Cevio (we need our Italian speaking daughter!)

A freshly emerged southern white admiral on our washing on Wednesday morning

I was saying how much we like the current campsite and one of the reasons I forgot to mention is that the couple who run it make no attempt to speak English.  Don’t get me wrong, we don’t expect foreigners to speak our language, it’s just that it gets a bit wearing when we speak in French to someone and it doesn’t take long before they start speaking in English.  The couple here are not being deliberately awkward by not trying English, as some are, we just believe they find it even more difficult than us to speak another language 😊

Talking about foreign languages we have just realised that we haven’t been to Italy before without an Italian speaker with us.  That means we don’t really know much, if any, Italian.  Sophie has provided us with a list of how letters are pronounced (Italian is good in that letter sounds tend to be constant unlike English) but as I only asked for it on Tuesday I don’t think we’re going to learn much before we’re there 😉

Tuesday was yet another stunning evening and the new moon looked like it couldn’t be any newer:

  New moon from our tent

We woke on Wednesday to a clear, bright, blue sky and with the promise of it being another hot day.  It certainly turned out to be very hot and, even though quite a lot of cloud appeared during the day, it remained very warm.

We wanted to go for a swim (to hopefully teach Buddy to swim too), visit a couple of villages, have a trip along the Gorges du Verdon as well as pay a visit to a supermarket.  We kept changing our minds about which order to do things in, including going for a swim in the lake first and cooking pancakes on the shore, in the end we decided to drive to the gorge first.

We drove along the eastern side of the lake (Lac de Sainte-Croix) and had some stunning views as we wound through the hills.

Looking down on one of the islands on the lake which is about 6 ½ miles long

The far end was the touristy bit because this is where the river Verdon enters the lake and also marks the end of the spectacular gorge.

The business end of the lake

Looking into the end of the Gorges du Verdon

We both found it really uncanny seeing all the pedalos and kayaks making their way into the gorge – it just seemed so unnatural.  Talking about it later in the evening, Karen did point out that if we had our boat there then we would have gone in as well.

We were soon climbing up the hairpins on one side of the gorge.  We only went about half way along the 20-mile length of the gorge before we turned back but we had some brilliant views.

This was at about 1,300 metres, looking back down to where the river enters the lake

We could just make out the pedalos and kayaks in the blue part of the river far below

There is a view (entirely subjective) that this gorge is the most beautiful in Europe and I must admit, that it is absolutely awesome the further you travel upstream.

We returned along the far side, so we could see the dam and thus complete a circuit of the lake.

The hydroelectric dam (although I think it’s made of concrete etc.)

We returned to the spot on the shore we went to on Tuesday afternoon and Karen was first in the water.  We were hoping that by us going in that Buddy would want to follow suit and thus get confident in swimming.

Far from it, he became very anxious and would hardly step into the water whilst we were in there.  It seems we have taken a step backwards in getting him used to water ☹

Not happy that Karen was in the water…

…and a picture of me in the water to prove to our children that I can now just about swim 😉

We lay on the shore drying off and were thankful that we weren’t by the sea as we avoided the unpleasantness of feeling sticky and uncomfortable with sand and salt water.

After popping into the supermarket down in Aups we went back to the tent.  Whilst Karen was cooking we had a bit of rain which was most unexpected although the forecast said there was a 20% chance of thunderstorms at midnight.  The rain didn’t last long, and we sat out all evening but, as there was cloud cover, we couldn’t stargaze. It did mean it was really rather muggy and we were aware of the buzzing of mosquitos for the first time.

We packed up the tent after breakfast on Thursday and set off on the back roads through the hills to stop for lunch in Monaco.  We passed through many of the hilltop Provençal villages that this area of France is famous for:

  

  

Neither of us had been to Monaco before and were a little out of our comfort zone as the place was packed with people.  Monaco is the second smallest sovereign state in the world and the most densely populated.  Over a third of its 38,000+ inhabitants are sterling millionaires and we assume the rest either service them or work there.  We also assume that by millionaire it is meant true millionaire as in having at least a million pounds of free cash as opposed to having it tied up in assets such as houses.  The other fact that surprised us was that 6% of the population are British.

We entered the city through a spiral tunnel – something else neither of us had seen or been on before.  Driving down the start/finish straight we turned and went to the far end of the harbour where a multi-storey car park on five levels has been built beneath the sea.

Walking out of the car park we were faced with the opulence seen in so many of the famously rich ports around the world

This boat had a helicopter on one of the rear decks and was still small enough to fit in the harbour

We had our picnic lunch on the harbour wall where there were some steps leading down to the sea where we could dangle our legs in.  We were opposite the back end of Queen Victoria and the constant convoy of tenders bringing cruisers on and off the boat created such a wash that a load of crap was washed ashore so we decided to avoid the leg dangling.

Cruise ship Queen Victoria anchored out of the harbour

The town end of the harbour where the smaller boats berth

When driving through the packed streets to get out of the city we felt rather sheepish in our car;  the other British plated cars we saw were two Lamborghinis, three Ferraris, two Porsches and two McLarens ☹

Once we were out of Monaco we headed towards Italy, San Remo in particular.  Once again is was a scorching hot day even with clouds in the sky; we were really looking forward to getting to a campsite and setting up with a cold beer.

Crossing the border

In the end we bypassed San Remo as we couldn’t find any camp sites with decent reviews and headed for Imperia instead.  We followed Germans with a caravan into the site and they got the last spot.  It was really ‘resorty’ anyway so we gave all the other sites a miss and headed further east.  We agreed we would stop overnight at the next site we found.

We pulled in at the first site at Cevio and realised immediately that it would only be one night.  The view could have been a lot worse but the site could not have been.  Tired and run down would make it sound not too bad; the site was full of Italians in campervans apart from a couple of Germans and us.

View was OK from our pitch

I won’t begin to explain why the site was so bad but, needless to say, we got up first thing on Friday, packed up and headed in the direction of Portofino.

Our travels and eight camp sites since getting to France 17 days ago