End of Part 1

I

I'm writing this as we wing our way up to Stockholm, where we will enter the 2nd half of our holiday. We have a bit of a change of pace now - from a touristy/driving holiday to more of an orienteering holiday including the Swedish 5 day (O-Ringen), the Swiss O-Week and the World Champs spectator races.  We'll also see Paul and no doubt some other Australians which will be exciting.

It's a good time to reflect upon the last 4 weeks.  All up we drove 4387 kilometers in around 30 days. The driving was fine. Google maps was generally awesome (including this morning when we had to re-route ourselves quite a few times to avoid peak hour accidents in the outskirts of Munich). 

We visited 5 countries (France, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia & Austria) and stayed in 19 different places, including 7 different camp grounds.  We mostly stayed at least 2 nights in the places - the exceptions being Annecy, Trieste, Albertville &  St Genest Malfaux where we only stayed one as they were generally just on our way to other places.  

We stayed in apartments in the big tourist locations - Paris, La Spezia (for the Cinque Terre), Venice & Plitvice. This was mostly so we could get an early start in the busy areas, but also so we didn't have to leave all our stuff in tents or car for long days in high risk areas. We ended up having to get 2 nights in an apartment in Bled as we couldn't get into the campground. So far we haven't lost, broken or had anything stolen.  Oh actually, my little camera has stopped including green in the photos - I think Slovenia broke the green receptors if there are such things! 

Almost every single day we've eaten our own baguettes for lunch. Without doubt this would have added up to hundreds of euros of savings on cafe/street food. Not counting the TMB We've eaten out for dinner 4 times (and had pizza on 3 of those occasions!). The pizza in Courmeyeur was our favourite but we still reckon that the pizza we make at home is the true best. :)  We've all been enjoying the massive and cheap cheese sections in the supermarkets, and I've been loving all the different sorts of fresh filled pasta you can get as well. Jon has been dabbling in the very cheap wine sections with mixed success.   It was weird that in France we couldn't really get fresh milk - only long-life milk that was stored in the fridge occasionally but most people seemed to buy the milk at room temperature.  It was really hard to find ice in France and Italy - which made it hard when it was so hot and we were camping.  Slovenia finally bucked that trend and had ice available at service stations. In fact Slovenia's supermarkets were much more like our own except for the bread and cheese sections which were still pretty huge.  

Not eating out very often has meant we haven't really immersed ourselves into the food culture of each country but we have at least had Bled Cream Cake in Bled, Pretzels in Salzburg, bucket loads of pizza and pasta in italy, and delicious goats cheese (so cheap!) in France.  We also sat at a parisian cafe and had a drink while enjoying watching the people walk past (and simultaneously choking from all the cigarette smoke around us).

Our favourite smallish city was Venice (with a special mention to Annecy).

Our favourite large city was Paris.  Our least favourte city without a doubt was Florence - sorry Florence, it wasn't all your fault, it was also the weather (sooo hot), and the poorly designed brand new at-capacity campground with ants & tiny pitches so that when you went to bed you it felt like you were lying at the feet of the noisy people in the pitch beside you.