After relying on public transport for the entire trip so far, we finally get our own set of wheels . We’ve leased a Peugeot 407 wagon for 34 days to do a loop of the Adriatic Sea and eventually finish up Paris in late October.
Our first challenge was to fit our entire luggage in the car, we have to say the boot section looked much bigger back in Perth when we viewed the car at the Peugeot dealer. Much to the amusement of the Peugeot rep who said it wouldn’t all fit, we managed to fit all of it in the boot unfortunately we ended up piling it to the roof, so I’ll be relying on the side mirrors for the drive.
Our first stop after whizzing along the autostrata was Verona, the setting of tragic love, i.e. Romeo and Juliet. Our second visit to this city was just as hectic as our first, as it was packed with visitors being a Sunday, who were mainly local Italians enjoying the lovely sunshine on the weekend. The city is a favourite destination for Italians on their holidays, mainly to get away from all the foreign tourists that flock Italy and definitely worth a visit or two. Isabella received from a street performer her first balloon sausage dog and she loved it, played with it for hours afterwards till it deflated. The old city itself has a great collection of Roman, Medieval and Renaissance buildings including a Colosseum. And of coarse it has Juliet’s balcony, with a statue of her and its reported (for the tourists) if you hold her left breast you’ll find true love, but then you’ll have to kill yourself in true Shakespearean manner J
To save some time later in the trip we decided to head straight for Lake Bled in Slovenia. A drive of 580km from Milan, but the entire trip was on the autostrata (Freeway) so you can travel legally at 130 km/h, which made the trip a bit quicker. The scenery changed from the plains of Northern Italy to the mountains of Southern Austria and Northern Slovenia. The trip into Slovenia has been made simpler with the construction of the Karawanken Tunnel, which runs 7.8km’s under, oddly enough, the Karawanken mountains and emerges not far from Bled.