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villages in the Dolomites and each one has ski lifts basically that come right into the village. Essentially making every town a ski town and every villa, or hotel or BB "on the hill". Actually everything is on the hill all the time.
I started to characterize that the ski lifts were like bus stops in Calgary or Edmonton they were that common and frequent. And every town seemed like Whistler BC.

We headed to the Passo de Salla and this area needs a bit of explanation. First, I need to ensure to you that I am not going to exaggerate any of the following information. Second, in the Italian Dolomites they do some special road markings for safety, believe it or not. Many of these roads are not full width for the passing of 2 cars let alone the safe passage of a tour bus and a motorcycle going opposite directions. I could never get a picture of this since I could never find a place to pull over a safely wait for a picture opportunity. So therefore they have a lot of road narrows signs. As I mentioned before I tired of the corners the day before. That was 2 fold, 1. the Beemer requires more work at cornering than say a sport bike, but more importantly there is a corner every 2 seconds. The next feature of going over a pass is that on the way up and down they number each corner (actually the number each hairpin corner) if it isn't a hairpin then it doesn't count. They also show you the elevation in meters at the apex of every corner.

So with that in mind the Passo de Salla has 31 corners up and 33 down. In 5 corners from #33 back to #28 I changed elevation by 700 meters. The pass in its entirety is approximately 14 kms, so 64 hairpin turns in 14 kms, with an average elevation change of 140 meters per corner will give you a sense as to the challenge here. Now add tour buses, cars and 100's of Italian motorcyclists wanting to do this at max. speed and you can get the picture of the challenge. The following picture is a stitched photo of 3 photos to capture the magnitude of this summit.

Next onto Florence via Vicenza. We had been planning the trip with meeting Pat and Belinda in mind and had agreed to meet Sept 6th in Florence, which was today. However after many exchanges of emails along the way we had gotten an email from them saying they would meet us in Padua on the 6th. Since we couldn't find web access in the mountains and their phone number they had given us no longer worked we headed in the general direction of Padua hoping for a connection that never did materialize till much later that day.

After Vicenza and several traffic snarls using the normal roads we decided to bite the bullet and go onto 1 of the Toll autostradas to Florence and thereby recover to our schedule and also believing that perhaps Pat and Belinda would try to get there oday as well. It was an extremely hot day and we had taken off every bit of motorcycle riding gear and if I could have changed to shorts I would have. We hit the freeway and did what the R1150RT does best, swallow huge amounts of pavement in relative comfort very fast.

We arrived in Florence in slightly over an hour and arrived in the centre core looking for the B&B that had been recommended. With little luck in finding it we opted to check out a local hotel the Hotel Pagnini and were met by very pleasant and helpful family Cinelli members who showed us our room, very clean and all in marble, and at a quite reasonable for Florence price. They then helped us dial using their phone to be put in contact with Pat and Belinda, and also because of their knowledge told us the phone number they had was from Spain and not Italy, a little detail Pat forgot to share. In any event we contacted Pat and Belinda and arranged to meet on the Cinque Terre 2 days later. We then headed out for an excellent meal of Spaghetti with shrimp and a local red wine.

Michelangelo's David is the defining attraction for Florence. So when we were having breakfast the next day and began talking to the couple at the next table ( something I always do) Charley and Rose, from Tampa Bay Florida, were heading there too. This was their third time back to Florence in 3 years, and they were excited to see David now that he had been re-furbished for his 500th birthday. We became affected by their enthusiasm and asked if we could join them. In fact we would spend a good amount of time with them at the gallery, go out for dinner that evening with them and walk the Uffizi Square and have 2 gelatos that day, they are SOOOOOOOOOO good!

Sandra and I spent easily a 1/2 hour just walking around this sculpture it was so powerful. You can see veins and ligaments in the marble and as a Herald writer recently put, "it is so lifelike that it looks like he could just step down and walk away."

From there we carried on to get our first gelato of the day at 10:30 in the morning, 'Hey we're on holidays!" and we were overwhelmed by the flavor. Next the Uffizi Plaza where a copy of David stands as well as other statutes.

Alot has been said about the Tuscan hills. As we left Florence the next day after buying our new GIVI top case from a motorcycle shop called "Scarpelli's" and trusting the Italian mail service to deliver it to our hotel in Apeldoorn, that was misplaced trust I'll tell you, we headed out into the Tuscan hills. This area is gorgeous with incredible mountain vistas (where have we heard that before??) and there is a little village around every blind corner. And I didn't count but there must have been 700 to 750 blind corners that day. Just about any place they can they grow grapes they do.

We travelled this route to La Spezia and then into the Cinque Terre, pronounced correctly as "Chink a Terra". It took us all day first because we bought and had to ship the case, secondly because of heavy traffic leaving Florence, third because Italian back highways are congested beyond belief and fourth because the road isn't very well marked.

When we arrived in Levanto there was a place I was going to attempt to find but it was getting late and we stopped at one B&B that was full and it referred us to another just up the road which was Fernando and Leah's. We checked the place out and since they had room and it was inexpensive we thought hmmm... maybe we can do better. We checked a few other places out and everything was twice the price and full so we went back and checked in. Just after that a woman came up the driveway (remember its 34C out) and asked if they had a room. Fernando said no and the woman almost burst into tears. We would find out later that evry place was booked and how we lucked into their place, which put a room aside for Pat and Belinda we'll never know but we are grateful.

The next morning we would learn that Fernando has 616 olive trees, many grape vines and makes 1050 litres of olive oil a year and a huge amount of wine. The first picture shows him taking off a bottle of wine to give to us to chill for the hot afternoon and the second photo is him explaining his process of decanting to Sandra. Note the oak casks.

Leah gave me olive oil on a plate to dip with breakfast bread. Their oil is so light and flavorful compared to what we get it is unbelievable. Later that day Sandra and I would use it when we made a salad in the evening when Pat and Belinda would come.

The Cinque Terre region is a group of five (cinque) villages (terre) all situated on the Ligurian Sea (really the Med). They were not accessible by any highway, only by footpath and later train. Most of them still can not be accessed by car. The area is unique and is now protected by National Park status as well as recognized by Unesco as a "World Heritage Site". As you can see by the pictures they are amazingly beautiful and it is no wonder that tourists now flood the area. When I was researching the trip a guy on the Horizon's Unlimited website from France warned me about how busy it can be especially on weekends and closed by saying " Its the only place where I have been in a human traffic jam on a hillside footpath".

Fortunately for us it was not that busy but as I said the towns and surrounding villages were all full. If you are planning to do this area we would recommend the following. Buy a Cinque Terre all inclusive card for 1 day. That allows you park access, riding the train unlimited (especially if you don't want to hike) and any shuttle transfers between towns. It is only 1.4E more ($2.00) and well worth the flexibility it gives.

We took the train to Rio Maggiorio and began our walk back north. The hike will take about 5 hours to all the five villages so count on the whole day because there are lots of places to stop and enjoy the water, eat, or people watch. We ended the day in Monterossa had beers and caught the train back to Levanto.

We had only scheduled 3 nights in this area but it was so nice with such great weather and friends that we decided to stay another day and maybe miss the Normandy coast, or Paris. As we later discussed we only gave up going to Mont St Michel on the Normandy coast as the trade off for 1 more day.
The people we first met at Fernando's gave us the low down on places to eat and we went to Totano Blu both nights we were with P& B. Sandra and I shared a huge pot of steamed mussels with crusted bread in a wine sauce as an appetizer and then had Salmon pasta or linguini and clams and other sea food. It was fantastic. On the second night there, and sitting outdoors (of course) Belinda in a raised voice said something about "All you Canadians". Moments later Judy Henderson showed up and asked who was Canadian and shortly after she and her husband (Andrew)from Duncan BC were at our table to visit. It was so much fun!

Sunday we had to leave and the weather cooperated by raining a bit. Fernando gave us the weather forecast which was good for him "My grapes, they are so thirsty, they need a drink". So we felt we had used up all the nice weather and would drive a bit in the rain & we are well equipped to do. As it turns out the weather cleared north of Levanto about 20 miles and we ended up having another nice day while the lower part of Italy would get some well needed rain.

Saying goodbye to Pat and Belinda was a little easier knowing that we would see them again in December when they come to Alberta.

Travelling 130 to 140 kph on the freeway we were past by 5 really snorting Ferrarri's all red of course. The sounds of these cars is really wicked. The day cleared and we took off our rain gear when we filled with gas.

When we got to Ventimiglia we took the advice of a Horizon Unlimited contributor and took the road down through Menton and into Monte Carlo along the coast. As you can see from the pictures the weather turned hot and sunny and Monte Carlo was there exuding all its money and Nice all its beach glory. The route was pretty busy though with Sunday traffic and while the beaches at Menton weren't overly crowded the ones at Nice were buzzing.

After spending a lot of the afternoon around Menton, where we had our first "Steak and Fries Baguette" Really! we toured the gardens of the Monte Carlo casino where there are incredible works of art displayed in the gardens. Unfortunately in my only photo gaff of the trip I deleted 1 Monte Carlo garden photo to replace it with another but forgot to reset the camera to take the picture. I didn't notice this till we were miles away.

You can feel the money here it is so powerful!

Onto Nice and we headed north onto another road which had been recommended that would connect us to the Grand Canyon of France, the Gorge de Verdun. This road was extremely beautiful and very nice to drive after having spent a week doing blind corners in Italy. And we wound the day up in a small village with a fantastic supper out on the terrace of a bistro with great red wine. I normally tire of eating out after a short while but not this trip!

In France many places breakfast is "Petit De Jeune" and is not included in your room price and they charge quite a bit for what you get, normally a baguette and some coffee. So we had opted to avoid the cost of the breakfast at the place we stayed in and head into Entreveaux the next town. In France life revolves around the Pasterria and the Cafe. As we saw the fortress at Entreveaux I pulled over and then noticed a lady carrying her morning baguette. We stopped found the shop and I had a quiche while Sandra had a choco croissant and we would buy excellent coffee at the cafe and sit outside enjoying this view. Not hard to take.