Today is Thursday, I'm sitting in a square in Frascati, which is an ancient town on a hill to the South West of Rome – just outside the Rome ring road. This is my last blog entry because we're now in wind down mode and having a relaxing day wandering round Frascati, looking in motor bike shops and preparing to pack our stuff for the long flight home. We drop the car at the Peugeot barn in the middle of gravel pit near to Rome's Fumicino airport eraly in the morning to leave for Singapore at Midday. We have a day in Singapore at the Transit Hotel, before flying home to New Zealand, where we expect to be home by mid-afternoon on Sunday, having cleared out tent through customs and negotiated the different luggage limits between internation and national air travel. We are OK internationally, not so good nationally so let's see how that goes after 36 hours of travel.
Wednesday, we took the ferry from Olbia to Civitavecchia. Strangely enough, despite all the ferry routes that Moby runs to all the different locations at all the different times, the boat the we ended up on for travelling from Olbia to Civitavecchia is the same boat that we took from Genova to Bastia about 3 weeks ago. As per the last trip, the sailing was dead flat, with absolutely no wind. Even the seat we got was the same seat that we had last time, OK, it was 10 feet away, but that was by choice. The ferry left 10 minutes early, sailed on a sea that was like a mirror and docked 45 minutes late – how does that work? Maybe it was the tides – I don't know.
Getting on the ferry at the ground floor, and having parked two levels higher on the previous trip, I mistakenly believed that I was as low as I could go, until the man directing traffic told me to drive down the ramp. I'm not sure how far below the water line we were parked, but it was a long, hot, claustaphobia inducing climb up the stairs to our seats on the 8th floor.
The drive from Civitavecchia to the hotel was about 100ks and getting back into mainland traffic on a busy arterial road and ring road, was a bit of an eye opener after weeks of cruising round on the slow roads of Corsica and Sardinia. We stopped off 5ks short of the hotel at our favourite shop in Europe – Decathlon to stock up on some sports tops, then headed round to our hotel in Frascati. Frascati is another of these cobble-stoned towns, but the roads are less even, narrower and steeper than just about anywhere else we've driven and the convoluted nature of the town threw the GPS into a bit of a tail spin, but we negotiated our way around that. Having just described how tricky the roads are, a Ferarri 308GTS has just cruised by on them, so they can't be too bad. I guess it's what you're used to.
So that's it. We've had a great time. We're looking forward to getting back home, cheap and cheerful aisan meals on Sunday nights and having a big juicy steak.,
See you all soon.
Ciao.
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