Day 20- en route to Rome Surprisingly, we managed to get up when our alarm went off this morning (a huge change from previous days of hitting snooze 5 times before turning the alarm off) and we left for Rome at our agreed time of 10am. Neither of us were looking forward to the trip downhill to La Spezia, given how scary and dangerous the trip uphill was. A fortunate mistake had us miss the almost invisible left hand turn that La Punta Caro wanted us to take...

Be aware of incredibly large bees, wasps and hornets that love to terrorise tourists. Hotels in summer do not have self-thermostating air conditioning. It is set to a temperature of about 26 degrees which can be uncomfortably hot at night. Also, it is very rare to get a fridge in your hotel room, and almost impossible to get an iron unless you are in a 5 star hotel. A popular shower in hotels is the hand-held. Either by coincidence or not, at almost...

Day 17 - en route to Cinque Terre Carl could only use one word to describe the drive from France to Italy- DOWN. After3 hours of exclamations "Em! Look! We're still going down!" I politely asked him toonly tell me if something new was happening. Once we hit La Spezia, we were mistaken in believing that we were on the homestretch. Following the directions of La Punta Caro (b****-face, our sat nav), wefollowed a death trap of seriously winding and skinn...

Day 15- En route to Villefranche via Eze (written by Carl)After a couple of hours of getting organised, we finally checked out of the (worst)Best Western and left Antibes en route to Eze. On the way we were diverted throughsome of Nice. We didn't stop off as we were eager to get to Eze and we'd had enoughof rows upon rows of buildings for the time being. Just beyond Nice, we were led to a never-ending climb up the mountains ofVillefrance. We drove at 50km/h inst...

Day 13 - en route to Antibes We set the alarm this morning for 8:30am, determined to finally make it to the hotel breakfast. I then left Carl at the hotel to set on a journey to get a shellac manicure (I was getting desperate!) and after failing and then asking for directions in broken French (hey - it's effective communication if the message is understood, which it was!) I found a tiny salon that used NSI light cured nailpolish which is similar to shella...