Some days are Diamonds...

It’s funny when you’re travelling, you have good days and you have bad days… a bit like life real really! Which of course this isn’t, is it? You can get up in the morning full of the joi de vivre and for no reason at all things just don’t flow your way; today was one of those days !

The day started well enough in my cornfield wild camp, I even got a wave from the farmer as I was packing up my camp from his field. I found the road I wanted easily enough and the weather was… well too damn hot really I guess, in fact one of my first jobs this morning was to cut the sleeves out of my beloved Horizons T-shirt. By 9.30 I was already running in 30C and by 11.30 it was 36C, and we hadn’t reached the peak by any means. The run down the coast was busy, very busy… I tried in vain to find a bit of beach or sea that wasn’t a seething mass of humanity and failed dismally. I looked at a couple of camp sites and they were bursting at the seems… and then the penny dropped; 30^th June, tomorrow Sunday is the 1^st July, peak holiday season has arrived, and the World and his friends are now on their annual jollies! Thank God I leave for the peace and quiet (hopefully) of Greece tomorrow!

Yes, just been on line and booked my passage to Greece. Bari to Patra with Superfast Ferries, check in at 11am, sailing at 1pm. 24 Hours across the Adriatic, so Greece here I come. The price of this is staying at a grotty camp site as it has free WiFi, on a pitch just about big enough for my little tent and the bike. This crammed in the middle of other little pitches all identical except for the size of the tent on it and it had better not be too big or it won’t fit! But then again at just 10 Euro it is the cheapest site I’ve been on in Italy.

I must admit that this is certainly not my favourite part of Italy, it’s just toooo busy, too developed and too dirty. I’ve been extremely surprised at the huge amount of rubbish strew around, verges are strewn with it, laybys are stacked with it, streets are awash with it. Have the austerity measures bitten so hard that rubbish collection has been abandoned? Or is it simply that the Italians don’t care? In some places it was so bad it could almost have been Africa and it seems the further south I have come the worse the problem gets.

I’m also finding that food is proving to be a bit of a problem in the heat, made worse since I split with Taz & Joel. It’s quite difficult to buy small enough portions of things for just one meal and of course not much keeps well in a hot box which is what my black panniers become in this intense heat. Still it’s got to be good for my diet; firstly I don’t have much of an appetite; secondly I can’t be bothered to cook, so I’m living mainly on fresh fruit with a bit of Salad thrown in here and there and very tasty it is too! Oh! and the occasional glass of the red Vino which works well warm. Of course it could just be that I got lazy with Taz serving up wonderfully tasty Indian food for us all. Yes, now that we have parted I cherish even more those lazy idyllic weeks we spent just meandering through the hills and yes, I miss their company a hell of a lot.

I guess it’s a strange quirk of my character that always seems to make me do things the hard way; if there’s no challenge I seem to have to make one! If life is too easy… well you get the drift, and if you’re reading this the chances are that you know me and are nodding sagely in agreement already!!! Anyway, nuff said and I am already really looking forward to meeting up with Taz and Joel at the Horizons meeting in Greece at the end of July. Between now and then there is a lot to do and see. Even rethinking my Turkey plans, I know full well that I can’t do it all if I’m to return to the UK by early September. Think I need to get a skype call in to Taz over the next few days to see if they have firmed up on their plans for apre-Horizons. Meanwhile I sit by the pool supping an ice cold beer listening to the hoards of screaming kids.. perhaps life’s not so bad, but there is something missing………