Jones

We dithered about stopping another night on the agritourismo. I’m never the most decisive about these things but in the end I did it. Flynn and I went to the Etna Panorama whilst Jane interacted with the local horse.Then off to the only real reason we came this far south. The Riace Bronzes. First though we had to contend with Southern Italian navigation. We knew something might be wrong when we say this in the road.

All three of Google, Apple and Garmin were convinced that this was a motorway slip road.

With some old fashioned driving-until-you-recognise-something we eventually parked near the museum and left Flynn being dogsat by the aircon. The statues are two of only a handful of surviving Greek bronzes. They were found buried in tilth in 1972. The combination of age (2500 years) and detail – agate eyes, red copper lips and silver teeth are all intact – is stunning.

We tried our best to see the rest of the archeological museum but (sorry Grayson) there’s a limit to the number of pots you can look at.

We drove north an hour on the autostrada to Cala Camping. It’s washday hence a campsite and… despite not staying still last night, we do want a rest. Cala Camping is at the dull end of a nothing little town but it’s super tidy and very friendly. The owners’ twelve year old daughter speaks excellent English and was keen to practice so we got a very detailed overview of the showers and electricity.

We sat around for most of the day, venturing into town to give Flynn a swim and stock up on beer and pasta. The town is really beaten down… and a little weird. The only people on the beach seemed to be overweight late middle aged men. I fit right in but Jane wanted to go before I stripped off.

On the way back to the campsite we had an ice cream. It was rather good. A first cross between Ben and Jerry’s American awful throw-everything-in and Italian good-ingredients-must-include-booze.

Back at the van, we’d been told to take lemons from the trees surrounding the porch. When campsite owners give Jane lemons, she makes lemonade.

DInner was fiduea – portuguese pasta eaten in Italy. The pope phoned and told us off but it was delicious anyway. Whilst Jane was cooking, Flynn amused himself with a lemon: a desirable obviously a ball thing but smells dangerous. Very exciting.

He kept that up for about an hour.