“Where shall we go after summer?”

“Norway would be great….. Italy would be amazing…..”

“Excellent ideas. Let’s do Italy this year and Norway in 2024.”

We’ve found that we like to plan by quarter…… it just sort of works for us. Harking back to our old corporate lives, we started thinking about Q3 2023 at the end of 2022 but having decided that we’d be heading to Italy, we pencilled it into the calendar across September, October, November and left it at that.

For our travel, we find it useful to give the destination time to marinade. This allows us chance to take inspiration by osmosis in the meantime which means reading blogs, chatting to friends and family, watching content from our favourite YouTube creators and in this case enjoying the excellent Stanley Tucci’s Italy series. (No motorhome needed to enjoy this one!)

Maps

I love maps. Big ones I mean, that you can unfold and that take up the whole table.

Somewhere through summer, we acquired a large road map of Italy and then over a couple of rainy afternoons we really get started with planning.

In our experience, planning is most effectively done with either tea or beer.

We start by circling all the places we want to see or the places that we recall from a subconscious bucket list and then realise that’s a long list of places.

Our style of travel, if there is such a thing, is to take our time moving through the landscape…. not to rush too quickly from place to place. Ideally, we like to spend at least three nights in a place and are very happy to be side tracked into extending this to a week or ten days if the place and mood take us. (Yes, Ile de Re, we are talking about you!). Of course there are those places that are single night stopovers and where we can they’re the exception not the rule.

We’d already thought that Italy was likely to be two trips as Northern and Southern Italy, with perhaps Sicily, are so different and so large with so much to experience that it always felt like Rome might be a natural watershed. As we look at our circled map it feels more like three trips.

So broadly, we want to walk in the Dolomites, paddle on the Italian Lakes, experience the wines of Piedmont, see Venice (we’ve never been) and Verona (everyone says it’s beautiful), try the food in Palma, Modena and Bologna, see Ferrari’s in Maranello and spend as much time in Tuscany as we can. Touristy perhaps but we’d like to see Pisa, Luca and frequent Florence. I can imagine we’ll make it to Siena but that may be the point at which we turn northwards and head for home.

From here, the route starts to suggest itself. We’ll need to be in the Dolomites at the start of the trip to get the weather, so we’ll cross the Alps from Innsbruck via the Brenner Pass (thanks Tim) and then loop south past Venice and Verona then south into Tuscany and east before heading back North on the coast past Cinque Terre, Genoa and back into France for the trip back to Calais.

Looking back at all of this it feels like it might be too much but we’ll see what we can do.

To book or not too book

As we’ve gained more confidence with motorhome travelling, we decided not to book anything in advance. By timing our trip for September, we’re expecting plenty of availability in campsites and we like the freedom of being able to change our plans depending on what we find and feel.

September isn’t completely out of season, so I suspect we’ll take the same approach as last year and once we have dates for any tourist hotspots sorted we’ll probably book them a few days in advance so we know that we can see what we want to.

Places to stay in late October and November tend to be harder to find as most European sites are closed at this point in time so that’ll be another challenge but there are Sosta’s in Italy (a bit like the Aires we used in France last year) so we’ll try to muddle by.

Reassuringly, we’re pretty self sufficient in most conditions now so we don’t worry too much about where we’ll stay anymore.

So there we go., that’s us. We’re heading out to northern Italy and if you’d like to follow along, please subscribe to receive updates or click for next arrow to see how we get one.

Love as always,

Sally, Toby and Merlin