Homeward Bound

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Finally, after spending 47 nights away; enjoying 46.5 days of sunshine (just half a day of drizzle in Venice); visiting 8 different countries; driving 2,164 kilometres through Italy; traipsing up 13 hills to visit some of the best hill-top towns; staying in 9 different Airbnb accommodations (all good value I must say); sailing 175 kilometres of canal in France; passing through 66 locks (so ably assisted by Crew) - it is time to go home!

What have been the highlights for us....

1.  Catching up with our daughter Ellen and husband Franz in Austria (thank you guys so much for your hospitality and time/effort to show us around).

2.  Those Italian hill-top towns - so impossibly hard to drive to and get parked up! - But oh so wonderful to walk around at a leisurely pace and soak up all that history in places where time appears to have stood still for centuries.

3.  The Italian cuisine - so much great pasta, risotto, pizza, real parmigiano cheese, limoncello and the incredible selection of good but reasonably priced wines.

4.  The art, history and culture on view in museums like the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, in many of the great Churches and Cathedrals, and of course the Vatican City in Rome.

5.  The French cuisine - nobody does baked products such as baguettes, croissants, brioche and a wide variety of tarts and flans - like the French. You can even get good coffee (well almost as good as the kiwi stuff).

6.  Meeting so many good people, including our very hospitable Airbnb hosts, service staff, lock-keepers - and sometimes it's just strangers on adjoining tables in a restaurant that you strike up a great conversation with.

7.  The amazing fortress city of Carcassonne - so immaculately restored and having survived Napoleon's best efforts to raze it to the ground!

We cannot leave without posthumously thanking Pierre-Paul Riquet, Baron de Bonrepos, the brilliant engineer who designed and managed the construction of this great canal that we have been gently sailing for the last eleven days. 


Lined with majestic plane trees, the Canal du Midi is a sublime pleasure to cruise quietly along, ducking heads under low bridges and watching the herons swoop through the treetops as they contemplate their next assault on the unsuspecting fish below. It is with great sadness that we ponder the future of this gem of southern France. Disease, allegedly and unintentionally introduced by American soldiers stationed in Beziers during WWII is slowly killing the plane trees, and climate change is severely challenging French efforts to keep this waterway open due to the extreme low volume of water. But it has been a wondrous highlight for Brenda and I on this trip to Europe.

As for the lowlights.....

1.  Way too much traffic in many parts of Italy - especially around popular tourists spots like Sorrento and the Amalfi coast. I suggest you don't even try visiting these places in the high season (July/August)!

2.  The coffee in Italy tastes OK - but it is rarely hot enough. And they really don't know how to make a good "dirty chai" or "trim flat white".

3.  Losing my phone in Amsterdam, but fortunately being able to recover it before we leave France for our journey home.

4. And we have both missed terribly our wonderful little dog Cookie (but we thank our good friends Jane & Craig for looking after him while we were away).

Be home soon little fella


This will be our last blog update for this trip. Now we have one last night in France and then several days of air travel ahead of us. We expect to be back home sometime late afternoon on Sunday 8th October.

So to all the nice people we have met on our travels, we say....

"Merci beaucoup, ça a été un plaisir de vous rencontrer. Au revoir"
"Grazie mille, è stato un piacere conoscerti. Arrivederci"
"Vielen Dank, es war schön sie zu sehen. Auf Wiedersehen"

And lastly, we would very much like to thank Google Translate without which we would be hopelessly lost!!


Comments

  1. Veronica Lund5 October 2023 at 12:13

    What a wonderful post and a great holiday. Thanks so much for sharing and happy travels home x

    ReplyDelete

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