A little night driving in Viterbo

Dave the motorhome has a strange feeling of deja vu, I’m not surprised as he’s back in the free sosta in Montefiascone, we were only here on Saturday and seem to have travelled in a big loop (N42.53365 E12.04229).

We settled in and watched a movie last night, Four Weddings and a Funeral – a classic. When it came to the end scene where Hugh Grant and Andi McDowell are standing in the rain, we had surround sound, only the rain was hammering down so hard on Dave we couldn’t actually hear Andi mutter the tragic line ‘Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed’. The night continued in the same way as the day had with on, off rain as well as thunder and lightning, still it kept the Neds away.

This morning Jay had a bit of work to do, so Charlie and I had a lie in. We ventured out for a short walk, but I’m sure someone had been watching us as every time we step foot outside Dave it starts to pour it down. We got back into Dave a few minutes later and Charlie resumed his position in front of his favourite heater, only this time he was steaming – quite literally!  Couldn’t capture it on camera, but he certainly looked funny.

Steaming pooch!

We’d had a message a few days ago asking what camera we use and this reminded me that I hadn’t written a review for it – which I had been planning to do about a month ago once we’d used it for a bit. As we were trapped in Dave by the rain I finally got around to writing one for it – Sony HX200V. It’s in our Information Zone section of the site, which also has reviews of other stuff we use, guides to countries we’ve visited and all sorts of other useful stuff.

The fridge was looking bare, half a carton of milk, a couple of eggs, some feta cheese and half a tube of tomato puree. Still it meant we had all the ingredients we needed for a lunch of Easy Calzone, one of our favourite recipes from our camping cookbook. However the tortillas we’d bought in our last Lidl shop weren’t the normal sort. They were thicker and sort of potatoey – can’t think of any other way to describe them – still we ploughed on and the calzone were even better than normal. Email me if you want to recipe!

After lunch we finally de-camped, and un-hooked, from Tuscania and headed for the larger town of Viterbo as we needed a food shop and a vodafone shop to recharge our Italian SIM. Our Lidl ‘Points of Interest’ came good and soon we were stocking up on all sorts of goodies, a couple of which are below – sorry for food pics, but there’s been very little else to snap today!

If you’re ever in Lidl and spot this stuff, buy some it’s thick lovely chocolate pudding – even better if like ours it has a bright orange 30% off sticker on top, so we have to eat it all today – shame!

Baileys is a bit too expensive for team Dave, so we’re testing out Lidl’s own version. It has a slightly stronger whisky taste, but that isn’t always a bad thing.

Dave’s cupboards groaning full and my purse €72 lighter we headed to the sosta closer to the centre of town, stopping at a generic mobile phone shop to recharge our SIM on the way – we’ve gone native, doubled parked and hazards on as I nipped in! Battling through some of the worst traffic we’ve seen for a while we finally reached the co-ordinates for the sosta and found a very, very full car park with a tiny space for motorhome emptying. We stopped at the emptying point and tested our SIM to make sure the re-charge worked (we’re learning how stuff you expect to happen doesn’t tend to here), it hadn’t. With nowhere to park, and to be honest we didn’t really want to leave Dave there as it didn’t feel like a great place, but a need to get to a Vodafone shop a plan was formed. I headed off with a vague idea where I was going while Jay and Charlie stood guard over Dave who was having the longest motorhome emptying ever.

The narrow alleyways of Viterbo probably looked lovely, but it was getting dark and I was focussed on my mission to find a shop decked out all in red. That’s the problem with Italian shops, I don’t begrudge them their three hour lunchbreak, but it does mean it’s almost dark by the time they reopen! It took about half an hour to find it, fifteen minutes in the shop and another twenty minutes to get back, but we’ve been reassured it will work from 9pm tonight (I left wondering if that was the time the shop closed?). Back in Dave Charlie was cowering under the table as some football fans had walked past and set off fireworks – he hates fireworks. The decision was made, we weren’t going to attempt to sleep there.

Opening the map we had two options, drive back to Tuscania or back to Montefiascone – our database showed up very little else around here. We don’t like to drive at night, or go back to places we’ve already been, but we opted for Montefiascone and Jay did a sterling job and got us here before the gate to the sosta closed at 7pm. We just need to decided where to go from here!!  Oh well first we’ll have some tasty Lidl grub for tea and crack open the bottle of Deluxe – oh yes we know how to live!

Ju x