Jones

We spent a peaceful night on the olive grove despite the orange winds. It’s a lovely place, and we had it all to ourselves for €10, wifi included. Fabio didn’t turn up for the promised Italian / English lesson at 5 am, whew.

The forecast was for rain for most of the morning, so we drove to the free car park for Lecce, and sat it out.

Lecce had been sold to us by the Rough Planet as the Florence of the south, and so our expectations were sky high. Lecce was fine, but not really Florence. And as we were hampered in our ability to see inside anything by (a) it being closed for repairs – Anfiteatro Romano – or (b) not allowing dogs – churches and museums, all we really ended up doing was a 6km walk. With the odd view.

We were wondering whether to stay the night, but the car park was not enticing, so we drive on to Otranto, by the sea. Our first choice of car park was full, so we parked at a more expensive one next door – rather worryingly free of other motorhomes. 

We’ve been having MIFI problems. Our expensive (but free to us) Teltronika was brilliant on our first couple of Jones outings, but on this trip has been dreadful. In the Lecce carpark, I got 0.86 Mbps download from it, and 11.79 from my phone. The only possible explanations were that the new plan EE to which has changed its SIM, or something Rog has done to it. Because both talking to EE and fiddling with networks makes him very angry, he’s been resisting trying to fix it – until now. I had to cower silently under a barrage of swearing for a while, but afterwards the good news was that all was now well – a couple of cheap pigtails R has bought from Amazon to move the WIFI antennas to a “neater” place had introduced noise. Probably. Testing will continue.

Anger abated, we took Flynn for a little stroll into town, where after we inspected the castello…

…we drank a sundowner or two…

… before taking Flynn back to Jones for dinner (his) and changing for dinner (ours). Then we walked back into town and had a little wander around the shops, and Rog bought himself some locally made suede sandals, before we went for dinner at  Viccolo Matto Fishbar.

We had a bit of a splurge on a plate of raw fish – two sorts of prawns, oysters, tuna, langoustines and coffee seasoned salmon (surprisingly delicious).

Our mains were octopus tentacles, of which we have enough left over for snacks before tomorrow’s dinner.