We’re getting quite good at this packing lark – showered, packed and checked out all in less than an hour this morning!  The MR2 seemed happy to be on the road again.  After Tom’s minor tweek yesterday (just to fix a slightly loose alternator belt) she was running beautifully.

As we left the lovely city of Geneva, we were soon over the border again and back in France.  I think today has been our favourite drive so far.  The motorway took us high up into the Alps between France and Italy, with jaw dropping views in all directions.  Mountains towered above us, as we swept past Alpine villages, lakes and clear, turquoise rivers.  Climbing up towards Mont Blanc gave us a taste of the Swiss passes that are to follow later on in our amazing holiday.  We also passed over many more viaducts – the motorways over here are quite a feat of engineering!

Eventually, we reached the mouth of the Mont Blanc tunnel, where we were ushered to one side by a group of French policemen.  I nervously answered their many questions (this holidays is seriously testing my language skills), but they sent us on our way with no problems – after a quick nosey around Tom’s car of course!  Next came what we thought was going to be the border.  I prepared the passports, but, no, this was the toll for the tunnel.  A quite astounding 40 EUR 90 was handed over!!!  Let’s just say we’re glad we’re not travelling home the same way!

Speaking of passports, they have not been checked by anyone at any of the borders we’ve crossed so far; we’ve now crossed from the UK to France, France to Switzerland, Switzerland to France and France to Italy!

After passing through the impressive (but rather monotonous) Mont Blanc tunnel, we emerged into more epic scenery and descended through more stunning mountains (and tunnels) onto the planes of northern Italy.  From then on it wasn’t quite as exciting and was quite a long (and very hot) slog to Milan, with a brief break for lunch, after which I nervously took over the driving. However, the suburban roads of Milan were pretty quiet and the SATNav took us straight to the door of our hotel.  No covered parking for the MR2 here, but we found a shady spot in the hotel car park for her to cool down after her mountainous journey.

The hotel seems to be quite a way from the centre, but it’s in a quiet part of town and is nice and quirky, so it suits us!  It’s almost more like little apartments off a central courtyard, with their doors off long, shared blaconies.

We were very glad of the air conditioning when we arrived, and spent a good couple of hours just cooling off!  We then headed out to search for some dinner. but all the local restaurants seemed to be closed for the holiday season!  We did find a bar that served us a nice cold Morretti beer each 🙂  Following the advice of the hotel, we then went back to a pizzeria that we had passed and purchased some wood-fired-oven-baked pizzas, which we took back and ate on the balcony outside our room – yum yum!

Tomororw we’re off to explore Milan’s city centre, possibly with our waterproofs in tow – but who cares?  We’re in Italy!

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