Out-foxing autumn

This is the seventh autumn in succession that at some point in September we have loaded the moho and headed south. Travelling as we do at no more than 150 miles a day, with extra 'rest days' inserted into the schedule, we make steady rather than rapid progress. For example, in 2015 it took us around 15 days to get from the UK to the Peloponnese; the odd effect of this was to make time stand still, it was early autumn when we left home, still quite mild, the leaves tinged with yellow rather than a riot of colour, a week later, in the upper Tiber valley it was the same. Five days on the weather was identical though by now we were overlooking the Ionian Sea from a flower decked pitch watching the Mediterranean sparkle  as evening fell, wispy clouds gathering on the hills of Kefalonia across the water.  The news from  back home was of October gales stripping  leaves from the trees and the first frosty morning in the Pennines. We felt smug, it was as if we had out-foxed autumn.

This year has not been the same even though we left a fortnight earlier. Right up until we arrived in Italy we watched th BBC weather app plant a row of plump suns across our intended destinations. As we sped across Switzerland that changed to occasional sunny spells with thundery showers. And that is how the past two weeks have been, nights especially punctuated with brief, but violent thunderstorms. It has not stopped us ticking off the essentials - 

All the while we kept one eye on the sky and the other on Accu Weather's rain radar which tracked the westward progress of the pocket-sized storms that appeared to bubble up in the mountains of Corsica then sprint towards the Italian mainland as if running a meteorological relay race.

 The site we are on at Laguna is basic, but adaquate and we almost have the place to ourselves, it does not look that way, it's just all the 7m vans have clustered together onto the few pitches long enough to accommodate them, then there is a few smaller campers scattered about elsewhere.

We supposed the other site next door must be busier because the beach cafés were doing a lively trade, mainly with German families and couples, indeed we heard more German spoken than Italian.

As Gill looked along the shore she decided that we have been here before, recalling that we parked in the field behind the beach when we visited Elba in 2004. It was only later when I passed the actual car park on the way to a beach restaurant that I had any recollection of this. 

As well as being an attractive small beach resort Lacona seemed to have some interesting walks along the big headland that divides the settlement. We walked up the metalled track to the point where the footpath headed off through pinewoods. It was very steep and the surface too eroded and loose for Gill to continue, her dodgy knee, and worsening eyesight has exacerbated the vertigo she has always has suffered from Going up is fine, getting back down really problematic. 

Later in the afternoon I decided to do the walk on my own. It was steep and hard going at times but definitely worth it. You got a bird's-eye view if the whole Tuscan Archipelago, four islands:

Elba itself

Pianosa

Montecristo

The mountains of Corsica hidden in cloud. 

The footpath rejoined an unmetalled road which takes you back to Lacona. It's not too steep and well surfaced so maybe Gill might manage this part more easily, I wondered. You get some great views across the bay towards Monte Capanne, Elba's highest peak.

It was much clearer this evening The weather seems to be on the up, no thunder forecast, sunshine and 23° over the next few days. We might yet out-fox autumn.

Nomad spirit

Yesterday, Janice Soderling, a long time Facebook buddy, commented on the photos that I'd posted of Rosselba Lepalme:

"I so admire your nomad spirit, traveling to learn."

I was quite touched, because it does encapsulate why we choose to wander for months on end. It's not a holiday or an escape, but something more absorbing than that, an opportunity to scratch our curiosity itch, which, as Phillip Pullman asserted should be regarded as the key virtue missed off Aristotle's original dozen. I have learned as much from travel as I ever have from books or the media simply because you may speak figuretively of becoming lost in a book, but when visiting a place it actually happens as you stray beyond known territory into a 'faraway nearby' as Rebecca Solnit so succinctly put it.

Though we like to explore the Mediterranean, that is simply a personal preference, we could learn as much simply wandering off the beaten track nearer to home, it's just we like sunny climes and the food culture of the Mediterranean.  The beauty of travel is that it constantly challenges your preconceptions, you assert something in one place only to have it contradicted in the next, and perhaps confronting our misapprehensions is the only way we learn.

A good example of this was our original mantra that the Heels for Dust 'mission' was to discover places we had not visited before. This proved to be mission impossible, as we criss-crossed Europe on the way to somewhere new it was inevitable that we passed through places visited previously. This has its charms too, sometimes your previous impressions are re-enforced, sometimes contradicted, especially if some years have passed; places change, and we change too. It was like that when returned to Antibes, somewhere we visited frequently with the kids back in the mid-nineties, we found it more corporate and bland than we recalled, it had lost that sense of Riviera panache that we associated with it, we felt slightly crestfallen.

Conversely, sometimes a return visit can be delightful, like meeting an old friend after a long time and simply picking up where you left off, though years have passed.

Where we are right now, camped in Rosselba Lepalme, is a case in point. We were here sixteen summers ago, staying in 'en-famille' in a Eurocamp erected tent.  I remembered the place as a bit idyllic; it has not changed. One of our topics of idle conversation as we travel concerns the best places we have stayed, we tend to focus upon our travels by motorhome since 2013, but what hereabouts demonstrates is that we also discovered some truly lovely spots on family holidays before then, and Rosselba le Palme has to be a contender as one of the loveliest.

Its situation is spectacular, occupying a steep wooded valley overlooking Portoferraio across the bay. A few metres down the road from our pitch and this is the view that greets you on your way to your morning ablutions.

Looking inland a chain of low mountains run along the back of the site, including this conical peak with a ruined castle on top. When we were here last Matthew and I climbed up to it in 35° temperatures, it was a brutal scramble, and probably a tad foolhardy. I miss having the kids with us to inspire us to be more free-spirited.

The site faces westwards, if you climb to the highest levels in the evening the sunset across the bay is spectacular, even if it's a tad stormy like yesterday, the light effects are beautiful.

From all this you might conclude that what makes Rosselba Lepalme special is its wildness, that it is nested within a beautiful natural setting, and it is. What makes it truly unique is that the site is centered around the grounds of a substantial villa, dating from the early twentieth century by the look of it, though now it's divided into holiday apartments. 

Whoever built the villa made it their life's work to turn the grounds into a big botanical garden. Sheltered in a south facing valley, it hosts palms, succulents and tropical flowering shrubs from across the globe. The campsite has left the garden alone and made a decent effort to maintain it. As it's the shoulder season we had it to ourselves.

The swimming pool occupies a terrace above the garden and the site's spa and wellness centre is by the entrance, giving both a slightly tropical ambiance. I suppose it's these luxury touches that enables the campsite to call itself a 'resort'. To English sensibilities this does conjour images of Butlin's I think; given Elba's popularity with the Germans and Swiss I suspect spa and health retreat was more the the image they were after.

You don't really sense that right now in these cooler autumn days as the site winds down towards closing next week, but when when we here last in July 2006, the alluring mix of health spa style with an infectious Italian social buzz is what I recall, it exuded a kind of quiet exuberance that tempted even this normally sceptical Englishman to become hyperbolic. I wrote this a few weeks after we returned home.

So if Janet was right and we travel to learn, then the lesson of our return visit to Rosselba le Palme, is not simply that nature is a solace during difficult times, but our darkest days will pass and we will gather and celebrate life freely once again. Until then all we can do is travel in hope.

Queueing happily

Perhaps it's proof that context is everything when I can assert that the sight of the traffic queue filling the windscreen made me positively joyful.

The giveaway was just off screen to the left. My former colleague, Chat, worked out our whereabouts straightaway when I posted the next picture.

So far as I am aware the only ferry company in the world to decorate its ships with giant cartoon characters is Moby Lines. They specialise in connecting the Italian mainland with its neighbouring islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, or to be accurate the larger ones, Corsica, Sardinia and Elba. We were heading for the latter, but not on the cartoon festooned vessel. The more mundanely liveried Blu-Navy ship was £20 cheaper, so we opted for that one. 

All the sailings seemed to be busy, making us doubt the word of the campsite we had phoned who had reassured us 'there were lots of spaces'. We were sure of two things, our neighbours were going to be German, and we were likely to remain the only Brits abroad.

I have a thing about Mediterranean ferries. sailing on them takes you beyond TripAdvisor's hotspots, the sea's glamorous, super yacht crowded harbours and into a grittier more workaday Mediterranean. This is certainly the case so far as Piombino is concerned, the small industrial port in southern Tuscany where we caught the boat to Elba.

From the sea it looks like Port Talbot-on- Med, which is unsurprising given that Elba's wealth derived not from looking beauteous, but from its extensive iron ore deposits which were worked from Etruscan times right up until the 1980s. I imagine Piombino's heavy industry developed because of its proximity to the mines, though these days its somewhat delapidated looking plants look like chemical works.

The view towards Elba was much more prepossessing. 

The name of the island's capital, Portoferraio, may mean 'Ironport' but unlike it's neighbour on the mainland you can forget industrial decay. Blessed with a big natural harbour, Portoferraio is a classic small Mediterranean port, its ochre toned houses tumbling down a hillside topped by an impressive fortress. Backed by a forested hinterland and grey mountains beyond, it is a classic Mediterranean prospect. So beautiful. 

We were heading for Rosselba le Palme, a resort style campsite about 7km from the island's main town. Resorts are not really our style, but when we had a family holiday here in 2004 we liked the botanical gardens at its centre, its spectacular wooded setting with views across the bay towards Portoferraio, we remembered it as a beautiful place with a modicum of style. Sometimes when you return to places after some years you are destined to be disappointed, but not so here, it turned out to be as lovely as we remembered it. So what do you do these days to celebrate such moments? You tell Facebook.

I do like Nondays

Nondays are the blank Scrabble pieces of time, easily slipped in to create space in an overcrowded calender or simplify an overloaded schedule. You would think  experienced retirees like us would have little use of them, our lives would be one long Nonday, that we would struggle to fill all our spare time. The only period this has been the case over the past seven years was from March to May this year during lockdown, the longest Nonday of the lot.

Otherwise, I simply transferred the tendency I used to have at work to become 'over-driven' into the activities that have filled our post-employment life. The last three months have been a case in point. The ancillary work around the major house re-build - clearing rooms, tip visits, re-decorating, garden landscaping - kept us so busy over the summer that I lost a stone in weight without trying. The time period between the  fitters putting the finishing touches to the new kitchen and the arrival of our kids for an inaugural feast was about four hours. We had barely stashed everything away before Gill was pulling it back out again to cook up something delicious. We had a great few days together. Then It was less than week between the time the family left and when we headed to Europe, the days were slightly manic, a mix of pre-trip shopping, last minute flagstone laying and van cleaning and sorting. Then I drove 1200 miles in six days, made all the more difficult due to busy autobahns and booked up campsites. Phew!

Time for a Nonday. It was à relaxed drive this morning, well by Italian standards, down the length of the Tuscan coast. Past Pisa and Livorno, arriving in a quiet sosta within easy striking distance of Piombino where we will catch the ferry to Elba tomorrow lunchtime. We've done a bit of shopping, refueled the van, but I still managed an hour's snooze this afternoon.

A proper Nonday needs to be spent in Nowheresville. We've sort of managed that too. I can't see Venturina Terme popping up anytime soon on a must see Tuscan bucket list. Although the town has a clutch of Roman and Etruscan archaeological sites it's mainly a workaday place with the look of a new town, rows of terraced social housing interspersed with mid rise apartment blocks.

It's not unpleasant, trees line the streets and every so often you get a glimpse of the olive clad low hills that surround the town.

The reason we are here is that it's got a great free sosta run by the local motorhome owners club. It's huge, but most of the places are taken by the members as somewhere to park their vans. 

There's a few venerable ones, you could trace the development of the Italian motorhome industry over the last quarter century just by wandering around the bays. 

As well as a well designed service point there's a small wooden clubhouse and seating area where local motorhomers come for a chat. 

Despite its popularity with locals there's plenty of space for visitors too, and it's a lovely gesture that the facilities are offered to them for free. Where better to while away a much needed Nonday, a bit of RnR before we immerse ourselves in the delights of the Tuscan Archipelago, in my case literally, I hope.

In pursuit of the simply delicious

Contemporary Italian culture has to be one of the most exclusive and sophisticated on the planet. Wander around a high end mall in the Far East, in Singapore, Shanghai or Tokyo, and in terms of European brands it's Italian ones that predominate - Bvlgari, Armarni, Gucci, et al. When footballers hit the big time it's a Ferrari they aspire to. Just today the Prime Minister's PR team  strenuously denied that he'd sneaked off earlier in the month to a party thrown by the Russian billionaire Evgeny Lebedev at his palatial Umbrian hideaway. Since the days of 'la dolce vita' Italy has been a honeypot for the rich and powerful. However, beyond the glitzy veneer lies a more workaday, proletarian Italy, not upmarket, but with riches aplenty nonetheless; think pizza Margherita, Vespa, Lavazza, Prosecco. You still can live well here for relatively little, even in a tourist hotspot like the Cinque Terre. We set off this morning to prove this point; I think we nailed it.

It does help that even in disregarded places Italy can be disarmingly lovely. The gravel car park outside the remote campsite we are staying on is not exactly 'scenic', but then sunlight caught the umbrella pines across the valley just as slightly menacing thunderclouds bubbled up.

The mundane became extraordinary. I regarded this as a good omen. 

The site runs an hourly minibus service to the station at Deiva Marina. From there it's about twenty minutes to Vernazza, the largest of the five famous villages along this spectacular coast. We had no big plans, simply catch a train late morning after a relaxed start, wander about a bit, then track down a couple of places we had found on-line that promised delicious but inexpensive food - that's what we like!

We wondered what the Cinque Terre might feel like given the circumstances. When we came here in 2015 Vernazza was packed, heaving with Americans, venerable cruise ship parties, snazzily attired French hikers and bewildered Chinese visitors, many sporting masks. Today it was still busy, the tourists were a less eclectic bunch, mainly Italian young couples and older people from Germany and Holland. The big difference was there were no Americans or Chinese, but almost everyone was wearing a mask.

This is a good thing. I think Italians are being very particular, not just about donning masks in public areas, but with social distancing and hygiene. More fastidious than in Germany or Switzerland in our experience.

We found the famous gelateria that had featured in a Gino d'Campo programme - it looked  great, but really we needed a spot of lunch first so we carried on to Batti Batti Focacceria. Italian reviews on-line included a claim that the place served 'the best focaccia in Italy', could this be true?

We chose a vegetarian option and the much praised focaccia with mozzarella and pesto. The minor deity of the beauteous pie gift wrapped them carefully, then charged us a mere €5.00. We headed 50m down the road and plonked ourselves on the harbour wall to consume our takeaway feast.

Basically the place is pie heaven. Everything looked mouthwatering,

The vegetarian focaccia was lovely, it tasted wholesome and healthful. What can I say about the mozzarella and pesto one? How can anything so simple - bread, cheese, crushed basil - taste so delicious? It was sensational, an unforgettable experience. In the last post I wondered if the delicious should be accorded the same significance as the beautiful or sublime. If this was the case then we had just consumed a sublime pie.

We sat on the wall marvelling at how simple things could be so made memorable. It's a pretty spot. I took a liking to a rusty old ring on the quayside.

 

The fishing boats in the harbour....

The big parasols in the square..

It's a great place to linger, watch the world go by, people watch, while you digest something truly scrumptious. Now, gelato moment!.

When the place was showcased in a Gino d' Campo episode about Ligurian cuisine the owner asserted that he was inspired by the flavours of whatever was in season. Today figs seemed to be the headline act. 

I went for the ricotta and fig flavour, Gill, less adventurous for once, opted for limone and straccietela.

They were delicious, again we found a nearby bench and watched the world go by as we consumed them.

Now we needed a coffee, so we wandered back up the hill towards the station and beyond it. It was quieter here, more space between the cafe tables, it felt safer than the busier streets by the harbour. We ordered two macchiata to complete our walkabout lunch. Why does an Italian coffee never taste as good outside of the country, even when served in an Italian restaurant elsewhere, made by a native Neopolitan? It's never the same. It's got to be the mind playing tricks, that ultimately things only taste authentically Italian because you are here. 

Time to head back. Both times we have been to the Cinque Terre it's proved trickier to leave  than arrive. It's a complicated timetable of intercity express trains, regional services, and the local tourist shuttle used mainly by hikers that. My suspicion is that as the day goes on the timetable falls apart, and by mid afternoon it's chaos. Still, we got back to Deiva Marina eventually and the campsite minibus arrived to collect us 

There's a small supermarket next to the site. We managed to buy some  mushrooms, pancetta and a bottle of local frizzante white to accompany the truffi pasta and pesto we bought earlier. Back at the van Gill conjured her tribute to Ligurian ingredients.

We ate outside. One by one the stars popped out, cicadas chirped quietly, the threatened thunderstorms never materialised. We chatted about this and that, the night was warm and the air soft. Even in these strange times life can be good we agreed. Tomorrow we are heading further south, through Tuscany. On Wednesday we're booked onto a ferry to Elba. At some point in the next day or two I need to have a swim. In my view you cannot say you have arrived in the Mediterranean unless you've jumped in.

A peace offering from Herr Bean

It would seem German-Swiss Mr. Bean must have realised he'd been a prat. Yesterday evening he turned up with  carton of grapes for Gill. It was a kind gesture. 

We managed a bit of a chat, muddling through as best we could with our non-existent  German and his no English whatsoever. He's off to Sardinia apparently. We explained we were going to Elba. Now I feel a bit mean about taking the piss out of him in the previous post. However, I was very annoyed that his crass behaviour had almost decapitated my nearest and dearest. Anyway, apologies accepted, time to move on. 

Now it's the weekend the site has filled up somewhat. A more eclectic mix, not just grey hairs like us, but cute couples in small VW campers, some with pooches others with toddlers. It's nice to see.

Most are Swiss, I suspect hopping over the Alps into the milder Italian speaking Cantons is a bit of a regular getaway for the northern Swiss. I can see the attraction of the lakeside setting here, but with a soundtrack reminiscent of the M25 on the Friday before Whit Monday, it's not really conducive to creating the romantic ambiance that you might associate with such winsome lacustrine surroundings.

Today we're heading for Italy, a site near Deiva Marina on the Ligurian coast a little to the north of the Cinque Terre. We've stayed here before, emails have been exchanged with both Claudia and Virginia, they are expecting us around 4pm and looking forward to meeting us. After a week of clipped Germanic exchanges a bit of Italian blarney comes as a relief. In fact I'll be glad to exit Switzerland altogether. It's expensive, we've paid over £70 for our two night stay, that's more than double the usual ACSI low season rate. 

Last night the place excelled itself and definitely topped the the poll as Europe's most noise polluted campsite. Some monster machine worked on the railway track next to us into the small hours, I suppose the line is so busy essential repairs have to be carried out overnight. The thing sounded like a gigantic high pressure washer, goodness knows what it was for, perhaps Swiss railways feel spotless sleepers and gleaming signal gantries as well as punctuality are critical to maintain their reputation for meticulous efficiency.

Now the only thing that lies between us and the relief of Italy's more random, haphazard culture is the ritual hazing of the Milan 'tangenziale', it's a kind of immersion therapy designed to introduce  rooky northerners to the importance of expecting the unexpected. Germanic order, Italian spontaneity, of course both are imperfect generalisations, inaccurate as all stereotypes are, until you try driving on the motorway around Milan at rush hour, when you find out the latter is all true.

Thankfully it was Sunday lunchtime when we reached Milan, the autostrada was relatively benign. Then south towards Genoa across the plains of Lombardy, a heat haze making the road ahead shimmer. Alessandra, Pavia, over the Po, all sandbanks and gravel at this time of year. Suddenly through the mist the steep green hills of Liguria loomed ahead. The motorway twists and turns through narrow valleys, an old road in need of improvement. In fact autostradas across Liguria are like this, we passed a sign that read 'lavori a 102km. The rest of the journey was characterized by constant contraflows and bewildering speed restrictions all of which were treated as opportunities to display advanced chicanery by the locals.

Somewhere south of Genoa we caught sight of the sea. "Yay! The Med!" we exclaimed in unison. Even though it was shimmering grey rather than sparkling blue, it's always a moment to celebrate -that first glimpse.

The road from the autostrada down to Deiva Marina is winding and vertiginous. Accessing it proved unexpectedly tricky. When Gill tried to slide our ticket into the machine at the exit barrier it simply spat it out. At the third attempt we were hailed by a voice from on high at a volume you would usually associate with a Papal blessing booming across St Peter's Square. 'What is your problem?' she demanded, proving at one fell swoop that God is actually a woman and she is omniscient, speaking English to us just because she knew - it was  truly a miracle worthy of Pentecost. Of course it might have been the result of number plate recognition, but do we really want to live in a mundane world entirely devoid of the miraculous?

Ms. God soon sorted our ticket glitch. A few minutes later we arrived at the campsite. I had it wrong, it wasn't the one we had stayed in before, that was across the road. No matter, they are both ACSI and the same price. The place is packed, we took the last pitch, agreeing we'd been wise to book ahead. It's full of German and Dutch vans mainly  I sensed that we were graced with a somewhat stony welcome; everyone stared, no-one smiled. I don't expect hail- fellow-well-met friendliness, but being affable costs nothing.

We settled in and did a bit of planning - establishing that the world famous gelateria that featured in a Gino d' Campo piece about the Cinque Terre is located in the neaby town of Vernazza, the place also seems to have a well regarded takeaway  specialising focaccia with pesto. That's tomorrow's lunch sorted. 

The campsite runs an hourly minibus to the local station. You have to book a place on the first three, popular no doubt with people wishing to tick-off all five of the famous villages in one day, or aiming to stride healthily from one to another along the famous hiking trail that connects them. We'll wait for the first ad-hoc minibus at 11.20am. It means we can have a relaxed morning, limiting our aim for the day to eating something inexpensive, but delicious with a stunning view of the sea. In truth, the older I get the more I appreciate the delicious rather than the sublime or the beautiful. Perhaps it's Gill's influence, but these days when I'm in Italy l'd rather spend time lingering over a well cooked pasta Norma than seeking out some Piero della Francesco masterpiece. I've changed, but surely that is a good thing, life is too short to stay the same or have your outlook defined by the out-moded attitudes of some half remembered former self.