'allo

After Rome we had 2 nights in London. We had just enough time to get some stuff sorted out (tax, stored junk, etc) and squeeze in a pub lunch with some of Aimee's (now ex) work collegues (a good excuse for a last meal of 'sausages and mash' and a pint of real ale) before boarding a flight to the USA for the last leg of our trip.

Thanks again Liv for putting us up and feeding us some of your good Irish cooking (that was Irish Chillie, yeah?).

The USA is where we are now. More on that soon...

Buon giorno.

Italy is a fantastic country. The food is fantastic - the best pasta, pizza, dolchi - fantastic vino, culture, art, architecture, history, language, climate, mountains, lakes and countryside.

There is a lot to see in Rome (besides old Beatles), so we did a lot of walking to see as much as we could in the couple of days we had there.

We were looking for a quieter, less touristed corner of Tuscany. We found it in the virtually unchanged medieval hilltop town of Cortona in SE Tuscany. Our accomodation was in a hostel in an old convent with a vaulted hall for a common room.

After Tuscany we would be spending the next 2 weeks or so in Rome, London, New York and LA in that order, so we made the most of the countryside. We walked in the hills, amongst the vineyards, stone villas and pencil pines. We stopped for a coffee at a small village cafe where old Italian men were playing cards. We even took to the steep cobbled streets at dawn in search of good photos. Honest...

We made our way from Torbole south through fair Verona (of Romeo and Juliet fame) and Bologna (of spag bol fame) to Florence in Tuscany.

Florence is where the Renaissance began in the 14th century and is still Italy's home of Art and Architecture. We spent several days wandering the streets and alleys, admiring the piazzas and statues.

We did the train thing again to get from Nice to Venice in Italy, via a short stop in Milan. Venice was fantastic, but not cheap, so after a couple of days we were looking for another spot to hang out in northern Italy.

We found out that Adam (a friend from Melbourne currently living in Germany) and his girlfriend, Sandra, were going to be camping in a town called Torbole from the next day onwards. Torbole wasn't in our guide book, so we found it on a map in a bookstore and found out roughly how to get there from the information people at the station (people in Venice seem unaware that there is a world outside of Venice and they are very unhelpful!).

We rolled into Rome yesterday to discover there was a free concert on.

On a hot Rome night we went along to see Paul Mcartney perform outside the Coloseum! It was fantastic. With the Coloseum lit up behind him he belted out 3 hours of Beatles, Wings and his other songs. It was at it's most surreal when he sung Let it Be and Hey Jude (although we think some Italians were singing 'hey dude') as the crowd really got behind these.

Aimee was quick to notice the irony when he sung Live and Let Die...

Bonjour!

We spent a great week in the south of France on the Cote de Azure; The French Riviera.

We enjoyed sunning ourselves on the beaches in Nice and Cannes (home of the film festival) with the beautiful people, and paying out on the posh, monied 'Guchi Gang' (with their jumpers draped over their shoulders and leading their tiny dogs) on the promenades.

OK, so I just did a post for Spain, but we have actually gotten a little bit behind in the posts, thanks to some extortionate internet cafe fees outside of Spain.

We have actually moved through the south of France (sunned ourselves on the French Riviera) and into Italy (getting stuck into piazzas and pizzas). We have visited Venice, camped by a lake in the mountains with a friend from home (Adam C. of hostel fame) and we are now in Florence.

I don't want to get too far ahead of myself though, and have you miss out on all the juicy travel anecdotes, so we'll put up some posts for France and then Italy soon.

We went down to the coast to Almaria for a day or 2 on the beach. Unfortunatley the weather turned rather 'blustery' on us about an hour after we arrived. We spent the whole next day killing time in what must be the south of Spain's most boring and back-backer unfriendly town, waiting for our 9:30pm overnight bus to Barcelona to leave. Drank way too much coffee.

Barcelona, on the other hand, was excellent.