Blogs from Italy, Europe

We still can’t quite believe that we drove an hour to get to La Pelosa Beach yesterday (and it was a truly stunning beach), but we then had to turn around and come back again because we couldn’t find a square millimetre of unoccupied sand to lay our towels on. Issy reminds me that we walked about ten kilometres along a pristine sand beach about an hour from home last summer, without seeing a single other human being. We make a note to remember to never again take our Aussie beaches for granted. We discuss some other observations we’ve made about life here. We’ve seen lots of Italian parents here with children of other races, who we assume must be adopted. You hardly ever see this back home, and we understand that Aussie adoption laws are ... read more

Issy really liked La Pelosa beach when we went there on Saturday, so we decide to head there again and spend the day lazing on the sand. It was very crowded there on Saturday and hard to park, and we hope that it might be a little less so today on workday Monday when hopefully all good Sardinians will be slaving away back at their desks. The traffic gets very heavy as we get close to the beach, and it now seems even heavier than it was on Saturday. If half of Sardinia was here then, the whole of Italy feels like it’s here today, plus the populations of a couple of other smaller European countries thrown in for good measure. We wonder why Sardinians aren‘t at work like they should be, and what we might ... read more

We’re still trying to work out what our accommodation, the Starry Sky Charming House, really is. Mr Google says it’s a four star hotel, but it clearly isn’t because it doesn’t have any hotel facilities. It does have hotel size rooms, but they’re jammed into an apartment block, and are certainly way too small to be called apartments. The establishment itself refers to itself as a guest house, but it’s not a house, and the only guest houses I’ve ever stayed in have at least had a lounge, a bar, a reception area and a restaurant, and it certainly doesn’t have anything even vaguely resembling any of of those. We decide to settle for “boarding house”; for which we’re paying four star hotel prices. I’ve decided that I need to try to stop thinking about our ... read more

The rock concert that was still vibrating the walls of our room at 1am must have eventually stopped, and we awake to the pleasant surprise that the owners of our accommodation, the Starry Sky Charming House, haven’t broken into our room overnight and thrown all our belongings over the balcony into the street. They clearly haven’t discovered our blog posts from the last two days yet, but we mustn’t get complacent; we’ve still got four more nights here to endure. Today’s destination is La Pelosa beach near Stintino in the north west corner of the island about 30 kms from Alghero. Unlike yesterday‘s mountainous coastal drive, today’s route takes us through fertile looking agricultural land with more than the odd vineyard. We were warned that La Pelosa can get very crowded, and it feels like most ... read more

Today we decide to visit the small town of Bosa which is about 30 kms south of Alghero. The views from the road along the rocky mountainous coastline are spectacular. There’s very little in way of habitation along the route; no villages, just steep shrub covered mountains, with few if any trees. I read up a bit about the history of Sardinia. It’s the second largest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily, and like most places in this region, everyone whose anyone from around the Mediterranean seems to have had a go at attacking and occupying it over the journey. The Sardinians seem to have been good at banding together to try to repel external invaders, but they then seem to have spent most of the intervening periods fighting each other. This doesn’t seem to make ... read more