OK, we seem to have whizzed across Turkey and Greece rather faster than we had originally planned. We’d looked at finding a nice Neilson beach resort to chill out in for a week, but the dates were hard to coordinate and in the end, at Patras, we simply bought a Bari ticket and carried on.
So here we are in Italy with only a very vague arm-waving view that Santander is still somewhere to the north-west of where we are. And to be honest, we’d really like to go somewhere where there are lots of nice hotels in lots of towns, so that we have some flexibility over our day-to-day route planning.
But (cue DOOM music), that is not to be right now. Because we are a bit stuck between a Long Boring Coast and some Really Epic-ly Complicated Hills. We fancy the Famously Pretty Bit, but apparently need to get there before it gets full of those wretched Brits. We also can see a great way to island-hop our way out using Sardinia and Corsica. But all of those require us to find a way across the Beeg Eels which does not require 2,000m of climb in order to stay at a farmhouse B&B which may be booked up by the time we find we are actually strong enough to get there. All other options push us back along the Boring Coast, sorry the Costa Esmeralda.
Tomorrow’s plan is to have a word with those nice people who run trans-Appenine railway services before plugging along the L.B.C.
