Road trip Rome to Venice

We left Rome on Friday 28th after spending 4 full days of maintenance isssues on the boat, well Robbie doing all the work, I got sick again after we went out for dinner with Peter and Heidi the night before they flew home to Germany for a week. Robbie has taken off the anchor winch which had just started to leak oil and serviced it, taken the alternators off the wing engine, generator and the small alternator off the main engine that charges its battery for servicing. We dropped the Winslow liferaft off to be serviced, which will take around 10 days and cost around 1500.00 euros!. We drove to the UPS depot and collected our parcel of Stabiliser rod ends which we had sent from ABT in the USA. It is not easy finding addresses in Italy, they barely have any signposts and it takes us a good half hour to find the business once the GPS tells us we have arrived at our destination!

We set off on the road trip finally on Friday morning, in our little Citroen rental car, and headed to Massa, where we collected our Furuno chartplotter cards that we had posted a few weeks ago to be updated with new charts for the Western Med, Africa and Canary Islands. We are heading towards Venice, in no particular hurry or plan, just going where it looks nice. We arrived in Carrara about half an hour from Massa, it is quite high up in the hills and there are heaps of marble quarries all around. the town is very quaint and beautiful old buildings. We stayed in the Hotel Michaelangelo which was very nice and right in town. We went and had a couple of drinks in a local bar in the town square, and had a few games of 500, dealing 3 hands but obviously only playing 2. Pretty safe to say that I won mostly.

We had a walk for 10 minutes and found a lovely Pizzeria and enjoyed a pizza and a bottle of wine and then back to the hotel for our first night off the water for a long time. Had a pretty good sleep except for a few mozzies (so you dont just get them on a boat hey!) We had a nice European breakfast Robbie had a hardboiled egg (cold), bread, cheese, Ham, croissant, Yoghurt, and tea, and I had fruit , yoghurt and 2 croissants they are soo good! Then we walked it off exploring the town. We set off from Carrara with no real destination in mind just heading towards Venice. We drove high in the Alps, wow just stunningly beautiful scenery, very green, very high and very narrow roads! We were glad we only had a small car. We headed towards Castelnovo ne’ Monti a unique cliff that you can see for 30 kilometres that is famous for abseiling. We continued past here and came across some 4 wheel drivers having fun, we stopped and watched for a while and then carried on to Mirandola, a small country town. where we will stay tonight and head to Venice tomorrow.