We started with a plan. Leave Pisa, drive down the main road, a bit along the coast and spend the night on an olive farm between Grosseto and Civitavecchia.

1 - Leave Pisa: The road we want to take passes under the ancient viaduct, miles of arches in a brick wall. But the road arch is fitted with scaffold reducing clearance to 2.7m, Mary*Lou needs 3m. So we turn away and Snoopy starts bonging and beeping. We turn down a side lane under a clear archway to turn around and end up doing a 3 point turn on a cyclepath.

Eventually we find an alternative route out, skirting Livorno. It's quite a pretty run through lush green fields and small wooded areas, always with mountains visible ahead. There is also typically Tuscan villas surrounded by Cypress trees.

Ali suggests we deviate into Cecina to have lunch by the sea. We backtrack from the next roundabout and weave through the town's tortuous one-way system. The camperstop is nowhere near the sea so in the end we pull into the next big enough carpark. After lunch the one-way system takes us briefly onto the seafront, then it's all around the houses to get back to the main road, where we join dual carriageway. That's not an expressway either, rutted and rippled and fitted with more than the ocassional ski jump literally lifting us out of our seats at anything approaching 50mph.

We turn off at Follonica to follow the scenic route but apart from the town it's almost endless sandpines and cycle paths, with a 30mph speed limit.

Ali finds an aire in Marina di Grosseto so we decide to pull in there, have coffee and ring the olive farm as required in the Fatorre Amico book. Marina di Grosseto is more maze-like than Cecina and by the time we actually find the stop, tempers are frayed.

Without all these diversions we could have been on the farm, but now it's still 40 odd miles and well over an hour away.

We go instead to the large out-of-town camperstop 3 miles away. There is only one other [German] van in a space designated for fifty. It's flat gravel surronded by trees but next to the main road, which we hope will quieten later.

After coffee we consider moving on to catch up miles, but we had a day like this in Italy once before and were trying to find parking as it was getting dark. That day ended on the most miserable, overpriced, couldn't-care-less campsite possible.

All is not wasted, it gives us time to work out stages for the remaining miles to Sicily. There is still nearly 600 miles to go, so we decide that using motorways as much as possible will get us there for the weekend.

No CD today - the roads were too rough to listen

Dinner : chicken salad