Italy with Kids - Rome to Venice

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Our day was spent on two primary endeavours, firstly to visit my sister's friend's house in St Michele in Teverina, and secondly to drive to our accomodation in Cavallino (southeast of Venice on the peninsula). What I didn't realise was that much more important than that (sorry Joanne), was to actually get out of Rome first!

Anyway, we did manage it, and I must say that although the road signs in Rome were not very helpful, all the regional roads we have come across so far (I'm writing this on 10 Sept in Callino, as it happens), have been well signposted.

So onto the A1 and a little information on this notorious Italian driving:
In Rome, we saw not only double but triple parking, parking all the way around corners, even scooters double-parked. This is obviously a necessity in a central area with mainly six-to-ten storey buildings and no underground carparking. Driving was equally erratic, with a combination of worn linemarking, large volume of scooter traffic that tends to look for all the gaps, and the remaining volume of either large buses or very small cars (like the Smart 4-2) all thinking they can fit into the same gaps. So the rule was: just go where you need to go. However, the Romans were very obliging to us trying to cross the street and would stop for us at any of the pedestrian crossings. Thank goodness for small mercies.

Having seen fair bit of this driving style over four days, I hopped into our rental car and adopted the same approach. It worked fine, only problem was we really didn't know if we were on the right street (in Rome), and ended up doing a u-turn, then driving up a completely wrong set of streets before finding the ring road, so-called "GRA" (Grande Accorde Annulare). Annulare for us english folks links to the latin annulus, i.e. the large ring road. Lucky it was Sunday and not much traffic.

Then the A1. Driving on the A1 was an experience. Freeway drivers in Perth have become in recent years increasingly casual about following distances and merging spaces. They will typically change lanes to immediately in front of someone they are passing, or approach to immediately behind the leading vehicle as if to give them a friendly 'push'. The same was true with the A1, however in this case the left lane (of two) was populated by vehicles travelling anywhere from 130 to 200km/hr. So their 'push'es were much more dramatic, and consisted of flashing lights and tooting horns. The exciting part of all this was for someone wanting to travel at a more respectable 110-120 km/ge, one had to stick in the right lane until reaching a truck, which is speed limited to 80-100, and then pass on the left while keeping note of the rapidly approaching left lane traffic in behind.

Some other notes: most of the drivers didn't indicate when changing lanes. They would just sort of drift over. I frequently also saw vehicles drifting halfway across lanes and then returning to the one they were one.

In the middle of all this, Liam got car sick so we had to pull over, and later on outside Firenze we were stuck in a traffic jam for 40 minutes. Later on we refuelled at one of the many service areas off the toll road (so you don't have to leave the toll area).

Joanne and her husband's house (I won't mention too many names for security Jo) was magnificent. He had built this enormous two storey house, complete with attic, basement and cellar, by hand. They offered a fantastic lunch, delicious lasagna, a selection of local antipasti, their own sweet juicy tomatoes (pomodore), and their own pressed olive oil to take with us. Our time with them was too short by far, so here's hoping we can remedy that later.

Back on the A1 and by around 9:30pm we finally arrived in Cavallino. I hadn't figured on the extra 40min+ it would take from the Venice turnoff to get around the peninsula. Lucky for us a friendly police man gave us directions for the last leg as we had reached Cavallino and didn't know where to go from there. But all was well, the office was open until 11:00pm and we hopped into our little permanent campervan style rooms.

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