple of night at Sorrento to take in the Amalfi Coast then we will be meeting up with Stacey, Adam, David and Georgia for our week in the villa.

All in all everything is going very well and according to plan.

Take care and we will see you all again in a few weeks.

Shirley and Ian

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