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  • Day 46

    Otranto and down to Italys heel

    May 16, 2019 in Italy ⋅ 🌧 16 °C

    After a smooth sailing, we have decided to head south from Bari to find a little farm stop on the coast and are grateful to see sunshine, though the rain does still threaten to follow us. We find a Lidl (supermarket of choice for this whole trip due to purchases at other unnamed supermarkets such as 4euro punnets of tomatoes, 3euro loaves of bread and bottles of wine costing more than 4euros!!) and pick up some new italian snacks and after taking 3 fuel stations to figure out how to actually get fuel out of the pump, the rest of the journey is without drama.

    We arrive to a very quiet field with a few other campers and as the sun is still out (!) we decide to find the tiny cove beach that the campsite points us to. For some reason we decide to take the pushchair to the beach (?) and so obviously find that the path is totally impassable due to a huge muddy puddle! After some more crystal maze-style attempts by me and Amelia, with me falling in the very gross-looking puddle, we make some planks of wood into bridges and find the lovely little cove.

    The sea is warm, but the rain still looms so we do some den building, I make a tiny dent in clearing the absolute ton of plastic that is covering this little cove, and we head back for some dinner.

    Our first experience of Italian camping and we are reminded what we’ve read about the electricity ampage in Italy (Croatia’s campsites were all pretty modern so we’d forgotten what low ampage meant) - it takes us about 2 hours to cook a really simple meal and we have two very hungry (bit luckily distracted by other children with balls and frisbees)!

    We decide to head straight on the next morning, Amelia is now sporting a big swollen eye, we guess that pile of ants that they kept playing in might have liked the taste of them both as they both now have a fair few new bites - a few doses of piriton in case it’s a reaction!

    On recommendation of the campsite lady we take the long route around the coast to get to the east side of Italy’s heel (and luckily there’s only one ‘can we make it through that road?’ incident) - it is a beautiful coastline with tiny coves, lots of rugged cliffs - we are amazed at how some of the buildings and houses are built on the very edges as though they will fall in at any minute, with stunning views over the Adriatic Sea, we make some stops on the way around to find caves where bears live(!!) and views of beautiful ports!
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