May 2017 – Judy and Valerie On the Road

Next stop Greece!

On board the ferry for Greece. We’re doing ‘Camping on Board’ so we sleep in our van on the garage deck. All very new and exciting!!

This has been great. We could hook up to electricity so could use our Remoska for cooking (gas not allowed) and they had showers and toilets for us to use. There were only 6 motorhomes on board and 4 of those left at Igoumenitsa so we pretty much had our own facilities. Very nice ‘Superfast’ new ferry, making our way down the Greek coast to Patras. Definitely recommend it. We sailed from Bari but you can also go from Ancona and possibly Venice. You need to book early to get ‘Camping on Board’. This made the overnight crossing pretty cheap £260 return for a 16 hour crossing, discounts being available for early booking and age!

White-washed towns in Puglia

Found some ladies making lace in the winding streets of Locorotondo

Whilst Cisternino was a lovely town with white-washed houses, a market and a great cafe

Alberobello – UNESCO heritage site

Alberobello is a truly extraordinary town. it contains large numbers of buildings called Trulli.

I felt as though I was in hobbit-land.

Pompeii

I had never been to Pompeii and it was a revelation. I had no idea of the size and that it was a city. It had an amphitheatre which held 20,000 people and a large theatre for plays which held 5,000. It is huge and amazing in terms of the preservation and how you can visualise the lives of the people living there. I’ve now started to read Mary Beard’s ‘Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town’ which is very readable, and they’re just like us. Here are some photos.