we’re so hot we overtook a Ferrari
Friday, August 14th, 2009carpark beside the river in Aulla, Italy
It’s true!
We’re hot. High thirties hot and humid with it.
And we did overtake a Ferrari. This one:
I guess you know it was not going at top speed.
When we were in the early days of driving these vehicles, Rob kept saying over and over, “Hold your line. They’re expensive, they’ll move.”
This time we were in the middle of Riviera madness, a constant stream of vehicles careering along the highway and I was determined to not get separated from The Bear Cave. So I took on the yellow Ferrari, held my line and discovered again Rob was right. They’re expensive; and they do wait.
Driving along the Riviera beside a Ferrari….sounds not bad eh!
Will you believe it was one of our most unfavourite days?
If you came in to port on a cruise ship, the green-shuttered pink and yellow buildings climbing up the hills would look quite pretty. If you disembarked and were whisked away to an umbrella on the beach or a ristorante just off the promenade, it might all seem quite pleasant. But we were in vans, crawling along in traffic from one town to the next, all identical and not a spot to stop anywhere. Carparks with their 2m high barriers were all off-limits to us, roadside parking was already all taken and so it was literally impossible for us to find anywhere to stop for dozens of kilometres. Turning left into the “towns” was also a no-go; the streets were impossibly narrow and had to be going nowhere as we could see the mountains rising up directly behind them. To our right, the sea was tantalisingly close, but we could not get to it.
The umbrella-ed beaches made a pretty picture, but we were unable to snatch more than a glimpse down through the trees, across roadside barriers. Fortunately there were so many, that our many snatches built up quite a picture in our minds eye! The entire stretch of road that we covered along the coast was identical…..umbrella beach followed by a wriggle through tall tatty colourful plastered buildings. Everywhere there were motorbikes overtaking, cars weaving in and out, pedestrians zipping across the road, oppressive heat blasting down, buildings, buildings, buildings, and we could not stop.
Strange noises came from The Bear Cave. It was just Rob wondering aloud how to say, “I’m out of my mind” in Italian. You see, it wasn’t just the ongoing beach issue. We had already had a demanding morning in a mountain meander. Spectacular, but hard driving. The adrenaline can only keep pumping for so long on those narrow winding roads! The constant appearance of signs warning of falling rocks and others indicating it’s about to get windy (as if we haven’t just spent two hours going round the bend bends), starts to wear away at you after a few days of it!
Back beside the sea, Grandpa informed me he is not fond of beaches at the best of times and this type with lines of changing rooms and merry-go-rounds and inundated with people is the worst of all – Brighton on steroids. We drove on; mostly because we had no choice, partly because we didn’t really want to.
We just kept driving and driving and driving and always it looked the same. Always there were the crowds, cars and condos. We got hot. We got hungry. At the top of a hill we found a place to pull over. It turned out to be a bus stop! So we moved on again. Then right next to the sea, we found our lunch spot. We couldn’t actually see the sea, because there was a seven foot high fence, but we know it was there. Getting out of the vans to cool off was not an option: the only shade was roadside. So we squished around tables eating prosciutto and roma tomatoes on ciabatta. It wasn’t all bad! Soon afterwards, when we re-entered the fray, we passed our Ferrari.
Desperate to get out of the mayhem, we did not object in the slightest when the road wound away from the beachfront and up a hill. The hill turned into a mountain. On and on we went. Up and up. Views across the orange-topped houses and dark green trees were undeniably amazing, but hard to appreciate when negotiating the road, and when already tired from morning mountains and the Riviera Rampage.
Just like earlier in the day, there was nowhere to pull over. We started wondering where we would stop for dinner and bed. We eventually found a spot right underneath the toll motorway. What an irony – we had been avoiding that road all day. We had been watching it streak across valleys on bridges and through tunnels in a straight line while we rounded curves and topped mountains on the old main winding road. We had spent the hottest hours of the day in dense traffic while the motorway tauntingly drifted just beyond us. And now we were going to sleep under it. We had spent all day either beside the sea or in spectacular mountains and now we were going to sleep under the motorway! It was not the best spot for kids getting out to stretch legs, so we decided to press on and use the daylight for travelling – another half hour today would be half an hour less tomorrow. We ended up beside a river, squeezed into a carpark, a school in front of us, police station through an adjacent mosaic-ed archway, the town sleeping right there with us.
We didn’t fire up the laptop. We didn’t grab a book from the shelf. We just collapsed into bed and slept soundly. Not what we expected of the Riviera; we’d thought we were going to the beach for a few days!
But we did overtake a Ferrari.
rayres