Italian Road Trip Part One - Taormina, Sicily
42 hours after leaving our house in England (at 2am) we arrived in Taormina, Sicily! That was 1630 miles, 30 hours of driving, 2 ferries, 4 countries, 21 toll booths, 11 petrol stops!! Phew.
Air con broke on the car which was a nightmare as temps were up to 39 degrees - not so bad when you're in a moving car with the windows open but not great in a traffic jam. Italian drivers are insane. Made good time on day two but didn't on day one as we got held up in switzerland. Ended up travelling for 21 hours but made it to florence where we stayed overnight.
This is me on the ferry at about 5am with no make-up on... eek!
Aaah the white cliffs of Dover - goodbye England!
Some driving shots - that's Lake Como in the middle (I think!). Lots of tunnels in Switzerland - the bottom photo is of the Gotthard tunnel which was pretty scary - it's the third longest road tunnel in the world - 15.3 miles long - and all I could think of was the tunnel disasters that happen every so often...
The view from our hotel window on the first morning. Taormina was lovely. On day one we just set out and explored.
Mount Etna - she's huge!
This is me by a cannon in the botanical gardens. Wherever I go away I always like to look round botanical gardens - they're lovely and they're usually free!
More of the gardens. Here's me by a curious work of art. People, a lesson to you all, this is what will happen to you if you eat lots of cakes - you will get chubby, you will be unable to run to catch buses and you will look twice the size of any life-sized statues you sit down next to.
Taormina centre.
After going into the centre we headed down to the beach via the hotel. This is our hotel car park! You can just see our smart car behind the leaves of the palm tree.
We took a walk down to the beach - it's quite a long traversing walk - most people take the furnicular instead (we only saw one other person on the steps down). These people are lazy! It was a nice walk with great views as you can see.
Part of the path down.
The beach! I think that's Isola Bella in the background which you can walk through the sea to. The beach was completely jammed. Sadly lots of beaches in Italy are private.
Mr JRB enters the sea. I stayed well clear of the sea for fear of being harpooned or rounded up by Greenpeace and driven into deeper waters.
When we left this part of the beach there was quite a long flight of stairs which we had to climb. I almost fainted and had to sit down for quite a long time. We had to go back to the hotel because I was really unwell. This meant we took the furnicular back :-( I was looking forward to the hellish walk back up!! This happened a few times on the trip - heat stroke? My hands swelled up terribly too.
Me in the hotel gardens looking pale but recovered. Good hotel - Grand Hotel San Pietro. The evening was spent eating pizza and... best of all... CANNOLI!! More of that to come.
Here's what my Forerunner made of our walk down to the beach (don't worry there's far longer and more interesting walks to come!).
Air con broke on the car which was a nightmare as temps were up to 39 degrees - not so bad when you're in a moving car with the windows open but not great in a traffic jam. Italian drivers are insane. Made good time on day two but didn't on day one as we got held up in switzerland. Ended up travelling for 21 hours but made it to florence where we stayed overnight.
This is me on the ferry at about 5am with no make-up on... eek!
Aaah the white cliffs of Dover - goodbye England!
Some driving shots - that's Lake Como in the middle (I think!). Lots of tunnels in Switzerland - the bottom photo is of the Gotthard tunnel which was pretty scary - it's the third longest road tunnel in the world - 15.3 miles long - and all I could think of was the tunnel disasters that happen every so often...
The view from our hotel window on the first morning. Taormina was lovely. On day one we just set out and explored.
Mount Etna - she's huge!
This is me by a cannon in the botanical gardens. Wherever I go away I always like to look round botanical gardens - they're lovely and they're usually free!
More of the gardens. Here's me by a curious work of art. People, a lesson to you all, this is what will happen to you if you eat lots of cakes - you will get chubby, you will be unable to run to catch buses and you will look twice the size of any life-sized statues you sit down next to.
Taormina centre.
After going into the centre we headed down to the beach via the hotel. This is our hotel car park! You can just see our smart car behind the leaves of the palm tree.
We took a walk down to the beach - it's quite a long traversing walk - most people take the furnicular instead (we only saw one other person on the steps down). These people are lazy! It was a nice walk with great views as you can see.
Part of the path down.
The beach! I think that's Isola Bella in the background which you can walk through the sea to. The beach was completely jammed. Sadly lots of beaches in Italy are private.
Mr JRB enters the sea. I stayed well clear of the sea for fear of being harpooned or rounded up by Greenpeace and driven into deeper waters.When we left this part of the beach there was quite a long flight of stairs which we had to climb. I almost fainted and had to sit down for quite a long time. We had to go back to the hotel because I was really unwell. This meant we took the furnicular back :-( I was looking forward to the hellish walk back up!! This happened a few times on the trip - heat stroke? My hands swelled up terribly too.
Me in the hotel gardens looking pale but recovered. Good hotel - Grand Hotel San Pietro. The evening was spent eating pizza and... best of all... CANNOLI!! More of that to come.
Here's what my Forerunner made of our walk down to the beach (don't worry there's far longer and more interesting walks to come!).
posted by Jenny at
1:18 PM
1 Comments:
South Africa:
Not sure if you have heard of arguably the greatest ultra marathon in the world where athletes come from all over the world to combine muscle and sinew and mental strength to conquer the approx 90 kilometres between the cities of Pietermaritzburg and Durban (Province is KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa)).
Well done on your running program!
By
Charles, at 9:53 PM
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