Heading south out of the enchanting town of San Gimignano, we couldn’t resist a quick stop in Volterra to visit its Guarnacci Etruscan Museum, with thousands of funeral urns dating back to the Hellenistic and Archaic periods. Main attractions are the bronze statuette “Shadow of the Night” and the sculpted effigy of an Etruscan couple in terracotta. The town was a Neolithic settlement and an important Etruscan center. The site is believed to have been continuously inhabited since at least the end of the 8th century BC.

Parking was easy at the base of the “city”. Climbing some two thousand steps, (I lost count after that), we found the museum at 5:01. It closed at 5:00, but we stayed for the sunset over the rolling hills of Tuscany. The parking lot had signs reading “No Camping”, but we slept comfortably along with a dozen other travelers who we guess couldn’t read either. It did mean climbing the endless stone staircase again in the morning.

Monika has always been fascinated by the Etruscan culture. The beautiful pottery, glassware and sculptures were amazing considering their age. The numerous burial urns spoke of the wealth of the citizens.

We wandered around town long enough to find a cute bakery before driving north to the romantic city of Florence.

Christmas 2013

We’re playing catch up again. In case you wondered where we were and what we did for Christmas, here’s a brief report. Leaving Pisa behind us we followed secondary roads through beautiful Tuscany of Italy. The scenery was truly everything we could have expected from this famous region, even in wintertime.

Chief navigator Monika was searching the map for a small village as a friendly place to hang out. By chance she found San Gimignano and the nice Santa Chiara campground within walking distance.

Even now, the day before Christmas, there were several other people traveling who had discovered San Gimignano, a small walled medieval hill town in the province of Siena, Tuscany, north-central Italy. Famous for its medieval architecture and well-preserved towers, its hilltop setting and encircling walls formed an unforgettable skyline.

Before leaving Nice, France, we had raided the local supermarkets for some special Christmas treats. The menu for Christmas Eve included escargot with an herb butter sauce served with Trebbiano wine and Monika’s family’s traditional recipe of “Pastetli”, little puff pastries overflowing with a creamy meat and mushroom filling. Dessert was, what else, a fresh Italian Panettone with dried fruit, nuts and raisins.

On Christmas Day Santa Claus had some inventive ways of making his deliveries including ladders up the back of several motorhomes and climbing ropes to balconies. We took the opportunity to stroll around the cobbled streets of San Gimignano without the hordes of tourists that crowd this World Heritage Site town during Summer.

For our feast on this special day, we started with a little Foie de Gras and a chilled Sauterne before moving on to some barbecued veal chops and a tradition in Gary’s family, fresh raviolis with a butter-garlic sauce and some grated sharp Italian Parmesan. We didn’t have a white Christmas, but the ice on The Turtle V’s hood in the morning was enough to remind us it was winter.

Not willing to stop celebrating, we had a wonderful dinner the next evening at Santa Chiara RV Park’s cozy restaurant where we enjoyed one of the best wood-fired baked pizzas we’ve ever had. Joining us were Steve, Dawn and Ali, a Scottish/Turkish family who had been camping next to us. The owner of the restaurant and campground was a great guy and he even presented us with a bottle of his own red wine!

With our water leak fixed and the assurance we would have a warm Christmas with hot water, we headed east and crossed into Italy. Our first stop was the famous town Pisa, which much to Monika’s annoyance I continued to call it Pizza.

Certainly on the short list of things we had to see in Italy was the famous leaning Tower of Pisa, actually called Torre Pendente. Having been duly warned by other travelers of the dangers in Italian cities like Pisa & Rome, we found a comfortable secure campsite within walking distance of town and spent the next day wandering around through the Cathedral, the Baptistery and of course, the Bell Tower itself. Thinking we may never come this way again, we did climb to the top of the tower on the narrow spiral stairway, not a place for anyone afraid of heights or claustrophobia. The sensation was weird since the angle of the stairs had changed so dramatically that within every few steps we seemed to touch either the outside or inside wall depending on which side of the leaning tower we were on. Extensive restoration has been done to assure that this amazingly strange piece of history will remain at its precarious tilt for many years.

Resisting the temptation to have pizza for dinner, we stopped at the cozy Bar & Food 62 for a caffe latte and a slice of a local pie, content that we had seen what we came to see in Pisa.

The Tower of Pisa has been stabilized. Gary hasn’t.

It had been an interesting morning. We had spent several hours wandering through the Pont de Gau Bird Park near the town of Stes Maries-de-la-Mer, photographing thousands of pink flamingos who flock there every day to gobble up the rice that the Park provides for them. Returning to the truck, we decided to have a bowl of hot soup for lunch. Monika flipped on the trusty Espar D5 Hydronic diesel coolant heater that is normally valved to heat our FlatPlate heat exchanger, providing us with almost instant hot water. However, we had had some very cold mornings and I had set the valves on the Espar system to run coolant directly from the engine as we drove, allowing us to heat both the camper and the FlatPlate.

When Monika turned the D5 on it fired up immediately, heating the coolant 187°F, but as it attempted to pump that heated coolant to the FlatPlate, it was blocked. Normally this would not create a problem but in this case a small plastic fitting on the FlatPlate had been installed with some kind of plumbers putty thread sealant. The fittings made by Sea Tech Inc. specifically warned against using anything but Teflon tape. The threads had been softened by the thread sealant and the extreme pressure created by the internal pump of the D5 basically blew the threads out of one with a loud pop and a second one was already dripping. This was the beginning of a week-long process of trying to find similar brass fittings somewhere in various hardware stores in France. Several parts looked promising but none were exactly the 3/8 NPT size threads we needed. They all leaked.

In short, I was able to plug up the hole in the Flat Plate so we still had water, but no hot water. Christmas was just around the corner, and knowing that everything in France would shut down until after New Year’s, the outlook was not pleasant. Temperatures had been in the low 30s at night.

As luck would have it, we had been given a catalog with RV Accessories Parts Dealers in France, and one happened to be in Nice, sort of on our way. We took a chance, thinking that just possibly they may have the right parts. Arriving at the entrance of Nice Caravanes/RandoEquipement just as they were closing for the mandatory two-hour French lunch, we were looking for parking place when a man came running up and introduced himself as: “Hi, I’m Patrice”. Turns out we had met Patrice Ryder two years earlier at an Overland Journal SEMA party in Las Vegas. What an amazing coincidence!!! And he spoke English as he had lived in Australia for many years! He had sold his French Outback Import company only two years ago and was now involved in this new venture. And he was a can-do type of guy!

He guided us into the compound to a nice flat place with electrical hookups and we started the search on the Internet for the parts from SeaTech. With Patrice’s help we tried SeaTech distributors in England, Holland and France, but no one had that size NPT thread. Finally we contacted SeaTech in the US and learned that if we ordered the part through their main distributor’s international website, it would take at least 10 days to reach us. Not giving up, we contacted SeaTech Customer Service again and explained our situation to Melissa Thomas. She figured out a way to circumvent the normal system, pulled the parts off the shelf and overnighted them to us as “samples”. Now that’s called Real Customer Service!

Of course it was Christmas time, so “Overnight” by UPS took four days by the time it worked its way through three airports and French Customs. Finally at 4 o’clock Friday afternoon, only an hour before Nice Caravanes was about to close for Christmas week, the UPS truck arrived. We installed the parts using the correct Teflon tape, turned on the D5 again and headed for Italy, looking forward to Christmas with hot water.

We had hoped to spend the day in Monaco and maybe even throw the dice in the famous casino. Driving into the city was something like entering one of those cutaway ant colonies with more tunnels than open space. Forget about parking. There wasn’t a spot even if we had been on a motorcycle. We did manage to drive part of the famous Monte Carlo Formula One race route including a few hairpin corners and that long tunnel near the harbor. Escaping the web of one-way narrow streets, we found a vacant lot in an industrial area in the next town and slept quietly with visions of sugarplums and Italian olives in our heads. Christmas was just two days away…

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A must-stop on the way to Arles is the Pont de Grau Bird Park founded in 1949 by the passionate Camarguais ornithologist André Lamoroux. In 1974, his son, René Lamoroux, took charge. He envisioned a large sanctuary for local and migrating birds. Today, the park has grown to 60 hectares where thousands of birds can feel safe and their migratory stop-over, feeding and breeding grounds are protected. The number of dark pink flamingos in the park that morning was staggering. They come here during the day to feed and leave at dusk only to return the next day.

The center’s core mission is to teach awareness of protecting the Camargue in its natural stage. They also run a free care center for insured or sick birds, domestic or wild. Several of the knowledgeable staff spoke English and they patiently answered all our questions.

We strolled along the six miles of walking trails and while the main attraction were the pink flamingos, we observed several other bird species and had fun watching a muskrat scurrying across our path. Spring and Fall are the best time for viewing.

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It’s one thing to see flocks of flamingos from a vantage point of a hot air balloon in the Serengeti and it’s quite another feeling to watch a whole squadron of these majestic birds with wingspans over five foot flying straight at you in their landing approach.

The Camargue – It has a mystical ring for any European. Beautiful wild white horses and Gypsies gathering in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer once a year. The Camargue, the Rhône River Delta, is the largest delta in Western Europe, but it is much more than that: Fighting Camargue bulls, straw thatched white farm houses, dykes, brine lagoons, lakes and reed covered mashes, rice paddies, salt pans, migratory bird sanctuaries for thousands for birds including storks and flamingos.

Our illusions stemming from forever-reproduced photographs about the “WILD” white horses were, as the tourist office informed us with a smile, something like believing in Santa Claus. They are all owned by someone. Many farms/owners offer them for tours in the summer, and yes, there you might be able to splash through the ocean waves on an un-saddled horse…just like the pictures promise, but not in December….

We enjoyed the town of Le-Grau-du-Roi with its canal leading to the tidy harbor decorated in pre-Christmas fashion. Saintes Maries-de-la-Mer was equally pleasant though different. We visited the fortress church dedicated to Mary Magdalene, Mary Jacobé and Mary Salomé who were said to have been the first to come to the open grave of Jesus after resurrection. French legend has it that they left Egypt and arrived here by sea. The dimly lit crypt contains a pagan altar dedicated to the dark skinned Gypsy patron Sainte Sara, who might have been a servant to the other Maries. The Roma (Gypsies) gather every May 24/25 for a religious festival in her honor.

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Driving through the Southwestern part of France, many people had insisted we visit Carcassonne, the largest fortified city in Europe. What struck us first were the impenetrable walls high up on the hill, yet people were driving their cars into the fully walled cité where they clattered by us over the cobblestones. Cars in a fortress? It felt strange.

Carcassonne’s first human trace dates back to 3500 BC. It became important during Roman occupation around 100 BC and the history goes on.

We parked just below the walls next to the church in Ville Basse (lower village) from where we hiked up to the fortress. After touring the palace and meandering through its narrow streets we discovered the local St. Nicolas Market, (It was December 6, St. Nicolas Day.). We ended up at the cozy Le Trouvère restaurant where we enjoyed local foods (yes, fries for an appetizer!), and chatted Spanish with our Catalan table neighbors.

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Being members of the Silk Road Motor Caravan Club, fellow travelers British/Scottish Chris and Jack Kane, invited us to stop by at their home in Vinça, France. Having just returned from a six-year journey through Central and North America, they were keenly aware of our needs to get off the road for a few days. It seems that things like emails, blogs, laundry, maintenance, etc. become priorities more often than not. Chris took us shopping at the local weekly market and we shared some fun dinners and swapped travel stories. The area was picturesque with the snow-covered Pyrenees in the background. We took time for a few hikes and also visited the most famous town in the valley, Villefranche-de-Conflent, a walled city dating back to 1098.

One major issue that needed solving was filling our propane tanks. We had heard that to do this in France was much easier than in Spain. Not! Both Chris and Jack took the time to drive around with Gary to several hardware stores and a camping store, as far as 30 miles away to find the correct connections. In the end, the simplest solution was the direct transfer from one bottle to the other, which we had done in South America, but every country in Europe uses the exchange tank system, and every exchange tank seems to have a different outlet fitting. At length we found a can-do guy at the local hardware store who quickly assembled the adapters, hoses and connectors we needed. The following day we took one of Jack’s exchange tanks, hooked it up, turned it upside down, and basically poured the liquid propane from his tank into ours, carefully monitoring the 20% valve which is designed to eliminate the possibility of overfilling all US portable LP tanks like our Manchester 20# RV tanks.

Obviously, this needs to be done with extreme caution. Gary will be doing a full report on the procedure later. Many Silk Road Motor Caravan Club members have chatted about this on the Forum. The procedure is quite simple, providing you have the correct fittings for the country in question, using the 20% bleed valve, or weighing your empty tank and not filling it beyond its rated capacity.

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It was in Figueres that we met up with our old friend Chema Huete, past editor of Solo Auto 4×4. The readers of this magazine followed our travels through South America in the late 80’s and our Siberian trip in 1996. Chema now owns 4×4 Pasion.com, an online magazine.

We spent a couple of fun evenings with him, his lovely wife Mercè, and friends. Mercè is not only charming but also a fabulous hostess. Chema took us on a sightseeing tour through the valley while testing a 2014 BMW X5-V8. Following a dirt two-track he had often used for test runs with vehicles for the magazine, we cringed as brush and tree limbs raked the side of this $70,000 SUV. The road had not been used for a quite a while. Coming around a corner, Chema looked ahead and uttered half under his breath, “merda”, literally translated as “shit”!!

An eight-inch tree had fallen across the road. No place to turn around and way to nasty to go back. The tree limbs and roots clearly needed a winch or a tow cable to move. Gary saw the only answer. Whipping out his trusty Swiss Army Knife, he began the seemingly impossible task of sawing the top of the tree off. Never underestimate the power of a little Swiss Army Knife! With the top severed, the four of us were able to swing the trunk around and proceed back to civilization.

Near Chema’s home, we stopped at the much-visited town of Besalú with its pretty 12th century Romanesque bridge and twisted alleys, which was easily one of the more interesting medieval towns we had seen.

Now it was time to say our good-byes to Spain and head to Southern France. We chose the tortuously scenic and historic one-and-a-half-lane route over the Col d’Ares pass through the Pyrenees Mountains to reach our next destination, Vinça, France. While the route was beautiful and exciting, we had failed to notice that Chema was an avid motorcycle-touring enthusiast. Clearly, this was a great road for his fully loaded BMW K1200 GT. We made it unscathed, but the transmission and steering got a workout with the lock-to lock hairpin corners.

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), the famous and colorful Catalan artist and writer, had very clear visions when he insisted that “his” museum should be in Figueres, the town of his birth. On the site of the former municipal theater, the Dalí Theatre-Museo was born. He had his creative hand in every detail of this venue. It is the largest surrealistic object in the world.

Upon entering into the courtyard, the first thing you see is a black Cadillac with a ship hanging above, dripping with water, and golden mannequins standing in many window niches. The museum houses a good representation of his work from different periods of his life. His exquisite drawing talent fascinated us, though we should not have been surprised, having seen some of his later works in St. Petersburg, Florida, the largest collection in the USA.

A separate museum houses his 1959 jewel collection that includes his famous ruby/pearl lips and the animated pulsing heart of love.

His creations were as eccentric as he was; mostly weird, forever challenging and exciting. You can like it or hate it or you can like and hate it. As he quotes in the jewel room: “Without an audience, without the presence of spectators, these jewels would not fulfill the function for which they came into being. The viewer then is the ultimate artist. His sight, heart, mind – fusing with and grasping with greater or lesser understanding the intent of the creator – gives them life.”

The experience was fascinatingly, liberating, inspiring us to follow our path of independent thinking and encouraged us to continue to do what is important to us without regard to “the norm”.

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