Going to the Dogs

On Sunday morning at the campsite lake we noticed a group of cars, vans, people in wetsuits and dogs. The dogs were having a grand time jumping in the water and retrieving things. It soon became clear that this was not a dog fun day and these were no ordinary dogs, but Newfoundlands having a rescue training session. These are big, powerful dogs as you can see in this photo, this one having just emerged from the lake dripping wet.

The dogs all wore a collar with a handle so that non-swimmers would have something to hold on to while being saved. How practical! This handle can be clearly seen on the swimming dog below. I suppose you could also use it to rescue the dog.

Even more impressive was the boat rescue. A Newfoundland swam out to an inflatable 30 yards off shore, grabbed the rope hanging off the side of the boat in its mouth and towed the boat to the bank with two men in wetsuits aboard. Perhaps it’s all part of a big eco-plan to save fuel. Container ships entering Livorno port will be piloted in by 2,000 Newfoundland tow-dogs.

April 5th: Visit to Lucca

Lucca is an almost perfectly preserved medieval city surrounded by its original massive walls. Although only 15 miles north of Pisa, it receives just a fraction of Pisa’s visitors. Puccini, the composer of so many famous operas, was born here. It is one of the riches cities in Tuscany based on silk and high quality olive oil.
This is a typical square, the Piazza San Michele, with an ornate church that somehow looks as if the roof is missing. Apparently the church was meant to be built up to the level of the façade but the money ran out.

A really extraordinary square, an oval square, is the Piazza Anfiteatro Romano. As the name suggest, it was originally a roman amphitheatre and the medieval buildings now present were built on its foundations. It has one set of buildings on the outside of the perimeter and another, back to back, on the inside. This is the more picturesque aspect, as it is what comprises the square itself.

It’s always interesting to compare how these places looked in past times, and an old photo was displayed in the square from about a century ago. You can see that not much has change apart from the market stall buildings in the centre of the old picture.

And now two weary tourists, sat by the canal that runs through the city. The whole place has a quiet, harmonious elegance that is also reflected in the exclusive and expensive shops. To sum it up, we had a most enjoyable day out.

Sat 31st March: to Pisa

Levanto to Pisa is 60 miles, and the campsite 5 miles to the south of the city, set in a nature reserve, with a small fishing lake. Very peaceful, even though less than 3 miles from the end of Pisa airport runway. Just remove the jack-hammer ear defenders before you go to bed. It’s here we are meeting our friends Paul & Trish: we both arrive just after lunch within an hour of each other.
Here’s a view of the site, with us in the centre behind the silver car and Paul & Trish on the right in the motor home.

All visits to Pisa must contain a picture of the Leaning Tower, so let’s get that done right now, with a dramatic story to tell. It’s been standing since 1173, leaning more and more over the years, until before our very eyes it started to topple. By a stroke of great fortune, Trish was on hand to save it- just in time. This will surely merit a marble statue in the piazza.

The Tower, Cathedral and Baptistry are located together in the grassy Campo dei Miracoli (Field of Miracles) with the Camposanto cemetery. The buildings all date from roughly the same period and make a magnificent group. The next snap shows another magnificent group posing in front of the Cathedral and Baptistry. The angle of the photo is a bit odd as the camera was on the grass on timer, so it makes the Baptistry look like a spaceship from which we have just emerged, disorientated but happy E.T.’s.

The rest of Pisa is not to be ignored and there are many fine ancient buildings in the squares and streets.

The remaining fine houses along the banks of the river Arno that flows through Pisa are also worth a photo.

Pisa is of course touristy but the cafes and restaurants were reasonable value for money. We sampled the fare at lunchtime with pizza in the piazza at Pisa.

Thursday March 29th

Today we galvanised ourselves into action. We caught the train from Levanto to Riomaggiore, the furthest of the Cinque Terra’s five villages, with the intention of walking back towards Levanto. It’s too far to cover all in one go, but each of the villages has a station and you just jump on the train when you’ve had enough.
The photo shows the start of this spectacular coastal path: on the right in the photo you can see the path railings. We’re heading for village no.2, Manarola.

The villages were built wherever they could be fitted in, on rocky outcrops and in steep valleys. The result is very picturesque, as in the example of Manarola below with its multi-coloured houses and small harbour. Tarmac roads only came in the 1990’s.

Before the roads and the tourists, the area supported itself by fishing and vineyards. Wine is still an important product and the vines are immaculately tended on incredibly steep terraces. See photo underneath. Vegetables for local consumption are also grown in the same way. Hard though the work was, and still is, we saw some really ancient villagers on these plots so perhaps the exercise, fresh air and lack of modern stress gets them to a ripe old age.

Moving on from Manarola, another lovely headland beckons, behind which lies village no.3.

But round the next corner, we come to a barrier that states that the onward path is unsafe and therefore closed. So, without a convenient train due to hop around this obstacle, we decide to retrace our steps to our starting point, Riomaggiore. But all is not lost as we now walked around the village, not having done so earlier in our eagerness to get started on the walk. The next photo typifies so many places in Italy.

2012 Italy

March 25th : Levanto


We are staying at Levanto, 50 miles south of Genoa. This is the Cinque Terra region, a National Park comprising coastal mountains and ancient picturesque fishing villages, some of which were only accessible by boat in former times. The only reasonable beach in this area is here at Levanto, so the town gets packed out in summer. Fortunately, it’s now only the start of the season, as the next photo shows: all sand, no bodies (the Mafia’s less active in these parts).

The campsite is a five-minute walk from the beach, at the edge of town, overlooked by a lovely old church bell tower. The lovely old church bell tower, unsurprisingly, contains a lovely old large bell that is loosed off loudly at seemingly random intervals during the day and early morning. It’s the price you cheerfully pay for local atmosphere. Fortunately, we’re on the opposite side of the site, overlooking a small vineyard. Idyllic.

We’re enjoying chilling out as the weather is sunny and warm, so may not get round to doing the full Cinque Terra tourist trail.

USA: Comparisons and Overview

Speaking the same language makes visiting the US relatively easy. Well, nearly the same language, as the following selection of road signs illustrates. In the first one, standing means parking. All this is easy enough to work out except when you’re driving along and need instant comprehension.

This next one is my favourite. Beware, all you honkers!

We have some camping friends, Bob & Mavis, who are keen cyclists, and often bring a tandem down to Spain where we all meet up. Well, Bob & Mavis, let me tell you- everything is so much bigger here in the States!


Camping-wise, the average outfit is quite a lot bigger than in Europe. Our 25-foot motorhome is small compared to the typical units using the campsites we’ve stayed at in our eight weeks here. The biggest units are the bus conversions, as in the photo below. These are around 40 ft long, often towing a family car or 20 ft SUV. Notice also the slide-outs. Top-of-the-range prices: a staggering $1,750,000! I don’t think Cliff Richard’s ex-London Transport bus in Summer Holiday cost that much.

Type two are the fifth wheelers, very common here, and the biggest as big as the bus conversions. The towing vehicle is always a pickup truck mostly with the same 6 litre engine as powers our camper.

There are also caravans, but again much longer than UK/Euro standards, all twin axle, and towed by a similar truck to the fifth wheelers.

Can’t leave out all those beautifully turned out lorries that zoom past us on the highways (no special speed restrictions for trucks here). This is an example:


We have had a super time here in the Eastern US. It has all been better than anticipated: driving the rv, driving in general, the campsites, the friendliness of the Americans, and the diversity of the places to visit with their many sub-cultures.

And last but not least, we’ve had some lovely visits with Claire and family, so it would be most appropriate to finish with another family photo:

South Carolina

The Audubon Swamp: these are tupelo trees, one of the few that can grow permanently in water. The other is the swamp or bald cypress and both are common in these vast subtropical swamps that run for 1,000 miles, all the way from Virginia to Florida. I’ve used generous amounts of mosquito repellent that according to the label also sees off “chiggers”. A Google search reveals these to be biting mites that live in grass and cause severe itching. The expression, “bitten by the travel bug” is open to many interpretations!

Now we come to the shallow lake where the alligators live, in their natural habitat. We only saw them from a distance, as they are quite shy and much less aggressive than crocodiles. However, it is against the state law to feed them, so we didn’t come armed with a tin of Lassie. They are also a protected species and this is rigorously applied as we were told happened at the campsite where we’re staying. The large campsite lake had an alligator living there that one of the permanent residents baited and killed, following which he was reported and arrested by the police.

We did get a lovely close-up of this Great Blue Heron, who looks as if he’s wading through a pool of treacle.
And now to yet another plantation: Boone Hall. This one’s a bit different, as it’s been used many times as a film location. The house and avenue of trees shown below is how you would imagine a plantation house and entrance drive to be.



Those white candyfloss bits of tree catching the sunlight are Spanish Moss. It is neither Spanish nor moss. It’s a flowering plant that lives on oak and cypress trees and gets all its sustenance from the air, and is named after the early Spanish settlers' wispy beards.
The plantation is also a working farm, currently producing vegetables. From the 1880’s until 1911 it was the world’s largest pecan nut plantation, 14,000 trees. In 1911 a hurricane destroyed almost all the trees after which the plantation moved on to crops.
Boone Hall originates way back from 1681, so naturally it has a slave history, with rice as the main crop in this area. The household slaves were housed in these buildings made from reject bricks turned out by the slave brickworks. This was top housing as the field workers lived in wooden shacks near the fields, which of course haven’t survived. They were still being occupied as dwellings by poor workers up to the 1940’s.

Before coming to Charleston, we expected the town to be capitalising on all aspects of its tourist potential, including the “Charleston”, the 1920’s dance and symbol of the party set of that era. We thought some cafes would be playing the music with maybe a video, perhaps a small museum somewhere in the town. When I phone my Dad and tell him where we are, I can tell it’s a blur of places- until we came to Charleston. “Ah, that’s where that dance comes from”, he said straight away. We couldn’t find any recognition of it in the town, but we did find a poster describing its origins, surprisingly, in Boone Hall.

Would you believe it, the Charleston dance originated from the music of the Jenkins Orphanage band in Charleston. The Jenkins Orphanage was founded in 1891 by the Rev Jenkins for African American orphans. The orphanage had received donations of some musical instruments and the reverend decided to get some musicians in to teach the youngsters to play. The experiment was so successful that the orphanage developed a band culture, and by the 20’s was running as many as 5 bands some of which toured America and Europe. The song “Charleston” was written into a Broadway musical, and the dance steps appeared in another show, which all helped to broaden its popularity.