The Med

We've been chasing warmth since we arrived in Europe mid-August. But we haven't been able to outwit autumn and seem merely to be keeping pace with falling leaves as we venture southward. On Italy's Ligurian coast we camped one night in a grotty grove where feral cats roamed and there, falling chestnuts accompanied the leaves, greatly imperilling our noggins! While the tent did receive a few direct strikes during the night, I was let off with a glancing blow to my shoulder. Adam was wholly unscathed. He must have better guardian angels than myself.

Our other campsites in Italy were significantly more charming. One was located in a terraced former olive grove, with utility sink at every site! A great luxury. At the other, we were sited in our tent on a narrow outcrop directly overlooking the Mediterranean from where we could watch the cruise ships lumber past.

[Latte on the Ligurian Coast]

Moving across the coastal roads of the Ligurian Coast and the Côte d'Azur is slow going as the road snakes along the undulating contours of the shore. The area is enormously built up and traffic is forced to slow for town after town. Even I tried my hand at 'filtering' or lane splitting when traffic grew particularly dense. Mopeds and vespas abound, and general policy is to ride the centreline bypassing all of the wider, lane-bound traffic. This is a tougher manoeuvre on our motorcycles as the panniers widen our girth so we are not as nimble in narrow gaps, but anything to escape plodding traffic moving twenty kilometres an hour under the limit.

We timed our overnight stays on either side of Monaco, Nice and Cannes so that we could cross this especially densely populated area in a single day. We had a splendid day for it and enjoyed the views from high on the hills, out of the fray. Some road works forced us down into Monte Carlo but Adam's GPS found us a sneaky snaking and precipitously steep route through back lanes that kept us on the slopes and out of the city centre.

[Coast near La Spezia, Italy]

I had hoped to find the Côte d'Azur to be a warm and quiet place to park ourselves for a bit, but was put off by the ticky tackiness of the area and so in the end, we stayed only an extra day to see to some laundry and some more mattress patching. The days were still warm but even here the nights were cooling off, and so we continued our journey chasing the warmth.