Next stop Carey Bay (Oh! alright, Newcastle) to bring best birthday greetings to our youngest, Calinda. Happy Birthday Kiddo ( I won’t embarass you here) Good to see things happening with the house but it does seem a slow process and we can feel Lindy’s frustration. It seems no-one wants to do much work in […]

Four days commemorating what is probably one of the biggest achievements in human history – man’s walk on the Moon. In Canberra, guests of Robert and Judi Dey we have spent these four days (18 – 21 July) remembering, celebrating and recording the Australian involvement in the Moon landing as well as the event and […]

Monday. Coloseum tour day. Met Valentino our tour guide after a bit of confusion and spent the next 2 1/2 hours or so romin in the glomin. This is an incredible place, given that it is 2000 years old, was abandoned in the 5th century, stripped of its decorations and its marble in the centuries […]

Or maybe just starting. By the time we dropped the car at the airport, worked out the trains and got back to the hotel, Saturday, our first day in Rome, was pretty much over. Besides, we needed a rest so the balance of the day was spent planning the uncommitted parts of the rest of […]

The trip back up to Roma was pretty uneventful. I missed the first turn Narelle directed me to and by default she found a better way which as it turned out was a wider road, had fewer twists and turns and relatively little traffic. Then on approach to Napoli we hit the Autostrada and stayed on […]

About a thousand years ago Kelvin Whitford said to me “Europe is much better than Asia” I think mainly cos I’d spent more time in Asia than he had. But in time I think he might have been right. Europe has been more interesting although in different ways. A few centuries later he told me “there are three […]

We moved on from Napoli, just a few k down the road to Ercolano and this trip was perhaps the most challenging so far. Not only are the roads cobblestone and rough as guts the motor scooters are like bees to a honey pot and we’re that honey pot. On top of them, the cars […]

Naples to us foreigners. But the journey doesn’t start here. From Civitavecchia we drove only 60 or 70 k to Latina. This was just a transit stopover for reasons previously enunciated and well it should have been because we found little of interest in this township. One of the weekly chores is laundry. Latina was […]

and there it was – my dream car – an all electric, remote controlled Maserati. And we had to come to Civitavecchia to find it. Only the little shit wouldn’t give it up. I put this place on the itinerary cos I thought I’d seen that it had some sights to offer. It didn’t. We […]

From Pisa its on to Siena, mainly so we can traverse Tuscany, said to be one of the most beautiful regions of Italy. Not sure it is that much different to lots of other areas we’ve seen so far. There are certainly lots of little villages clinging to mountain sides but we’ve seen all of this […]