With the broken window not going to be
fixed until Tuesday we have been rather house-bound. Not that that mattered as it’s made us find
different walks around the area.
Among many of the butterflies we are
seeing on our walks at the moment we have noticed that there are lots of fresh
clouded yellows and Queen of Spain fritillaries emerging which is great
considering we’re in October. On my first walk with Buddy this morning I was watching clouded yellows mating but I imagine the offspring will hibernate as full grown caterpillars rather than completing the life cycle as the temperatures will be dropping sharply soon.
One of our walks took us further up
the mountain on Saturday and we found ourselves walking through the clouds
which was really uncanny, especially when we were in the woods.
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| Eerie clouds in the woods |
The road that Karen runs on is very
quiet, other than at weekends when the locals drive up the mountain to have
barbecues and walk around the top. Even
though most days no cars pass her, she still
has to be really careful because of the hairpins and also, they tend to drive
all over the road. This is because there
are so many large areas that have been washed away that drivers suddenly switch
from one side of the road to the other.
We decided to cover up the window in
case it rained before the new one is, hopefully, put in on Tuesday. We carry a large roll of Gaffer tape as a
precaution in case we get a tear in the tent, so it was a simple matter of
finding some bits of clear plastic and taping them together and then to the
car.
When my son in law, Yanos, had his car
window smashed he made the mistake of taping plastic onto the car
paintwork. Repairing the subsequent
damage to the paintwork cost him more than the replacement window ☹ Because
of this we were careful not to get any sticky tape on the paintwork.
We took the finished product out for a
five-mile test drive to Castel del Piano and back and were rather pleased it
held together. At least we are now
covered up in case it rains, or we have to go anywhere in an emergency.
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| The result of our cutting and taping |
You may have noticed we have a ski box. This is a real ski box unlike today’s top
boxes and I bought it for its original purpose 30 years ago. Even though it’s designed to take skis it does
the job for us and takes all our camping gear.
I agree that the modern versions have a far greater volume but it’s done
us well. It’s only since we’ve been over here that we
have realised that it is now almost an antique – we haven’t seen another one
since we’ve been looking.
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| Our ski box – note the gaffer tape on the front to stop water ingress in a crack 😏 |
For many years my sister looked after and used the box as they tended to have more camping holidays than we did. They recently replaced their car and brought a modern equivalent so our box has come back to us and it's been so useful. You would have thought that we wouldn't have needed the extra space considering there's only us and Buddy and we have an estate car but we're still packed to the gunwales.
On Monday we walked the two miles down
to Pescina. We have been promising ourselves a pizza from a pizzeria for lunch
and today was the day. The restaurant,
Da Luca, was deceptive like many bars and was massive inside. We couldn’t believe how busy it was
considering how shut up Pescina is (it’s in the lull between summer and ski
seasons) at the moment. It seemed that a
constant stream of workmen were appearing in vans and stopping for lunch.
Ironically they only cook pizzas in
the evening so we settled for a full blown meal which was most enjoyable. We
were rather pleased we had a steep uphill walk all the way home to work it off though
😏
With only ten days to go before we
leave here we spent some time in the afternoon planning our route back home. The main thing we decided was that we would
head up for the Italian lakes first, taking the inland route through Florence,
Bologna and Milan rather than the coastal route we took on the way down from
France.
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The route we will probably take to get to the lakes on our way home
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