Our journey through Italy brought us into a different landscape again. Gone were the arid brown plains, interspersed with the peach and fruit orchards, we were now passing olive groves and prickly pears, as we are up the miles these gave way to vineyards and then on to pass empty fields of harvested crops and then once more into the rolling hills and up onto the sweeping corners of the mountains. Along the route towering above the roads were mountain side villa...

We've just set off on a 9 hour ferry across to Italy a deviation from our anticipated route but one we both feel is the right decision. So reflecting on our last few days travelling through Albanian the mix of sights and experiences not to mention emotions have been at times awesome, awe inspiring, humorous and terrifying! Yesterday was a trial for me, I was absolutely petrified getting back on the bike to leave the hotel knowing that we would once again have t...

Today we have had a very relaxed day starting with Colin having the most sumptuous breakfast ever! Each of the courses were served beautifully and tasted even better, I enjoyed my melon and hot water much to the dismay of the owner/manager who tried desperately to get me to eat something else, his final word to Colin were "I need a wife like this one"! As we walked down to the castle, the hotel manager passed us and told us to visit an old merchants house down t...

An early start this morning for a number of reasons the first being if we couldn't get through the Albanian border we would have time to re route, if we did get through then we knew the route we were taking was a long ride and given the road conditions that we have experienced already this trip we knew that it would take far longer than the predicted 6 hours and we were right. Also we didn't want to ride in the hottest part of the day. The roads were as expecte...

Our journeys yesterday and today have been everything that we hoped for when we planned our tour, well almost everything-some of the road surfaces leave a great deal to be desired, whilst the potholes are not quite up to the Ukrainian size they are a close second! Moving between Bulgaria and Macedonia gave us the biggest landscape change we'd seen since setting off through Belgian. Up until coming into Macedonia the landscapes had been consistently compromising ...