I had the best sleep last night that I’ve had in a long time :)My phone ran out of batteries yesterday so I didn’t have an alarm, and as I was sleeping in a park where camping wasn’t allowed, I was a bit worried I would sleep-in and get woken by the cops. Luckily, that wasn’t to be. At the first sound of people walking around the forest, around 06:30, I was up and about.
The morning walk was great but I was amazed at the amount of people running, walking and going to the beach. I had never seen so many Italians up this early…but it was probably just the German and Dutch tourists ;)
About 4-5kms down the road I came into another area of campgrounds. Camping must be a national sport here, there are acres upon acres of campgrounds down this coast. And they are all packed to the brim…it’s great!
I soon found one that had wireless, Camping Village “Free Time” in Marina Di Bibbina, but I was a bit disappointed to find that they only sold day passes. You can imagine my surprise when I was informed that they only wanted to charge €5 for the whole day…finally a reasonable price!!! But it did mean that I had to drag myself away at noon as it was looking like I wasn’t going anywhere for the day.
The road then turned inland, and I finally found some Tuscan wineries! I figured that my attitude had improved enough over the last couple of days to warrant indulging myself slightly with some tasting ;)
It was a bit of a struggle finding one that was open though. All the ones I found were closed for lunch and the ones that had signs saying they were “open” were all a kilometer or two off the main road…
So, by the time I had made it to St Vincenzo I was still thirsty but also getting very hungry. It seems the four hours on the interet this morning really put me out of whack with the Italian time schedule. I couldn’t find a restaurant open anywhere!!! It was also a sign that I was out of “touristville” because this was the first time I haven’t been able to get some food in Italy.
Luckily I had learnt my lessons from the past and had some rations in my bag :)
So after lunch, I didn’t have to get far before I found a winery that was open. The woman serving, called Katrina, was great. She had traveled a lot and had studied with Osho’s followers in India so we had heaps to talk about. I tried their three wines they had available for tasting and they were awesome. The last one was amazing, but when I went to buy a bottle at the end it was €49! No wonder it was so good, but I settled on the €16 bottle :) And because I read Osho, Katrina gave me the tasting for free…Thanks, but shhh, we can’t let the boss know ;)
I then made it down to Venturina for dinner and had a great cheese ravioli. It was wonderful. That is the good thing about camping every night, I have lots of money for food.
I am in farming country once again, so there are not so many good places to camp. As it was getting dark I still hadn’t found anything so rather than risk getting woken-up by an angry farmer I decided to go and knock on a door and ask….
They didn’t seem to have a problem and pointed me in the direction of a good paddock…probably the neighbors ;)
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