Into The Wild

The cobblestones of Rome far behind us, we enter the last third of our travels, staying in a tiny town on the Reno river about a half an hour into the hills above Bologna.


Vado a Vado.  Getting there was a huge adventure as we arrived well after dark and as Vado is not easily accessible from the A1 we had to overshoot it by about 8 kilometers and double back. Turning on the wrong branch of a roundabout and found ourselves on the A1 again in the opposite direction.  Re-routed by GPS we had to overshoot it again and did so successfully.  Then ran into a barrier in some dark and lonely place called Rioveggio:  ROAD CLOSED.  An ominous sign, fog piling in, GPS re-routing again and I believe starting to get annoyed with us.

We put ourselves at its mercy and only took one more horrible wrong turn on the dark highway -  into an ancient farm and nearly got our car stuck in an old stone barn passageway. Yikes. The car scene from Master of None. (@4:10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVm17f9KzGs) flashed before my eyes, but I managed to back out in time.

End of story, we limped into a dark and foggy Vado and were welcomed by Andrea and Martina to their apartment, with Panettone and Prosecco and in the morning were rewarded with a glorious view of our new home in the hills.

A very different vibe than Rome. a true small town with empty streets, People dressed like people and not like fashion models. Very much feel at home here. Not a lot of places to eat outside of pizzerias and bars, but the folks are friendly, the river is wide, the pizza is wood-fired and amazing.

Tomorrow we head out into the wild, southwest to a collage of villages and ancient mountain towns

It's going to be a good month..