After a somewhat short 5 hour sleep, we got up on Tuesday morning to continue on our journey. Today’s trek would take us from Ponte Sabbioni to somewhere around Florence. About a 400 km drive, we were looking at almost a full day’s drive with a few breaks scattered in.
The first half of the drive was not all that nice. We skirted Venice and not the old historic part everyone is familiar with. The industrial and more modern areas of Venice took us at least an hour to drive through and after that was another hour or so of driving through marshy areas and skirting the ocean.
However, after leaving the coastal region to begin our drive across the country, the landscape opened up and we were treated to wide open roads snaking through the back country of Italy.
At around 3 in the afternoon we decided to stop in a small town which none of us can remember the name of and set out to find some coffee and other refreshments…but the town was almost deserted and of the 2 or 3 locations they had there which served food, nothing was open or would be for the rest of the day. Their afternoon pause started at 12:45 and they didn’t reopen at all.
So we decided to return to our cars and make our own food. We whipped up a quick meal of pasta ali olio and quickly wolfed it down as we watched some dark storm clouds start to roll in. Refreshed, we set off to complete the last 100 km of our drive just as it started to rain. The rain, coupled with crossing a mountain pass with lots of twists and turns with a high point of 900 meters, made for a long journey and we were all rather relieved when we finally reached more level ground.
Not too long later, we pulled into our campsite for the night; a beautiful, hilly, forested site called Camping Village Mugello Verde. However, the joy didn’t last long as Steffen’s RV started losing oil due to the stresses of the pass road and we had to call the auto club. All we could hope for was that there wouldn’t be a major setback.
