Greve in Chianti

September 13, 2017Italyairbnb, birthday celebration, food, friends, greve in chianti, wineJudy

We drove the 150-ish kms from Marina di Massa to Greve in Chianti yesterday and reached our Airbnb on the outskirts of Greve just before 2pm. We stopped in at a couple of supermarkets in Massa and got fuel for the second time since leaving Barcelona.

We’ve driven 1300 kms so far and I think we’ve spent more on road tolls than fuel! For the first part of yesterday’s drive, we thought we’d avoid the toll roads, just to see what it was like … we quickly realised that it was very slow going, through towns and villages with lots of traffic and low speed limits. Our GPS estimated it would take us at least an extra hour, so we headed back to the autostrada.

Our Airbnb place is lovely. It’s a self-contained apartment on the ground floor of a 16th century stone farm building on a vineyard. Our host lives in a separate house on the property and his parents live above where we’re staying. Some of the walls are at least 60cm thick! There’s a very old wood oven in a corner of the living room, and enormous timber beams supporting the ceiling. The apartment is very modern, with a good kitchen and bathroom and a comfortable bed!There’s even a friendly little kitten, Pepe, who sneaks in to visit us whenever he can. He likes to sleep on the bed and lie on the huge serving platter which sits on the coffee table. I’ll make sure I give it a good wash before we leave. You can see photos of our accommodation here

We’re only about 500m as the crow flies from where our ADL friends are staying at Fattoria Viticcio, a farmhouse which has been converted into upmarket accommodation. However our host’s mother told me that we couldn’t walk there, we have to drive. There used to be a track through, but it’s now overgrown and not safe to walk on. So after we unloaded the car, we went to visit Liz, Sean and the crew. Got lost and ended up way too far up the hill, but eventually found the right place and it’s lovely too. Probably a similar age to the place we’re staying at, but a much more substantial organisation with many rooms on several levels, and it’s still a working winery as well.

Last night was the Birthday Dinner, which was held at Enoteca Fuoripiazza Ristorante in Greve. 20 of us sat at a long table outside and ate our way through many plates of delicious antipasti, then mains, then dessert. The restaurant’s specialty is bisecca alla fiorentina t-bone steak which is sold by the kilogram. 41 euros/kg. About half the guests chose that – Sean’s 2 brothers shared around 1.5kg and ate it all, Liz and 4 friends shared 1kg and several of the young male guests at the other end of the table may well have consumed 1kg each! It was served very rare. Greg and I had wild boar stew with spinach and it was delicious. It was a lovely evening, Sean made a beautiful speech and I felt honoured to be able to help Liz celebrate her special birthday in such a special way.

Today we’re doing absolutely nothing. It’s the first day in a week that we haven’t been on the road, taking down and setting up camp, and apart from joining our friends for dinner tonight, we have nothing planned. Liz’s sister Triscia is in her element, cooking delicious meals for lots of people. Like me, Triscia enjoys feeding people. She is planning to cook pasta with truffles tonight.

the outside of the Airbnb apartment in Greve

Some very big and very raw pieces of steak

4 countries in 4 days!

September 11, 2017France, Italy, Spaincamping, france, italy, monaco, road trip, spainJudy

I think it’s some kind of personal record that I haven’t accessed the internet since we arrived in Barcelona last Wednesday, and it’s now Monday. I can’t think of the last time I went so long without at least checking my emails. Sometime last century, maybe? More than 10 years ago, anyway. The world hasn’t ended, and my online business is still up and running, and most things seem to be pretty much as they were 5 days ago.

So, we got into Barcelona late on Wednesday night, picked up our rental car and drove 30kms east to grab a night’s sleep at a hotel. Since then, we’ve been camping but it’s the end of the season and there haven’t been many campers around.

This list of places is just so we remember where we’ve been – Camping Vell Emporada, Garriguella, Costa Brava; Camping de la Chapelette, Saint-Martin de Crau, Provence; Camping de Rossignol, Antibes, Cote d’Azur; Parco Vacanze Ali Baba, Ceriale, Liguria; Parco Vacanze Camping Casone, Marina di Massa, Tuscany.

We’ve mostly driven along the coast, from Barcelona to Massa. We’ll head inland tomorrow to go towards Florence, and aim to reach Greve early tomorrow afternoon. We spent a few hours in Monaco yesterday, just to see what was there. Greg had picked out a parking station near the Casino after reading various comments on Trip Advisor about how inexpensive it was compared with paying for parking in Australia. We got a bit lost and ended up at the far west of Monaco, at a metered car park near what appears to be the only public beach in the principality. We put 1 euro in the meter and got back a ticket that said we had paid until Monday morning! Seemed too good to be true, and after copping a huge parking fine for mis-reading a parking meter in Norway, we were a bit suspicious, but it all seemed legit, so we walked to the main marina and the Casino and a few other places along the way.

It’s good to be back in our tent. I counted up and worked out that by the end of this trip, we’ll have spent nearly 6 months in it, since we got it in mid-2014. We forgot the front part of it, which gives us extra shelter and protects the main front ‘door’ of the tent from getting wet when it rains, but we found a decent-sized white tarp at Leroy Merlin, a hardware chain, and Greg has rigged it up a couple of times when it looks like it might rain. The night we spent at Antibes, it rained a lot but we stayed dry. However, I was talking to someone at the campground we stayed at last night and she told me that there had been bad flooding at the Tuscan port of Livorno, and Pisa, and 6 people died. You can read more here.

Walking up the hill to the Basilica in Marseilles

The poorly parked car that stopped a bus getting around the corner in the narrow streets downhill from the Basilica in Marseilles. There were another 30 vehicles and buses stuck behind this one.

Looking uphill to the apartments in Monaco

One of the many many super-yachts moored in Monaco harbor

and the cruise ships were there as well, one in port, and one ferrying passengers via launch from outside the harbor

Our first camp in Italy amongst the olive trees

A Rough Guide

September 6, 2017Spainairbnb, camping, road trip, sightseeing, travelJudy

If there’s some kind of a travel planning spectrum, we tend to be at the ‘vague idea’ end, rather than at the itinerary-with-every-spare-minute-accounted-for end.

This trip started out with a chat with a friend at lunch one day late last year. At an Old and Ex-Midwives’ Christmas Catch-Up lunch, Liz mentioned that she didn’t want a 60th birthday party to mark reaching that milestone in January. Instead, she wanted to go to Italy during the Northern Hemisphere summer, and if anyone wanted to help celebrate, she would be at Greve-in-Chianti in the second week of September. Great, we’ll be there.

So our trip is arranged around a few days in Greve-in-Chianti next week. Eek, next week! We’ve been looking forward to this since late last year!

We’re flying in and out of Barcelona with Qatar Airlines, hiring a car at the airport, then plan on driving through southern France and heading straight to Greve-in Chianti which is about 15kms from Florence. Liz and her husband Sean are spending next week in Greve, and various family members and friends will be there for varying amounts of time. We have booked an Airbnb apartment for 4 days, it’s a street away from the former-farmhouse-now-upmarket-hotel where Liz, Sean and many other attendees are staying.

After the birthday festivities, we’ll spend a few days in Cinque Terre, either camping or staying in an Airbnb apartment and do a couple of days’ walking. Then back to Spain, and we’ll probably spend some time in France on the way. When we walked the Camino Frances in 2010 and the Camino Portugues in 2012, we spent a lot of time in northern Spain, plus a few days in Barcelona and Madrid, but we haven’t seen any of the country south of Barclona, so that’s where we’re going to explore. We’ll spend a few days in Barcelona at the end of the trip and head home in mid-October.