Bella Italia
If you like ancient stones, great wine, good food an small streets with uncountable turns you will love Italy! There is just more than enough of everything. However for a short period i felt like beeing in China. Rice for Risotto is one of the Specialities from Italy. In the Valley of Aoste this speciality is grown. So we drove one entire day through prosperous rice fields. Afterwards we travelled through Toskani. All the pictures are true – endless rolling hills and Italian cypress as far as you can see.
Everyone goes crazy about the Amalficoast – nice to look at, the layout of the coast line is not bad either, but i will certainly miss that spot next time. When we have been there at the begin of June, it was overcrowded and even with the motorbike or scooter no chance to move forward or backward. As well i will not go to the Vesuv anymore. It is just too much touristic offerings over there.
However Siena i will definitely visit once again. For this town even i like to spend more than one night. Just the old Cathedral is it worth it to visit Siena – and in the inner city it appears that time stood still for the last 300 Years. For this reason Siena established the first time in Italys history an area with only very limited traffic.
In Siena our GPS Tracker really paid off. Arrived in the afternoon, we parked our bikes on a big public place and took a taxi to the Hotel, which is located in this area without traffic. In the Hotel we got a map of the city, walked around and realized that Siena has several of those big public places. So we where unable to identify the location of our bikes on the map. But beeing smart we used the GPS Tracker to get the location via Google-Maps. I promise that i will never make Jokes about people who can’t find their vehicle on their own in a foreign city!
Perugia
Every old city in Italy seem to be build on a hill – as Perugia. The old town is showing-off with the monumental buildings. However a highlight for me is certainly the “Mini-Metro”, which connects the upper with the lower part of the town. This Metro runs every 90 seconds! Unfortunately it is only operated daily until 9:20 PM. So after dinner we enjoyed an unexpected walk to the Hotel…
Wine & Dine
…like gods in Italy. We planned to have a good dinner and share a bottle of Wine – which we did in the evening. But i must admit that we got the best food at lunch time in small unspectacular bars at the curbside. It is just awesome to enjoy fresh made Pasta with seafood right next to the sea!
Bed & Breakfast
This was the discovery from that trip! Until now i did not neccessarily think good about B&B. However the rooms ew booked in Italy have been incredible. Modern, well equipped, large und inexpensive – sometimes much better compared to the available Hotel rooms. The best example is Art Studio Six in Campobasso. Just great – have a look at the pictures in the Internet – this is the reality! However B&B very often cannot be booked about HRS, so we had to use booking.com instead.
Streets…
…more than enough – the mountains are not high, however with countless tiny roads. Already in the planning, we realized that we can plan a tour with just 180km, but just by choosing more turns it could be well above 400km as well. If you pick the tiny roads you already might feel fast at a speed of 40km/h.Sometimes even i was happy in the evening to see a straight street. The street condition on the smaller roads is very often crappy, but kind of expected.
Gas Stations
Getting gas is basically easy. Self service with credit card or cash are available at every corner and sometimes you’ll find gas stations with service – but in this case gas is about 20 cent per liter more expensive. But the further we go south, the more difficult it will get. Many of the self service stations do not accept our card, or the card reader is out of order. In this case we only can pay cash with small banknotes – in case we have some. Of course we are either unable to get our tank full, or some money remains in the gas station. No change! It even happened one time, that this damn gas station took our money without getting any gas. After this occasion we preferred the station with service – even if it way more expensive.
Even if this trip took an unexpected end in Calabria: We will come back! Maybe already next year to finalize the Wine & Pleasure Tour together with Silke!