Leaving Lauterbrunnen for Italy!

As we left Lauterbrunnen this morning, we both agreed that this town would be a place on our list to revisit if we could. We both enjoyed the quiet valley, waterfalls and less touristy feel of the town. We are glad that the Grindelwald place we chose first fell through, as Lauterbrunnen is so much nicer! We'll also keep in contact with Ian and Fiona, we really did enjoy their company.

A day of firsts!
the first day we have set off on our journey and had to backtrack because the pass we were headed for was closed due to snow!
The first time we have experienced traffic jams making our journey hours longer than it should have been!
The first day we have travelled through a tunnel 17kms long!
We set off this morning just before ten, expecting to be in Lake Lugano around 12.45pm. After over an hour of travelling, we were stopped on the road and asked where we were headed. Upon hearing our destination, the official told us that the pass to southern Switzerland and Italy was closed due to too much snow!

We turned back, deciding to stop off for morning tea at one of the restaurants (Restaurant Terrasse in Nessental) we'd already passed. We chose one and had some very good, but cheap coffee (for Switzerland €1.90, instead of €4.50) and shared a piece of strawberry chocolate cake smothered in cream - delicious! Little did we know what was ahead of us!
We went back 14 km and turned to take another road to go to Lucerne to get to Italy that way. This added quite a bit to our travel time, but worse was ahead.
We travelled through quite a few tunnels, including six that were mostly less than 100m apart! Then came the traffic jam. I'd been thinking that we might stop to have lunch around 1.15 and was about to suggest we should when we struck the traffic jam. We discovered that the other pass was closed, also due to snow, so the only way through was via the Gotthard tunnel. This tunnel only has one lane of traffic going each way, so 2-3 lanes going down to one meant stopping and not moving for minutes at a time, then crawling forward a few metres for kilometre after kilometre. Spring and summer is the time for roadworks here, but unexpected snow really played havoc. Going from three ways to get to Italy and then reducing to one lane in a tunnel each way due to roadworks probably wasn't considered a possibility in the roadworks plans!
Once we got through the tunnel, we took a break for lunch at the first rest stop over the border. Things did improve when we got under way again, but we ended up arriving at the apartment at about 4.15pm! Our host, Monica, was unfazed as we weren't that late, to her! We had thought we would have an opportunity for a look around before getting to the apartment between 3 and 4pm. The temperature, however, was a lovely, warm 26 degrees and it felt so good!
The apartment is well organised with a separate bedroom bathroom and living/eating area. It also has an outside area (with a barbeque, table and chairs) with a view to Lake Lugano, the reason we chose it. Apart from the church bells, it's pretty quiet around here. Sitting at the table, writing this, I can look up and see Lake Lugano through the glass door! There is nothing like a water view!

Porlezza, on Lake Lugano, Italy
Porlezza (in Italy) is about 17kms from Lugano (in Switzerland)!
We slept extremely well last night and had a quiet morning at the apartment. In the afternoon, we went for a drive, we thought to Como, but the satnav lady had other ideas, as we discovered later. We left Polezza, going up through the hills, through narrow streets in small towns and down some roads corkscrewing or spiralling down the hill. The turns were so tight, that one driver ahead of us who stayed on the right side of the road couldn't make the turn. Halfway through he had to stop, reverse and try again. There is nothing like driving along roads that are not wide enough for two cars (or don't look like it, anyway). At times, we did need to pull over so other cars could get through. Don't know what you would do if you needed to do a U-turn.
When we finally arrived at a bigger town, the satnav told us to do a U-turn at the end of the street and we realised that we were close to Lugano on the other side of the river. There was a spot where the satnav said to go left and there was a sign to Como pointing right, but we followed the satnav. Hmmm.....
We decided to abandon the idea of Como for today, parked, ate peaches and went for a walk alongside the lake for a while. When we got back to the car we headed back to the apartment, stopping on the way for a view of the Polezzo end of the lake. The tunnels through the hills are very narrow!

Tried another route to Lake Como. Well, it was faster, no corkscrew roads but when we got into Como we couldn't get off the main road to park anywhere! It was hard enough to know where the parking was, let alone how to get to it! The plan to go there, go for a wander by the lake, drink coffee etc was blown away. We did stop eventually on a parking bay out of town to eat our morning tea (leftover pastries Monica's Mum had made for us). It was a few minutes of breathing space.

We tried Plan B! Craig was thinking of buying some clothes, so we headed to the Fox Centre. Well, designer shop after designer shop convinced us we were poor, so, in addition to the fact that we were back in that very expensive country, Switzerland, and the fact that our lunch was called Raclette and was a very poor imitation of the real thing, we decided to give up on the day.

However, our return to Porlezza (Italy) was enhanced by the finding of tunnels through the hills that made the journey less twisted and bonus number 2 was travelling behind a bus. That may sound weird, but it ensured that everyone driving on the other side of the road moved as far as they could to their side to avoid being hit by the bus on the roads only just wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other. Plain sailing for us! No wonder they buy narrow vehicles!

Despite all this, we slept extremely well in Porlezza, in a very comfortable bed and in a very nice apartment with lake views.

Musestre, near Venice
After travelling most of the day, we arrived in Musestre a little earlier than we had expected, so had a drive around the area before driving back to our accommodation. A bit of confusion reigned until our hosts sorted out that we were actually booked in. Our lack of Italian didn't help at all! However, all is well.
We had realised that it was a holiday of some kind, because all the shops were shut (on a Tuesday) so our hosts kindly offered us a meal as we weren't able to buy food. Tuna pasta, then chicken and Tuscan potatoes (not as good as ours-ours are crispier)!

Venice
We went in to Venice by train, about a half hour trip. It was extremely busy just outside the station, so we decided to head away from the crowd to find coffee. We found a nice place ( Bar Rosa) in a square that seemed to be frequented by locals chatting to each other across tables. A quiet hiatus in our day
We did find the crowds eventually, in narrow streets full of shops, many selling very similar items. We also found them along the shore where there were many tourist boats and at the Bridge of Sighs. We walked for hours, with stops at a couple of places to take a break. The temperature was in the mid-thirties. We found a park in the mid-afternoon, with shady trees that we rested in for about three quarters of an hour, to escape some of the heat.
We ended our day having dinner at another restaurant in the square where we had had coffee in the morning. I really enjoyed my mixed seafood, something that's been hard to find in land-locked countries we've been visiting. Cooked beautifully in a very light cornflour batter. Mmmm! Finished off with a delicious chocolate panacotta, perfect!

Tomorrow, after a day of haircuts (organised for us by our host's mother) washing and planning etc we plan to go back to Venice and do a tour of three of the islands in the afternoon. Looking forward to it!

Exploring a part of Venice we hadn't had time for on Wednesday was not much different to most of the tourist areas of the city. However, there were fresh fruit and vegetable stalls and several selling serves of fruit salad. Breakfast! The days since we arrived here have been around the mid-thirties and it very humid. Bit of a shock after 17-18 degrees!
Our tour started at 2.30pm and we were to meet just outside the Doges palace. The place was packed and everyone who could was seeking shade. There were probably about a hundred people waiting for the start of the tour, and, for the first time we followed a red flag, down to the boat for the tour.
Travelling on the boat was very pleasant. I thought we would have the opportunity to bypass the glass-blowing demonstration on Murano, as we both have seen that before, but we were herded from the dock through a door that led nowhere else but the demo. Unfortunately, most of the items for sale were not to my taste, so I was a bit disappointed.
We met a New Zealand couple, Eddie and Tahnya, and spent time chatting with them on the boat. Burano is the island of lace-making. Saw some beautiful work, but nothing to our taste that we would enjoy having at home.
By the time we arrived in Torcello, we were ready to stop for a gelato and didn't get to the church. Cooling off was more important than seeing it, I'm afraid!
While we were out on the water, we saw the cruise ship "Queen Elizabeth" coming in. It was huge! I don't know how many levels of accommodation there are on that ship, but lots of people (hundreds?) have a balcony outside their room on the top.

We had dinner in Venice again before catching the train back. It was still very hot and humid at 7pm (and didn't really improve much more when the sun did go down around 9.30pm). I wasn't feeling that hungry, so opted in the end, for a traditional Italian appetiser of a soft mozzarella cheese with tomatoes on a bed of rocket, drizzled with olive oil. I have never tasted mozzarella like it before. When I cut it, it was almost elastic, pulling away from the ball. Nothing like the somewhat rubbery mozzarella I've tasted in Australia. Craig enjoyed a pasta dish with onion and sardines that he is going to try at home.

We are glad that we have visited Venice, with its low building heights like Paris, but wish there was more evidence of restoration happening. There are some beautiful old buildings, with windows arched, Islamic, or just rectangular, no higher than six stories. The exteriors of most buildings are in a severe state of disrepair, making the place look unloved. As a destination, you have to love shopping, because apart from Bali, we've not seen so many shops over such a large area before. There are more visitors to Venice each day than people who live in Venice. No wonder the locals don't come out until the evening when most of the tourists have gone!

We have been woken every morning so far in Italy by church bells, starting at seven am. After driving to Pistoia (near Florence) today, we are out of a town. Perhaps we won't hear church bells in the morning!

Pistoia
The apartment we are staying in for the next few nights is lovely. Over two levels, there are two bedrooms upstairs, a lounge-kitchen-diner downstairs and an undercover outside dining area. It's beautifully organised and decorated with lots of paintings and posters. As the evening has progressed, it's much cooler and we think that we will sleep well while we are here. The last few nights have been very hot!

We have been entertained by the dog here. When we went outside for a wander, it found it's basketball. It's a brown and white collie (they call it an Australian sheepdog here) and reminds us a bit of Mali with the way it loves it's ball (which it can carry in it's mouth, as it is somewhat deflated!) Unlike Mali though, this one really knows how to whine loudly and repeatedly for attention! Mali wins!

I had suggested to Craig that we may still hear "church bells from across the fields" where we are staying and he assured me this morning that that was indeed correct! (They didn't wake me up though, so you probably need to be awake to notice them.)

Vinci and Anchiano
This trip didn't start particularly well. The road to the BnB was narrow, to say the least. Driving towards Pistoia, I managed to put the front right tyre off the track. I didn't realise that the was a drop of about 60cm immediately off the track, as it was full of plants hiding its depth. We had a slow motion crash, with the car ending up at an angle, resting the passenger doors against some plants.
We weren't hurt, except for pride, so we walked back to the BnB. Max got his tractor out and headed to the car. By the time we got back, there was a bun fight going on between Max and a neighbour (who had a bigger tractor). The neighbour won, we were pulled out and we could continue the trip, a little more warily than we started out.

Leonardo da Vinci wasn't born in Vinci, but did spend part of his childhood there, living in his uncle's house. He was born in his father's house in Anchiano. We visited the Leonardo da Vinci museum in Vinci before driving out to the house about 3km away.
The museum was in two buildings and every exhibit was a model of something he had invented or designed, displayed with copies of his original drawings.
The first building contained small models of engineering machinery and tools. These helped to explain how pillars and domes were constructed relatively easily - certainly easier than without them. Upstairs was an exhibit explaining the Vitruvian Man drawing.
In the second building, the castle, were some larger models, including a bicycle, a crane and a full size double wing, all made to scale. There were also exhibits about Leonardo's investigations into fluid dynamics and flight.

Even though it was hot, we decided to climb up the tower of the museum (about 100 steps) and we are very glad that we did. The views were amazing around the town and up into the hills around Vinci.Part way up was a room containing two- d nets and the three - d models made from them.

The house in Anchiano was quite small, only a few rooms, but beautifully restored and showing the original pizza oven outside. There was an explanation of his painting "The Last Supper" that surprised us with the detail about postures and expressions of the apostles, the table setting and the poor restoration work that had been done in previous centuries. There was only one other mention of his art at the Vinci museum and that was about his "controversial" use of perspective in his painting "Annunciation" (in the Leonardo room in the Ufizzi, we found out later); its focus was purely on his ideas and inventions. We really enjoyed our afternoon in Vinci and Anchiano.

In Lucca, we walked around the top of the wall of the old town for a while while we were waiting for the train to Pisa. Craig remembers a Top Gear programme where one driver drove around the top of Lucca and another had to drive through the town in one of their challenges. The road where we walked was lined with trees for a part of the way, so we were able to enjoy the shade while we walked.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa continues to lean and the number of people taking photos of others pretending to hold it up or other similar poses was amazing. "Indiana Jo" has a YouTube clip on her site of someone having fun with others posing this way at Pisa. It is worth watching and is quite funny!

Ros and Max (our hosts) invited us for dinner - pizza cooked in their outdoor pizza oven! Thin crust, few toppings and very quick cooking. The use of mozzarella instead of a tomato sauce was a revelation. Delicious! Less content was the rule for topping. We did try some different pizza doughs, but both of us really enjoyed the thin crust pizzas best. We learned a lot from them both about pizza making that we will try to do when we get our pizza oven at home. Thanks, Ros and Max!

Florence
Our day in Florence started with us not finding the station car park in Pistoia, missing the train we intended to catch and ending up driving to Florence (which Craig was trying to avoid because of the one way street system, etc). Once we got there and were on our way to the Uffizi gallery, I thought I should check what our booking coupon said, as we had booked for 10.00am online ( and that is what the email said). It was then that I discovered that our 10.00am booking was listed as 4.15pm! That changed our plans!

After a coffee to regroup and plan the rest of the day, we decided to find out how the booking voucher system actually worked, as we knew we had to line up in one place to swap our voucher for our tickets and then line up to go in. Just as well we did, because the place you line up at 15 minutes before your entry time is on the opposite wing to the entrance. That sorted, we went for a bit of a wander. Finding that one of the gardens we planned to visit was going to cost €20 (about $AU30), we decided to go to the Galileo museum, to find that it closed in 35 minutes! As it was either 35 minutes or none, in we went.

Galileo museum
I didn't even realise that there was a Florence connection to Galileo, but apparently there is. Outside the museum is a large sundial that not only showed the time of day, but the month (and, with a bit of imagination) the approximate date.
Inside was an array of various astronomical tools such as astrolabes of various kinds. There were also many globes showing how understanding of the continents changed over time. The big thing for me, however was to see two of Galileo's original telescopes. One was slightly more than a metre long and the other about 1.8m. It is amazing to me that he was able to see and work out what he did with such simple instruments.
The last set of exhibits showed early thermometers and barometers. I had seen some of these in documentaries (and had made a Mercury barometer before the fun was taken out of Science lessons) but to see them in real life was, for me at least, terrific.

After leaving the museum we went to see the Duomo. I was surprised to see its striking exterior decoration and it was only when we were walking around the outside that we realised what a huge restoration job had been carried out when we found an un-renovated wall and saw how dirty and discoloured it had actually been!

Ponte Vecchio was jam-packed with tourists either looking into the jewellers windows or walking to another to do the same! A distraction from the heat and humidity, perhaps?
By the time we needed to go back to the Uffizi to line up to swap our vouchers for tickets and then go to the other line to wait to enter the museum, we had been walking for hours and it had already been quite a day. Unfortunately, neither of us really enjoyed the paintings and sculptures on display there (there was one I photographed that I liked), so we left after about an hour and a half somewhat disappointed to drive to our last destination in Italy.


Faux Pas!
We all know how it is when travel arrangements don't quite work out. After driving from Florence for another couple of hours to our next accommodation, up in the hills of the Cinque Terre National park and arriving at about eight pm, we discovered that there was no one here that was in charge. We weren't on a list at the office door, but there was a key in the door of the apartment we had booked. Another guest (French) suggested that we could stay in the spare room in their apartment if we didn't want to just take the apartment anyway. We decided to as we were both really ready to stop for the day after a hot and humid day in Florence.
In the morning, we discovered that we were a day early and that we hadn't booked the apartment for that night! (We hadn't actually booked any accommodation for that night - the diary showed that.) By the time we realised that it was all our mistake, there was no one in charge around - they'd left for the day!
However, all is well! We paid the extra this morning, it was lucky that the key was left in the door by mistake, etc etc. Double checking now about to occur for the rest of our bookings...

Cinque Terre
After a rest day, we headed into La Spezia to catch the train to the towns of Cinque Terre. (These towns are most easily reached by train as the roads to them are in an extremely poor state and some cannot be reached by car anyway.) We parked the car at a park and ride centre. Catching the bus seemed an easy way to get to the station. Unfortunately, the bus we took didn't go to the station, but we didn't know until we arrived at the terminus and had to get out! The bus driver took pity on us, telling us to get back on the bus after his break and then he organised with a passenger to tell us which stop to get off at to catch another bus to the station. Deciding that it wasn't too far to walk when we got off, we set off anyway. It took longer than we had expected and we sought the shady side of the street as much as we could. We were a bit later than we had planned to be when we finally did get to the station...
It was a short train trip to the 5th (Riomaggiore) of the Cinque Terre towns we decided to head to first. Leaving the station, I was surprised to see the sheer number of umbrellas and people on the beach. We were ready for some lunch and headed up the hill to a cafe/restaurant that had seating overlooking the water. We had a very pleasant lunch of meat and cheese platters with bread and a chance to cool off a little.
After lunch, we went for a wander back down the street past the station to see more of the town, taking a few photos as we went.
The next town we stopped at (the 3rd, Corneglia) was a bad choice as there were only a few houses and the station there! We had quite a wait for the next train, spending the time in the best patch of shade we could find!
Our last stop (at the first of the Cinque Terre towns, Monterosso Al Mare) was a more pleasant surprise. We walked through a tunnel to the marina, then up the hill a bit on both sides before walking back into the town. Walking uphill on the Main Street was a bit cooler in the shade. We were surprised and pleased to see that the town was not overrun with tourist stalls and shops, making it the more enjoyable of the three towns we visited.