As we've moved east daybreak gets earlier and it's light well before 06:00. Today is patchy cloud and quite muggy. We're ready to leave around 10:00, the owner wishes us a good journey and asks us to review his site on the internet. He's working hard on improvements and says he hopes in two years it will be as he wants it. We certainly leave in a better frame of mind than we arrived. A few miles out through the busy town of Battipaglia and we're on the motorw...

We wake, as we fell asleep, to the sloshing of waves 30m away on the beach. After a few Easter fireworks at 23:30 it was a very peaceful night. We are very relaxed. Yesterday we felt there would be nothing to do if we stayed, but this morning we turn it about and decide we could stay and do nothing. For the first time in two weeks we don't have to be up or be anywhere so we enjoy the lie in. The Germans depart and the Austrians go out for the day leaving us ...

The first sounds we hear are swallows and sparrows tweeting. The sparrows are mating now and the males puff up and posture before doing their duty. The sun comes up behind the big mountain which is just a wispy silhouette in the early haze but as the sun climbs the shape and shadow gains in definition. When we arrived we saw a pen full of goats, thinking it was a goat farm, but as Ali wanders around taking photos it become clear that pigs are the main animals....

Traffic starts quite early but it was a peaceful night. By the time we leave, the Germans are, as they were when we arrived, out in their deckchairs. Surely there are more enjoyable things than sitting in a gravel parking area next to a busy road. Each to their own. We head back to town and over the bridge, all looking better than yesterday, and soon we are out on the main roads towards Civitavecchia. It appears quite marshy with a good few canals and rich g...

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 tur...