Day 32: Nice (France) > La Spezia (Italy)

We woke to another spectacular day on the Cote d’Azur. Stunning blue skies and hardly a cloud in the sky.

Beautiful cool crisp air, temperature around 12°.

Our last day in Nice and our last day in France. Today, we head off to Italy.

We will be back in France again later in the trip. We have to come back through France on our way back to Paris to drop off Claude and head home.

I took the well beaten path down to the boulangerie to get breakfast.

MBW gave me strict instructions. She wanted an almond croissant.

I found out that the nice young girl in the boulangerie didn’t speak English, and I don’t speak French.

But somehow I managed to communicate that I wanted a couple of almond croissants.

“Croissant almond” and try to sound French. Oui, oui, s’il vous plaît?

She had a brief conversation in French with the boss, and then she turned back to me and shook her head. No.

No almond croissants.

Unfortunately, it was a bit difficult to get the message across that my wife had said, “Don’t come home without almond croissants.”

So I purchased 4 plain croissants foe breakfast and a baguette for lunch, and hoped for the best.

€5.

Cheap cheap.

We had breakfast looking out over the ocean. And coffee.

We’d already done most of our packing up, so once breakfast was over, I took the first load of stuff down to the car.

We messaged Farzad to let him know that we would be ready to go by nine o’clock.

Claude hasn’t been anywhere for three whole days. It’s a much better idea to be a bus ninja than try and navigate the streets of Nice.

And to try to find somewhere to park.

I’ve mentioned previously that the trip from Nice to La Spezia is about 3.5 to 4.5 hours using toll roads, and about 7 or 8 hours not using toll roads.

Taking the toll roads today was a no-brainer.

We got Claude loaded up, and then we headed out of the car park and downstairs to meet Farzad to hand over the keys and say goodbye.

Josephine got her instructions to get us out of Nice and on the road to La Spezia.

Now I have to confess to feeling a little bit anxious about driving again today. I feel a bit like I’m out of practice. But I’m hoping that Claude doesn’t feel the same way.

I’m not sure how many road rules I’ve broken today, but I’m sure there were quite a few. Many of the roads in Nice are quite narrow. Joséphine gives you an instruction to take the second lane from the left to enter the motorway, but there really wasn’t a second lane from the left.

So I put my blinker on and moved on over, just like any Frenchman would.

We’d made our first wrong turn within 10 minutes after leaving home, which resulted in a bit of a go-around, but once you get on the motorway – seriously – there’s not much you can do wrong.

It’s not like you can just do a U-turn without going another 20 or 30 kilometres first as a penalty.

Once we were only about 30 minutes out of Nice, we crossed across into Italy.

Unfortunately, my photographer wasn’t paying attention and she missed the photograph opportunity. So you’ll just have to trust me.

But I’ll be having a word with her at her next performance review.

Italy is the land of tunnels. It’s so hilly and mountainous here that they build tunnels through the mountains. So we’re driving along a spectacular ocean road overlooking the water, and then the next minute, we’re into a tunnel.

Which probably makes the time difference between “tolls” and “no tolls” more understandable. I know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and a straight line takes you through mountains. Big ones.

So you need tunnels, and tunnels cost money. And these ones must have cost a fortune.

Digging out all of that rock can’t be cheap.

The alternative is to go around – or over – the mountains, and that’s just crazy talk.

My first observation of Italy is that the speed signs are confusing. I don’t know whether they are just recommendations, whether they are not enforced, whether they don’t matter on Sundays, or whether the locals just completely ignore them.

Driving on the road from Nice to La Spezia was completely different to driving on the toll roads in France.

In France, the toll roads are 130 km per hour – very wide, very fast, and big wide sweeping corners. You can literally sit back and relax while you’re driving along a toll road in France.

But in Italy, the speed limits keep changing. I acknowledge that they had a lot of roadwork happening on the motorway today, but the speed limits would change from 110 down to 100, down to 90, down to 60, down to 40, and then back to 110 again. Or 50.

Or they just say that the previous speed restriction was lifted and you could pick a number you liked.

But what was most confusing was that at one point I was in a 40 zone doing 75 and trying to keep up with the cars in front. Then some high powered German car went roaring past me like I was standing still.

Seriously, some of them travel so fast on the motorway that you’re looking at your rear view mirror about to change lanes, and by the time you’re in the overtaking lane, they’re right up behind you, and scaring the cr*p out of you.

At around about 10:30 this morning we decided that we wanted to stop for smoko. They don’t have boulangeries here in Italy, and I’m not quite sure what they have instead.

So MBW found something that looked reasonable in a little township called Spotorno. Parking was a nightmare, so I dropped her off and I went to do a lap of the block.

Unfortunately – and we learned a valuable lesson abour using her phone to find a bakery in Spotorno – when she hopped out of Claude and took her phone with her, I had no idea where I had to come back to. That address wasn’t in my Google Maps.

So I just kept driving around until I found something that looked familiar, and then made my way back again.

Driving in Italy is very different, mainly because of the different language. Obviously, we have learned enough French to feel comfortable with the road signage in France, but in Italy, it’s all very different again.

And a bit stressful. A whole new language we have to learn.

And learning a new language at our age is tough work.

But we found somewhere to stop and make a cuppa and had our morning tea.

I said before that the Italian motorways (that we have experienced so far) have lots of tunnels. I reckon we probably went through 80 to 100 tunnels today between Nice and La Spezia.

You can come out of one and straight into the next one.

MBW – the clever chicken that she is – realised that the signage before the tunnel told you how long it was. The longest tunnel that we went through today after we realised that information was available, was almost 1.8 kilometres

The other thing I’ve noticed about Italian motorways is that they’re not as straight or as easy to navigate as the ones in France.

There’s quite a lot of corners and curves that you have to navigate. I’m sure that if you were driving an Italian sports car that handled like it was on rails, it would be a fun drive.

But Claude struggled a bit. Especially with all our luggage on board.

We saw lots of police on the road today. At one toll both there must have been half a dozen or more police cars lined up watching the traffic. We also saw a few people pulled over at various times.

We figure that with our red French number plate we could be a target, but we will see how that goes.

But it all ended well. We arrived in La Spezia just before two o’clock and contacted Monica, our host for tonight.

Monica is lovely and speaks excellent English. The apartment is just beautiful. She showed us around and showed us how everything worked.

She gave us some recommendations for dinner, and told us about some things that we really needed to do while we are here.

After we had unpacked the car and had some lunch, we headed out for a drive down to Portovenere. This was one of the places that we were told we really needed to visit.

Unfortunately, it is Sunday afternoon and a beautiful day here in La Spezia Italy, and the people were out in droves.

On the drive we saw some beautiful views of the Italian coastline, but we were just unable to park anyway for more than a few minutes. But we will take a bus ride down there again tomorrow.

There is a Co-op (or maybe it’s a Coop?) across the road, so we dropped in and got some groceries.

One of the places that Monica recommended for dinner was a pizza place around the corner. We’ve been driving all day, and we were pretty tired, so we just went and got pizza.

And it was pretty darn good.

Tomorrow we will do the Cinque Terre (five colourful villages on the coastline). That should be a great day.

That will be another ticketing card or app to add to my collection.

I’ll tell you about the crazy Italian drivers tomorrow.

Ciao

#Europe2025