Sunday 28th June
Today we packed up and left Rome, we didn’t stay long enough to see everything, but enough to get our fill of old Roman ruins and the newer Roman architecture etc. We headed north on a smaller road towards Siena. This was a lovely drive through hillsides covered with vines, olives and fields of yellow sunflowers.A lovely drive through the Tuscan landscape (The landscape of romantic films and books), that felt a little like home. Some parts it was like driving in McLaren Vale or Clare, but then you would see the truly Tuscan Villa or Farm building. We stopped on the side of the road when we saw a small market set up outside the walls of a town. The town walls were truly medieval, and surrounded a village of narrow winding walkways and picturesque buildings. We couldn’t resist the opportunity to try some local cheese and wine and therefore stock up with some. The wine came from a village called Da Vinci (where Leonardo originated) and we bought a couple of goat’s cheese and 1 sheep. Truly tasty! Then it was on to Siena, we arrived there to find it was quite busy and after skirting the town about 3 times (I wont go into why) we finally found a park not far from the old gates. We walked into the narrow streets to the Piazza del Campo ,where they hold an annual horse race, and found it being set up for this event due to start on the 2/7. It was quite busy and we walked around to take some pictures when a thunder storm started and the heavens opened up. We sheltered with a lot of other tourists in the Palazzo Pubblico (town hall) until it started to ease then made our way across the slippery sandy mud and the paved courtyard up to the road back to our camper. The piazza is shaped as a large shell and the horse race is held inside this so they have laid a lot of sandy dirt on the cobblestones for the race.We made our way up and out of the Palazzo and without slipping on the wet cobblestones walked our way back to where we had parked.
From Siena we made our way through some lovely countryside and found a camper parking area by a lovely small town called Castella in Chianti. We parked on a hill which overlooked the lovely Tuscan countryside. When it got dark we found there were fireflies flitting around the parking area and these were amazing to see. We spent the next morning exploring the quaint town, looked at the museum in the little castle and climbed to the top to see the view. Then it was time to hit the road again, our next destination: Florence.After winding our way through the lovely countryside filled with field of green, yellow sunflowers and newly ploughed paddocks we found the motorway and decided to skirt the main centre and find a place to park by the railway station of Sesto Florentino. After a quick lunch we caught the express train into the centre of the city. This was great and only took about 10 mins and we found ourselves in the middle of Florence. We spent the rest of the afternoon exploring some of the highlights of the City, wandering the city streets and marvelling at the wonderful old buildings and the amazing statues. It was quite a hot humid day and after a while we were ready to head back to our temporary home and get out of the city to our next stop for the night.
After a night spent in place called Pistoia at the car park of Sports ground we had to do a tyre change on the camper. It had been developing a wobble from the front tyres and as we had no luck finding a tyre service, (we had two people trying to give us directions) we thought we would try the simplest solution first. When we first bought the camper we had it checked out and one of the front wheels had a bulge so Ewout discovered the other one now had one. With a bit of team work we had the spare tyre unhooked from the rear and replace the front one, which luckily fixed the problem.So there was I, on the ground under the camper undoing wing nuts and removing the tyre from its mount.The things you have to do!!! Still it cost us nothing and it’s a pleasing thing to be able to solve our problems ourselves. Then it was on to Pisa. Getting there was no problem, but we found the signage in the town was not very helpful, so after stopping and asking we found somewhere to park and walked into the town centre to marvel at the buildings and take some pictures. (of course)
From Pisa we headed up the coast to Sestri Levante, where we found a campsite for the night.
