Friday

Well I did get to see the game, the less said about that the better but United did scrape through to the final, just.

What was much more interesting than the footie match was that whilst I was walking to the bar I found a laundrette! That meant we spent Friday morning watching a pile of wet things tumbling around, not much different than watching United actually, but an excellent result in that we are smelling sweet again.

After lunch we headed south to Lucca, stumbling across Loch Nessie Bridge, well that’s what it looked like as we approached the medieval bridge of Ponte della Maddalena (Bridge of Mary Magdalene), probably built in the 9^th century and part of the early medieval pilgrimage road between France and Rome.

Italian Job (Saturday)

Lucca is lovely, as hopefully the photos will show, some of the residents are not so. After a morning’s sightseeing it was off to Lidl (where else?), 15 minutes in the shop and we return to Harry to find that somebody has tried to get in the habitation door, the lock was damaged but thankfully secure. We quickly dashed in through the driver’s door and to our relief found everything as we had left it. So the habitation door is out of use until we can get the lock repaired which we will enquire about on Monday.

This isn’t helping the Italy part of our venture, having already experienced the worst roads we’ve driven on and the most reckless and inconsiderate drivers, it is making us take stock of our travelling situation.

Italian Job 2 (Saturday afternoon and Sunday)

We escaped to the country to find an aire we both felt comfortable with and after 100 miles ended up at Volterra. Thank you to the Welsh couple who helped us scrape together the necessary coins to feed the parking meter for the night and they even insisted on giving us an extra 1€ so we could have 12 hours electric hook-up, how novel, so as not to be rude I kindly accepted and we had the unusual luxury of mains electric, so I could blow dry my hair in the morning.

We were lucky to be in the town of the weekend of the annual Saline-Volterra Classic Car Race. They close the roads between the 2 towns and have a time trial. There was one British registered car taking part which was from Norfolk,  but seeing the 4 Fiat 500’s made me think of The Italian Job, even though they weren’t Minis.

Back at the aire I got talking to some other Brits who had recently arrived, not that I pounce on Brits you understand, it was actually they who came to me! Later we were standing by their van chatting away and the subject of our attempted break in came up, the guy said “You were just unlucky, how is it damaged”? So I got hold of his habitation door and said “Well, it looks like you’ve been unlucky too”! His lock had been done the same as ours and they eventually narrowed it down to when it was parked in a Carrefour supermarket car park………..at Lucca.

Seems like the Italian job is to break into motorhomes!

More photos to follow (of Lucca & Voltera) in next day or so.