It’s another (mostly) travel day today. We’re leaving the fabulous town of Matera and heading for Greek Paestum.
But first we had to check out the “other” view of Matera, from the other side of the valley looking back at the town.
We couldn’t check out of the campsite until 9:30 (probably should have checked out the night before) and so we got to the Belvedere di Murgia Timone view point by about 10.
Now, our Italian isn’t great. We give it a go, but we’re not great, especially when it comes to road signs. Anyway, we got to the park associated with the view point and there was a tatty shed of a building reporting to be the tourist centre (or something similar). But we knew the viewpoint had a car park (we’d seen it on Maps) very near to the valley edge, which was still over a km away. However, the road to that car park was narrow, single lane and looked like it was meant for touring busses only. But none of the signed on the entrance to the road seemed to say we couldn’t got down it, so we did.
We met one car coming the other way on our tentative 1km drive down the road. So we assumed that at least others had made the same call as us.
When we got to the car park there was also one other car there.
Anyway, we got out and took some photos…
The pictures really don’t do this view justice. It’s beyond epic! With the usual Italian view of cliff edge safety (none) you can get right up to the cliff edge and look the two or three hundred meter gap to the city! Fantastico!
So after about 20 minutes admiring the view we set the Nav for our campsite just past Paestum – Agro Camping!
Apple Maps has been pretty reasonable on our trip so far. But today it decided to take us on some of the worse “proper” roads we’ve encountered so far.
The first bit was ok, but there was a stretch of about 20k before we got to Potenza where there were massive potholes, huge sink holes and/or the road disintegrating. Add that to the crazy gradients and the hairpins and we had to have our wits about us.
Past Potenza we were mostly on dual carriageway, and not bad road surfaces. But you still needed your wits on full alert as road works could mean a change to the other carriageway via a 5m drop combined with almost right angle turns.
Now… a word about Italian drivers. It’s been said before and it’ll be said again… They’re hilarious. Overtaking on blind bends, brows of hills, you name it, any bit of road (safe or not) is an overtaking opportunity. And of course it’s done even if it makes no difference to the driver’s progress… just stuck in the same 50 car queue that everyone else is in. We even saw someone overtake someone who was overtaking today. I have a theory that the overtaking isn’t anything to do with getting to their destination faster, it’s just to show that they’re more macho than you. Fortunately most of these kamikaze drivers will be dead soon, the road mortality rate must be astronomical in Italy. Their loss not ours 🤷♂️
However, some friends of ours said they’d been driving in Albania recently and would prefer to have been driving blindfold in Vietnam rather than Albania. So we dodged a bullet there by using the ferries a couple of weeks ago!
Somewhere just after Potenza we stopped for a coffee in a petrol station. Very friendly staff who sort of got what we were trying to do. Then we sat in the van and had some lunch.
Once we’d got to the Paestum area we dived into the only Supermarket we could find – Sole365, not seen that chain before.
Then off to the campsite where there was only one other campervan. The site owner only does checking from 18:00 to 22:00 so we parked up and went for a walk looking for a tobacconist for stamps. Everywhere was shut… everywhere!
There seems to be a lot of these self service shops, yesterday ice cream, today pharmacy.
We suspect there’s so many of these self serve places because many shops shut during the day and on Sundays. We don’t seem to have picked up this trend in the UK, and we suspect it’s because it’s so easy to find a shop that’s always open back home, even big supermarkets.
And then we came across Zero Glutine!
It was shut, of course.
So we made some tea and sat down to watch No Time To Die – for the Matera sequence of course.
We made some tea about 6 and decided to head out and see if the Senze Glutime shop was open – it did say it would be open between 4 and 8.
And our luck was in, it was open. Normally I’d be all over this shop, but on this paleo-keto diet I’m currently on, even GF stuff is off the menu.
And then on the way home we just had to have a nosey at the new range of Cat hardware!
First thing Tomorrow we’re driving the 3km to Paestum and then onto Amalfi.
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