However, both at work and in everyday life plans never work perfectly because things are unpredictable - ultimately chaos theory rules. If you are touring by motorhome there are many things that can upend your plans, esoteric local festivals, unexpectedly busy sites due to some distant country's school holidays, road closures, mechanical breakdowns, accidents... Really, if you dislike uncertainty it would be better to stay at home.
In practice the most chaotic thing we have to deal with is the weather. Though we both are inveterate travellers, neither of us are outdoorsy. If rainy days are forecast we don't carry on regardless, we try to follow the sun.
After visiting San'Antioco and Isola San Pietro our plan had been to head east towards Cagliari, staying at a big site near Pula. Maybe we would have taken the bus into the city, certainly we would have visited the archeological site at Nora which has well preserved remains of an important sea port used by the Phoenicians, Catheginians and Romans. Nearby are two Bronze age monuments of Sardinia's unique Nuraghic culture.
We have ten days remaining before we catch the night ferry from Olbia to Livorno. Many campsites in Sardinia are closed by mid-September and only a handful remain open by mid-October. Most of these are on the east coast, which makes sense as it faces the mainland where the ferry ports are - Golfo Aranchini, Olbia and Arbatax. So our plan was to head up the east, using a campsite near Muravera. Sadly, the medium range forecast was mixed to say the least, showery interspersed with thunder storms.
The weather in Northwest Sardinia was much sunnier, but that would mean heading back to Olbia using the same motorways we took to get here and giving up on visiting the archeological sites. Most people would have a brief chat about this and make a decision. I am annoyingly pedantic, I drive myself nuts, Gill must have saintly qualities to have put up with it for half a century. I consulted a range of meteorological sites, Google Maps, the Michelin Italian road atlas, Search For Sites. Park for Night, Acsi Eurocampings searchable database, Wikipedia's entry on Nuraghic culture, then pinpointed the location of every Lidl in Sardinia, and summarised the results in a gnomic chart.
The conclusion was no different what I knew all along, we don't like camping in the rain. So if course we are going to head back north again retracing where we have just come from even though sostas with services are hard to find and it means returning to the campsite in Alghero (the only one still open on the West coast) - a place I was quite rude about previously.
Right now it's still beautifully sunny. The sosta where we are parked is idiosyncratic. It's quite remote, located in the extensive car park of the 'Jamaican Beach' cocktail bar. It appears to be some kind of tribal gathering place for the Bundersrepublik's kite surfing fraternity. It is a fraternity, there were a couple of female kite surfers, but predominantly it seems to be a man thing. Within this there are two species, honed athletic types in crisp white shorts and 'bros' with man buns and crumpled khakis. Lots of man love and bonding going on, high-fiving, fist bumping, and 'bro-hugs. I do love niche sub-cultures.
Some of the reviews mentioned that the place was unwelcoming. I don't think that's quite the case, its simple self absorbed, if you don't have a kite board then you simply don't exist. The guy at the service point was amazed that that I could not understand him - not a kite surfer, not German - does not compute....
What reviewers were right about is that sitting on the beach watching the kite surfers was very entertaining, a huge amount of faffing about with complicated kit to get a few minutes of adrenaline fuelled pleasure, I guess you have to be an adrenaline junkie to understand the appeal.
In the winter we share beach parkings with Portugal's surfing community. They are a different breed. There is something almost spiritual in the relationship between the surfer and the sea, the sheer audacity of the thing, a frail human skimming the concave face of a glorious roller. Snatching a gust is not the same as catching a wave. Watching the kite surfing aficionados it seems anyone who is reasonably fit and lacks a sense of personal safety could become proficient at it, they came in many shapes and sizes. It's not the same with big wave surfers, they all look lithe, slim but powerful, beautifully honed bodies like a dancer's.
Though the Search for Sites app claimed the sosta had a service point it isn't fully functional. There is a black water dump, but the white water refill is adjacent to it which is a somewhat insanitary arrangement. Even more tricky is there is nowhere to drain grey water, luckily our tank was only half full, but in hot weather it does start to smell a bit fruity if it's not emptied regularly.
While we watched the kite surfers we hatched a plan. Head back to the campsite at Alghero for a few days via an overnight stop at a sosta with a service point in Santa Giusta on the outskirts of Oristano. Then the next day carry on to Alghero via a lunch stop at a Nuraghic site just off the motorway which looked to have a big enough car park to accommodate a moho. A good plan, that's what I like, what could possibly go wrong?
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