Day 53 – Gallipoli to Matera

Another travel day… the relentless pull of the road never ceases!

Not much to report today, and the Dashcam was playing silly buggers (needed the SD card reformatting) and so there’s not much from there either.

Camping Torre Sabea was a nice little site. Very tired, quirky, but we enjoyed it.

Sue didn’t enjoy her cold showers though, but that must have been her cubicle, ‘cos mine was toasty.

A bit of brecky for me (liking a bit of semi-real bacon with my eggs) then we headed off to Matera.

We both decided that Gallipoli probably wasn’t worth the extra 2 days and 150k. It’s nice and all that, but it’s pretty much what Lecce tells you about the history and without its scale and Roman sites. The castle is interesting, but not worth the detour really.

But on to Matera.

We’d selected the SatNav’s slightly longer scenic route up the coast to get to Taranto first, but for some unknown reason it flipped to taking us on the faster roads across to Brindisi and THEN Taranto. We’ve DONE Brindisi already! But by the time we’d noticed, it was too late, so we took the easy, but 40k further, option through Brindisi… just gotta go with the flow!

Taranto was an obvious point to switch the driving, Sue having taken the first leg, and to have something to eat and a coffee.

There are two large salt water (we think) lakes to the east of Taranto and we wanted a nice coffee stop overlooking one of the lakes.

But it seems Taranto is pretty industrialised (there’s a whopping oil refinery in every vista) and our first attempts at even a picnic stop failed with even nowhere to pull off the lake road.

So we headed for the first car park we could see, which was a park and ride into the town. And as luck would have it, it turned out that on the lakeward side of the car park was a municipal park with access to the lake shore. I’d seen it on the map and half thought it was somewhere we could get to the lake from, but it turned out much better.

We had something to eat in the car park and then wandered through the park to the lake.

(Best not to look at the shore edge – pretty yeuky rubbish tip!)

We then headed to Matera and our campsite for two nights, Masseria Pantaleone Agriturismo.

This site is a hard standing site with a small restaurant and a shuttle into Matera. The site was 1/3 full when we got here, but by 6 it was overflowing. Even at this time of year, the transit traffic “doing” Matera is significant.

WiFi was only accessible for around reception, but really fast and a chance for me to check some company stuff and Sue to catch up with her emails..

The site is really cheap though. €20 for the night, but showers are €1 for a 5 minute shower token. Loos are spotless, with no loo seats, but do have loo paper. There are definitely mozzies about, so we deployed the smouldering coffee trick…

Also started the bottle of 72100 wine we were given at the Dimora Risveglio winery outside Brindisi. Very nice!

There’s another couple of Brits on the site in an almost identical van to Ollie. But their van is a couple of years older and the occupants even more so!

Our other campsite option was a motor racing circuit, but there was no shade, so no choice really.

Just doing some route planning and put in some planned destinations to see what a route might look like.

From last nights “furthest from home”, and going through Paestum, Naples and Avignon, we’re looking at 3,000km to home! And that wasn’t even taking into account todays’s detour through Brindisi!

2557 miles on the odo at the end of the day.

Tomorrow we get the 9.30am shuttle into Matera. There’s lots to do, but we’ll probably head back on the 1PM return shuttle and maybe go back in the evening if we’ve got unfinished business.