Italy, ferries and road doggery....

Well....

Holding back tears from just watching Jamie's video (thank you for finding that tune) just then and reading his beautiful outro from his perspective...I now write to you from the perspective of myself and Bon.

I am sitting in a room in Torino (Turin, Italy) after a very early and interesting morning, but let me give you a quick run down. Obviously you know Jamie has now flown home. Bon and I toasted a can of Mythos to him that night sitting on our outside table of the hotel room and tried to hold it together. We busied ourselves for the next couple of days (the wind park is amazing Jamie, gutted you weren't there) in Milos and then got on the boat back to Piraues. After a hairy re-entry into Athens-ish mental nutcase driving land we found an overpriced campsite and settled. The next day we got to Patra in good time and boarded our ferry to Ancona Italy (nothing much happened other than a lot of sleep on the deck in sleeping bags).

The morning that we arrived we rode like the dogs we have become to Piacenza, loads and loads of miles. A slight shock from the usual lack of helmets, t-shirts and sunglasses as we get treated to torrents of rain. Rain that lasted for hours and hours and pummeled us worse than any other weather conditions yet. Oh how we laughed at the situation we found ourselves in, both of us admitting to individual dialogues within our crash helmets asking ourselves what the hell we were doing. When we arrived at our destination a hostel was promised from this land of sunglasses, stylish 14 year olds and loads and loads of money (it seems)...but the hostel did not deliver...it was full.

So we took some initiative while filling up with petrol at about 19.30 hours. There is nobody around and the obvious choice is to hunker down behind the petrol station over looking a prison, fuel ourselves with food and beer and wait for nightfall. When dark enough we set up a tent and chuck a sheet over the bikes. We're in our sleeping bags by 21.30 hours and just decide to get a super early night in our concrete hotel room and get up super early and bugger off.

Success! We wake up and get everything packed back up for absolutely no cash! We are however, freezing our nuts off. We ride off towards Torino (where we now reside in a more than comfortable hostel) in pitch black with rubbish C90 headlights and fog as thick as that cloud we rode through in the alps. No improvements in the weather until about 11.00....nightmare, wet and freezing again. During this journey the second ever technical problem occured as the fuse in Bon's battery popped without reason. It was yet another affirmation of humans in general as some local guy (knocked on his door) drove Bon to a local garage to find another only to find it closed. Some other locals were then involved and more garbled Italian/English/Sign language insued. It ended up with a tin foil improv session and away we went!

Torino (Turin) is massive, grand and huge all at once.

More updates to come....

Sorry this one was so factual but I had to cover a lot of ground. Jamie needs an update so I hope I delivered!