Le Tour de Pants

Yes, we´ve toured Europe on the seat of our pants in a car and we´re here to tell the tale. What a few weeks! Our grand European tour is over and we’re back in Santiago enjoying the comforts of home for a few days before heading ‘across the pond’ to the US.

In total we covered over 8000kms and saw a large chunk of Italy and some of the nicest areas of the south of France.

The trip over was a fairly direct drive with the objective of getting to Rome asap to make up for the time we’d wasted in Spain waiting for the car’s paperwork. We covered the 2500km in four days without pushing things too much. I practiced driving a bit faster than usual in Oz and trying not to look surprised at the $15 tolls every couple of hours. C practiced her new-found navigation skills (she now boasts an encyclopedic knowledge of the Italian autostrada letter-number identification system with favourites being the A-8 and A-4) and her well developed hobby of ‘you drive; I snooze a bit’.

C salutes Menton, France

Mamma mia we´re in Italy

Seeing ‘Rome Dave’ was not that different from catching up with ‘Bondi Dave’, always good and bound to involve a few glasses of wine, coffee and some good food. Rachel was the tour guide and host par excellence, in fact it seems these two are on the way to opening a boutique hotel if they’d just start charging their many guests for the privilege of staying with them.

Dave relaxes after work by drinking, smoking and meditating on the 17 th century architecture of his local supermarket (in the background)

Dave and Rachel´s Rome surroundings were very different to Bondi but somewhat similar at the same time. Bondi doesn’t have the Colloseum (it had the beach volleyball) but it does have a lot of trendy ‘beautiful’ people checking each other out, a lot of good bars & cafes, old run-down buildings and they’re both by water that smells like a sewer when the wind blows the wrong direction. The traffic is a completely different matter, after driving across Europe and having to look out for the lanes and people overtaking, going faster or slower, it was great to get to Rome and realize that no one paid any attention to any rules, any lines or anyone else and it was a free for all – dodgems for grown-ups, just don’t hit anyone.

Catalina looking saintly near the Vatican

Highlights of Rome were:
• dinner by the Pantheon the first night (thanks guys),
• drinks on an island in the Tiber River,
• lunch with Dave and Rach at the UN offices with multinational important UN-type people who will never be threatened by starvation with such a well stocked canteen; and
• waiting in the stairwell for a couple of hours after we conspired to lock ourselves out of the apartment, waited for the local fire brigade then looked on as the whole crew broke in by almost beating the door down
• regular gelato

get me outta here, per favore

one for Matt

presumably for horses in Florence

Next step was a circuit of about ten days through Florence where we camped in the hills above at Fiesole, Tuscany where we stayed in a nice old hotel in the hill town of Montepulciano almost got the car bogged and started wine tasting at 11am and then down through the centre of Italy and Apennines of the Abruzzo region finding ourselves in some small ski resorts and some isolated Roman ruins.

C indicating I am about to get run over by a truck

Then we started to get to the dirty, dusty, rustic, chaotic but sometimes charming south of Italy and drove around the ‘heel’ of the Italian boot that is Puglia. We stopped off in the one horse town of Galatina to catch the free Mother Teresa musical that night, stayed somewhere C considered acceptable; and went to the ‘so cute they could have been made for tourism’ Trulli.

The Trulli coincided with C’s most traumatic camping experience to date when she came face to face with her loathing for caravans (based on seeing Eminem’s lifestyle in ‘Eight Mile’), suffered for one night, then vowed never to step into one again. I feel that I’ve pushed the envelope enough just getting her camping so no more caravans it is.

Then skirted the coast across the bottom of the Italian boot. No beaches worth mentioning but the warmth and colour of the sea were some compensation. Some significant industrial works and the complete lack of building or environment regulation made for a contrast to some of the prettier places we’d seen.

After getting pretty thoroughly lost on winding mountain roads, then camping next to the main train line, we got to the other side of the boot and followed the coast back up through Basilicata, Paestum, Pompeii and then back to Rome for a few days. As an American said at Pompeii, "someone should get a garden hose in here and clean this stuff off so we can see it properly"; the same could be said for much of southern Italy.

Lake Como

Leaving is never easy so Dave and Rach went to Barcelona and we left before they got back, taking off for Lake Como and Milan for a couple of days. Another amazingly picturesque area that led us to the Alps and the Mont Blanc tunnel which makes up in length (11km) and fancy lighting for the expense of passing through it ($50).

morning breaks over the lake

Mont Blanc tunnel

Bievenue a la France! Chamonix or in fact anywhere in France would give the top tidy towns in NSW a run for their money. Lots of ‘pretty pretty’ as C has taken to describing all these nice places. The pure mountain air was invigorating until nightfall when it got very cold.

Chamonix is a tidy town

Despite only leaving them alone for 5 minutes that night while I went to the bathroom one of my thongs had disappeared when I got back. Having been warned by the owner of the campground about foxes I shook my fist and resigned myself to a cold foot in the morning though C refused to believe a fox could have come and taken it and assumed I’d absent mindedly left it in the car. Next morning I found the evidence halfway up the hill. Temporary repairs with gaffer tape saved me from being thongless until help could be reached. The moral of the story: never leave your thongs anywhere.

evidence

The next couple of days involved a drive through Provence, a night at the fancy Chateau de Pioline, dinner in Aix, a drive to Carcassonne and on to the south west Atlantic coast of France to catch the Quiksilver Pro. Hossegor is a great surf town with good beaches, good food, and nice countryside, a sort of French version of Hawk’s Nest or Forster (though you’d need to change quite a lot to create a French Forster).

le chateau

Hossegor

Had a good few days watching the competition and the pro surfers do their thing in some very heavy four to eight foot beach breaks. Lots of tube rides and some big aerial maneuvers. The crowd completely international. I went out for a surf up the beach a bit where it was one to two foot and still got completely worked over.

beach babe checks out the action

We managed to sample some of the nicer parts of northern Spain on the way back and took a detour through St Jean Port du Pied and the Pyrennes foothills and stopped off in Bilbao to see the new Guggenheim museum there and enjoy a ‘muy rico’ anniversary lunch.
The coast of Cantabria and Asturias is made up of green hills rolling down to of sandy beaches with warm (for around here) water and the Picos de Europa mountains forming a picturesque backdrop.

Santiago is still experiencing some warm sunny days at this time of year and is buzzing with thousands of students starting the university year. Tried going for a surf here last weekend but have never felt such cold water, no wonder all you guys from Tassie windsurfed.

Off to New York next week and then LA and SF before driving across the US to Miami. We’ll hopefully be able to stay in touch a bit better over there. Internet connections should be more accessible than they were in southern Italy. As always we miss everyone and hope to see you all again as soon as possible.

PS it´s good to see Matt´s modelling career is taking off here in Europe too! (Catalina is taking all the credit for this exciting development)