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I mentioned before that one of my university friends, Teresa, was working briefly in North Italy while we were there, and we’d arranged to meet up in Verona. Teresa and I were part of a group of six females in the same year, in the early 80s, reading Economics at Bath. We hooked-up early in our first year, and stayed friends all the way through. We even tried to share a house in our second year, but the landlady pulled it from the rental market over the summer. Apart from one

We’d originally planned to have a two-night stop before crossing the Alps, so that we could get some laundry done. But with the great weather conditions, and the chance to meet up with Teresa in Verona, we soon abandoned that idea. The drive along the Romantic Road twisted and turned so much that it took hours to reach anywhere near the end town of Füssen, and from where we would set off for the Brenner Pass. I’m not kidding – for two hours solid, we were only 1.5 hours from

Looking north from the Fern Pass, Austria Well, we are on day six of our grand tour to Leros and I’m in bed in the guesthouse looking out at the Alps. It’s a crispy morning with a light frost and the early morning sun is illuminating the snowy caps in a “ tantalising ” way. Of course, to the modern traveller, one can use romantic prose to describe such obstacles, but for the medieval traveller, “ menacing ” might have been a better word. Fear of extreme discomfort or even de

We were still in Greece in Autumn 2024, when Richard started to talk about driving down to Leros next season. There are always a few foreign-registered cars at the marina – British and German in the main, plus the odd Italian job, and I think Richard had wondered before about a Road Trip. He wanted to make a proper Grand Tour out of it, rather than just zapping down a bunch of motorways for eight hours a day. To do that we really needed to monitor our Schengen days in Greece,

S5 in Dinkelsbühl After leaving Würzburg, we found the ‘ Romantischen Strasse’, and wended and meandered southwards towards the Alps.   'Romantic' is a word to me that conjured up chocolate-box landscapes, dotted with Lego-perfect towns, and with villages full of medieval charm. And, indeed, that’s what we discovered to our delight. However, we soon discovered a possible darker interpretation of the word. This is related to the sentimental meanings of this Bavarian idyll. Aft