Left Bologna this morning and made our way further north to a small northern Italian town Udine. Only staying here one night as we are on a bit of a schedule to be in Frankfurt by the 10th to pick up Sam. The drive up was fairly uninteresting, fairly industrial/urban landscape as we wound our way north of Venice. A double check of google maps made sure we were not going anywhere near the Slovenian border (a reference to a previous trip). Arrived in Udine about l...

After our less than memorable experience in Genoa, we headed east to go across to Bologna . Weather is a bit weird. Temp has dropped down to about 4C. Pea soup fog all the way across northern Italy, no rain or wind though. Perfect weather for hurtling along the freeway at 130+. Not too sure what we expected in Bologna. Were we swapping one big city madness for another? Both cities ware of a similar size - roughly half a million people crammed into an area smaller...

Today proved to be the worst travel day we have ever had in all our trips to Europe. We decided, for some unknown reason, to make a dash across France to go to Genoa in Italy - a distance of over 500km. I don't know what we were thinking - we usually limit our driving to about 3 hours max. Anyway, off we went. At least the weather was good (in fact except for a couple of rainy days, we have been blessed with really good mild weather - Snow in Clermont-Ferrand was...

We left Parma yesterday and headed up to Padua (or Padova). This is to be our last stop in Italy before we head over to Croatia. Once again, Padua proves to be a real gem - the sum of its parts turns out to be greater than its individual attractions. We spent the whole afternoon getting lost in the maze of its inner city streets. We must be getting accustomed to the nature of Italian cities - no matter how much we got turned around we always had a sense of the di...

Left Asti yesterday to head across to Parma. It took us about 25 minutes to de-ice the windscreen and windows before we could start driving. Even though it had stopped snowing, it was still below zero, with a thick blanket of fog covering the city. We again decided to forgo the convenience of using the Autostrada and stick to the regional roads (to see more of the "real" Italy). Well, after about 2 hours of crawling along at less than 100kmh, and negotiating a ne...