Cinque Terre Petit

Well we had heard about the beautiful 8km Cinque Terre walk. And the only thing better than a beautiful walk, is a beautiful drive. So the next morning we packed up, Anna had an amazingly thick hot chocolate, and we drove the high road looking down on the amazing Mediterranean and cute coastal villages.

The we randomly decided to drive across Europe - after all, what good is a trip where you don't do a 1700km drive in 24hrs?

Our incredible drive took us across part of Italy and across most of France. We had a truly amazing section of road which was tunnels & bridges almost the entire way. Anna took a tally of a small section of road between La Spezia and Genova (about 90km) where we saw the following:
- Men at work: 10
- Bridges: 50
- Tunnels: 42
- Churches: 40
- Autogrills: 3 (rest area restaurant)
- Fires: 2

So bearing in mind that the tunnels could be over 2km long and the bridges were more like Tauranga to the Mount bridges, than typical NZ bridges (except higher!) - I really enjoyed the drive. I had been wanting to drive one of those roads since I saw them from the train 12 years ago.

The next notable thing was the crossing from Italy to France where we went through a 12km long tunnel. I tried to keep the movie "Daylight" out of my mind but it was uneventful. We drove till 1:30 before finding a nice rest area. Most rest areas we've seen have a few trucks but I guess at 1:30am most drivers are wanting some sleep and it was like a huge village of trucks, parked everywhere they could. Luckily there was another area for cars so we had a good sleep and were up again at 5:45 to get a good start on the day. We soon made it to Tours before plans changed slightly and we decided to head to Versailles, Paris for the afternoon. We had a short walk down the street and liked it so much that we found a fantastic camp ground and we've decided to stay for a few days.