Day 61 – Leaving Naples and a bit of Lucca

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So, we’re on the way home! We’re heading north now, and going to be taking big chunks out of the 2,500km we have to get there.

We had a spectacular thunderstorm roll through the bay of Naples last night, from about 11 until 1 – sheet and fork lightning. The wind got up too, which rattled the pop top a bit, and it was a good job we packed the awning, chairs, tables and bikes away.

But it was dry, if a little muddy when we got up at 7:30.

The first job of the day was to wipe the pop top and front screen cover down so they didn’t get stowed wet.

After a shower and some brecky we were ready to hit the road.

Villa Julia was one of our better campsite finds. There are sites that are also bang on the front door of the Pompei site. But they looked hideous. Villa Julia was a 10 minute bike ride away, but there was loads of space between vans and around the site, and the loos and showers were on a constant cleaning cycle. Though, to be fair, they needed to be as the site was either dusty, or muddy, depending on the weather.

It’s been a day of contrasts in many ways. Naples is a southern Italian city, 3rd largest in Italy. Lucca is a tourist trap (Sue says not, but I think it feels like Bath) in the more affluent north. Naples for us was (partly) characterized by the mess, typified by this shot only a few hundred meters from our campsite. It was the worst we saw, but not by much…

First stop was to see if we could buy an exchange gas bottle for the van from Boutique del Campeggiatore in Portici, about 30 minutes up the autostrada and exactly where we needed to be going anyway.

Boutique del Campeggiatore had nothing on what I’d think of as a camping shop, like Atwoll’s, for instance. But luckily for us they had the Camping Gaz 907 bottle that we needed and so we paid for an exchange (€39.50) and exchanged the bottles in the car park. Good value we thought. The staff were very friendly and the woman spoke good English.

Then we went in search of a supermarket and some diesel. The supermarket was a bust. It was the biggest (Sole355) we could find on our route out of Naples, but when we got there it was a mall type experience and there was only a multi-storey to park in. With the size of the van and the bikes on the back we decided it wasn’t worth the risk.

Next to the mall was a petrol station, not cheap, but we needed to get moving, so we paid about €1.6/L instead of about 10 cents cheaper elsewhere. But that’s ok, some you win, some you lose. The machine at the station was an automated payment system. It nearly worked for us, but the payment didn’t authorize on the first go and I hadn’t clocked that the pump was a locking type, not the “must hold” ones we have in the UK. The attendant sorted us in the end.

Next it was ttime to much some miles. We headed for on the Autostrada and punched in Florence (Fiorenze).

473km!

The nav said 473km to Florence. And we knew we’d need to go another 50 or 60k past there too.

So, I took the first shift and we headed north.

As we headed up, past Rome, the scenery became greener. And I would say the roads were better and cleaner.

We found the autostrada stops to be clean and friendly. In two of them (AutoCafe) they had two dedicated campervan/motorhome parking spaces, and grey water drains.

There wasn’t much to report in the 574km autostrada run. 2 hold ups, one for an accident and one for roadworks. It rained for a few km twice.

Every 90 minutes or so we stopped for a wee, a drink and to stretch our legs. So by the time we got to the Florence area at about 4, we’d each done 2 stints.

Sue then did some rootling around on Park4Night and found a parking only campervan stop in Lucca. The stop is behind an auto repair garage at Via Augusto Passaglia 318 in Lucca.

The campervan parking is in a courtyard at the back of the garage (you drive through it) and there’s space for about a dozen 6 or 7 meter motor homes. It was nearly full when we arrived but fortunately had space for one more.

We then headed into the town. This was a bonus stop. We hadn’t planned to be going anywhere particularly interesting for our stop over tonight. But we decided it was better to at least get a flavour than just sit in the van. Sue had also been recommended it by a good friend and Lucca was well worth the trouble to get out and about in.

Walking around Lucca in the early evening

And then we got lucky. We’d not done any research on Lucca and so we just wandering around. We saw an oval plaza on the map and decided to see if there were any restaurants there, Piazza dell Anfiteatro.

As it turned out it was JUST a piazza of restaurants. It’s about 60 or 80m on the long side of an oval, but there must be 20 restaurants. The second one we looked at, da Gherado, said it did homemade Gluten Free pasta and pizza, so that was a no-brainer, we had to stop… and bugger my Paleo-Keto diet… for another night! 🤣