Day 21 - Germany to Italy

We decided a few days ago that we would not have time to explore Austria and do it justice, so we made the decision to drive straight through to Italy. To make things more interesting we also had to avoid all the motorways… being over 3.5t means we would have needed to hire a Go box for the tolls, which is a lot of hassle (€80 deposit, plus paying per km, then finding somewhere to return the box). Therefore we’ve had a day of significantly wiggledy woggledy roads to navigate.
We started off quite early, leaving Camping Brunnen just after 9:30am (via a quick stop at the Rewe to top up our Schwip Schwap supply). Navigational wise, everything went perfectly - no wrong turns or sat nav malfunctions. We did have a slight timing issue, we thought check in was from midday - which was correct, but it closes between 1:30 and 3:30 for quiet time. Turns out we would arrive with an hour to kill…. so we stopped after 2 hours on the road for our sandwiches and a quick leg stretch, then carried on another hour to a big supermarket to pick up the things we’d forgotten to get. Marla fell pretty much straight to sleep as soon as we stopped and she was allowed up on the sofa. Poor dog still can’t relax and sleep while we are driving - although it was have been tough going today for her as we had a lot of acceleration noise, winding roads and noisy tunnels. Not to mention a fair amount of expletives from me every time I came up behind a cyclist on the mountain roads. They were all cycling really well, I’d have been absolutely terrified on those hills, it’s just a bit more difficult to overtake in Big Dave and we had a lot of impatient cars behind us.
We made it to camp (Al Plan) just before 4pm and have been able to choose our own pitch, which we are glad about as the one they’d earmarked for us had a dog just like Marla tied up outside (as in it barked angrily if it thought you were going anywhere near it!).
We took Marla for a super quick walk before our dinner, there’s some woods just over the road that I think we are going to have a lot of fun exploring! The camp toilets are a bit odd - there are showers over some of the hand basins - both Charlie and I took photos to show the other 😂 but everything is very clean, although I don’t think we’ll be doing any laundry here at €7 a go just for the washing machine.
The views around here are very impressive, so we’ve just spent the rest of the evening recovering from the drive (about 240km) with the help of an Aperol Spritz) and soaking it all in.
We do have one issue, our van wifi seems to have stopped working somewhere in the middle of Austria. I don’t know if it’s a fault or an issue with the Italian network, but for now the site has excellent wifi.Leggi altro