It’s getting better all the time.
Admittedly a low bar, having woken up in our clinical morgue – our most expensive booking yet, by a margin, but a soul-sinking experience, with a sterile, cheap, sub-Ikea aesthetic, all tacky ‘artworks’ and more empty white cupboards than you could shake a stick at, and welcoming consumables which included – correction, which were – one pack of salt, one sachet of sugar, and one of sweetener. How can you let out a room for an eye-watering 78 euros and provide one sachet of sugar? And what will your ‘guests’ do with it, when you’ve provided not even a smidgeon of coffee? Arsehole. Forgive my Italian.
Then as we left it began drizzling. Within minutes a drizzle had turned into rain. Then the rain became heavy rain. And apres le heavy rain, la deluge. Blimey but when it rains here it doesn’t mess about.
We pressed on. We’re like that. When we were thoroughly drenched, and with wind ripping branches off mighty trees, we took shelter under a bridge and considered our options. Which were none. When the maelstrom subsided to a steady pour, on we went.
An hour or two later it eased, then stopped. Scraps of blue appeared, even a struggle of milky sun. We continued on our soggy way, up and over today’s 500m pass, and by late afternoon we hit the coast. And another of those horrendous coast roads (admittedly along a stunning, wild coastline, late sun shimmering as breakers crashed in). This one punctuated on the final furlong by lengthy tunnels in which most of the already risible lighting had long since died, leaving us riding almost blind, on a busy narrow road, with vehicles, many heavy, hurtling by within inches. Genuinely terrifying. And absolutely no option but to press on.
To arrive, finally (thank God) at our destination, Gaeta, which was, is, absolutely lovely – everything our last coastal town, Giulanova, wasn’t – and our flat, which again is everything last night’s wasn’t: spacious, human, homely. With coffee. And much else besides. In fact it’s all so nice we’re currently celebrating with a couple of Jens’s latest educations – Aparol spritzers (how have I got through 62 years without?) – and have decided to stay another day. Cheers!