Calabria – RV Travels in Europe and North America

October 16, 2019 Tropea IT

Ton read my account of entering Tropea yesterday and said it sounded a little whiny. Ton thought Tropea was a really beautiful city, and felt I should have spent more time talking about how beautiful the town was, about our fun encounter with a young clerk in a food shop and that the water off shore was a beautiful emerald color. So I apologize to Tropea for not giving it it’s due yesterday.

Another picture of Tropea to make up for my whining.

As usual on these trips we start to panic when we realize that there is more to see than we have time for. Today we are two weeks into the trip, and have a lot more to cover. I had hoped to spend more time in the far south, but we both agreed that there was a lot to do around Naples so we made the decision to have a big travel day up to Naples. It helped that it was our first rainy day of the trip so we headed up the excellent and mostly free Autostrada to Pompeii. Tonight we are parked in the Spartacus Campground across the street from the entrance to the Pompeii archeological site.

The A2 Autostrada in Southern Italy is quite an engineering feat, we must have passed thru more than 50 tunnels from 100 to 2500 meters long.

Since there is not a lot to talk about today I am going to tell one of my favorite stories from Sicily. As we were walking around Sicily we kept seeing these flower pots of a male and female head. The male head looked Arabic, and was often black. We finally dug up the story behind these pots.

These flower pots are all around Sicily.

Once upon a time in Palermo there lived a fair maiden who was extremely beautiful, but she was a loner, and was not interested in suitors. One day a Moorish Prince landed in Palermo, and spotted the fair maiden and fell in love. He boldly entered her home and professed his love. The fair maiden was taken by his forwardness and agreed to allow him to become her lover. One day she asked when he planned to marry her, he then confessed that he must return to Africa tomorrow, and that he had a wife and family at home. The maiden said nothing, but that night she murdered him in her bed, cut his head off and turned it into a flower pot so he would be with her forever. How very Sicilian!

October 15, 2019 Tropea IT

I was worried about the day for some reason. I was 90% sure that I had told Greta Garmin the right ferry terminal, but there are three in Messina, and I did not want to be playing Ferry Terminal roulette in an old Italian city. It turns out I had nothing to worry about as I had put in the right terminal. I think the other reason I was uncomfortable is I have a feeling we did not give Sicily all of the time it deserves. We have not had a bad day on Sicily.

They have an interesting system for selling tickets for the ferry, there is an island in the road with two ticket booths in the middle, but no designated parking, everyone just drives up to the vicinity of the ticket booths, stops their car, and heads over to the ticket booth on foot, once they have their ticket they wind their way thru all of the other randomly “parked” cars, and head on down to the ferry.

It was a short ferry ride over to the boot of Italy. We pulled off the ferry and on to a really nice freeway for the next 60km’s on our way to the resort town of Tropea. We picked it as it seemed like a pretty easy drive if anything went wrong with the ferry. We were also intrigued with some of the pictures of the town in one of our tour books.

The drive was going along pretty uneventfully until we dropped down into Tropea. The road down from the mountains above town was pretty twisty, but we are getting used to that by now. The real problem was once we entered town we were immediately in typical small city roads which are challenging in a RV, then the real problem started. In Italy they have areas called limited traffic zones (ZTL) where cars are forbidden to enter without special passes. The fine for violating these zones is around €100, and they are enforced by cameras. The problem is if you accidentally blunder into one you may pass several cameras before you work your way out of the area, and you get fined each time.

The road we turned down to reach the campground, the sign on top means no campers or trucks. I missed that sign as I was trying to work out how to get out of the center of town.

While I was trying to follow Greta and thread my way down the narrow streets I saw a Limited Traffic Zone sign in front of me. I made a left turn to avoid entering the zone, and hoped it would trigger Greta to find another route that avoided the dreaded zone. She led us out of town on even narrower roads to punish me for not following her original route. We finally emerged on a nice wide highway and I thought problem solved, but suddenly she wanted me to make a right turn onto a road that was on her map. The problem was the road was in a gorge about 50 feet below us, so now we were heading back into town, and sure enough there was another limited traffic zone sign, but I had a place to pull over and sort thru things. As I was looking at the map, I happened to notice that the limited traffic sign had a green sign under it that was flashing a message in Italian, and then a miracle, in English the same sign said Free Access. I took this to mean it was ok to enter the limited traffic zone and did. We were not out of the woods as Greta then told us to turn down the narrowest road yet, a motorcycle behind me honked a warning and I knew that I might be heading into trouble. The road was narrow and the switchbacks were hairpin. Luckily François is short, and most importantly we did not meet anyone coming up. So after quite an adventure we made it to our seaside campground. So I guess my unease was right I just did not realize it would be on the end of the trip.

After I had a beer and did some research on how to avoid a ZTL we walked into Tropea and it is beautiful.

Our campground is just to the left of this 6th century monastery.

October 15, 2019 Tropea IT

They have an interesting system for selling tickets for the ferry, there is an island in the road with two ticket booths in the middle, everyone just drives up to the vicinity of the ticket booths, stops their car, jumps out and heads over to the ticket booth, once they have their ticket they wind their way thru all of the other randomly “parked” cars, and head on down to the ferry. Initially we sat at the end of the “line” of cars trying to figure out the system, which confused the Italians behind us who scurried around us looking annoyed. Eventually we figured out the system and joined in the fun.

While I was trying to follow Greta and thread my way down the narrow streets I saw a Limited Traffic Zone sign in front of me. I made a left turn to avoid entering the zone, and hoped it would trigger Greta to find another route that avoided the dreaded zone. She led us out of town on even narrower roads to punish me for not following her original route. We finally emerged on a nice wide highway and I thought problem solved, but suddenly she wanted me to make a right turn onto a road that was on her map. The problem was the road was in a gorge about 50 feet below us, so now we were heading back into town, and sure enough there was another no traffic zone sign, but I had a place to pull over and sort thru things. As I was looking at the map, I happened to notice that the no traffic sign had a green sign under it that was flashing a message in Italian, and then a miracle, in English the same sign said Free Access. I took this to mean it was ok to enter the limited traffic zone and did. We were not out of the woods as Greta than told us to turn down the narrowest road yet, a motorcycle behind me honked a warning and I new that I might be heading into trouble. The road was narrow and the switchbacks were hairpin. Luckily François is short, and most importantly we did not meet anyone coming up. So after quite an adventure we made it to our seaside campground. So I guess my unease was right I just did not realize it would be on the end of the trip.

After I had a beer and did some research on how to avoid ZTL’s we walked into Tropea and it is beautiful.