Aurevoir France, Buongiorno Italia

The meal was nice but pricy for what we had, the van was still there when we got back. Not the best nights sleep, church clock chiming every half hour and a car alarm going off every ten minutes. As the carpark is used by people who work in town and they start work around 8 am we decide to leave early and breakfast further down the road.



We turn down a small road and find ourselves in the Gorges de Vesubie,

spectacular cliffs a cascading clear mountain stream and another winding narrow road to negotiate, the road climbs up and up past hilltop villages, the road in places narrowing to a mere sliver, getting colder and colder until we reach 1600m and the Col de Turini which has seen its fair share of snow in the past few days,

 the road is quite slippery in places with about 5cm of fresh snow, we edge the van down to a warmer altitude and stop for lunch.


Arriving back in Sospel for about the third time in as many days we deviate to Breil sur Roya, one of many old medieval towns dotted around the hills

 and head for the Italian border town of Tende,

 a few km up the road and we enter the 3km long tunnel and on to Italy.

As children we both read the lion the witch and the wardrobe series of books, we now know exactly how Edmund, Lucy, Peter and the other one felt because on exiting the tunnel we were in a completely different world, the weather changed quite dramatically and we seem to have gone back in time somewhat.

We drive for a bit and it gets dark, surprisingly we find a campsite open "Campeggio di perduti" says the sign.


where I negotiate a pitch for the night using my half a dozen words of Italian, quite a bit of French and smattering of English.