Getting to Croatia – France and into Italy

The ride on day 2 of the trip to Croatia was good, but we had to miss out on one road that we had intended to do. We rode 365 miles on this day and it took a long time, on mainly mountain roads. Early on during the ride, I hit a big milestone, or rather the Leading Ladies did. The bike went over the 40,000 mile mark....

This is Ian, taken at a morning drinks break....

It didn’t take long for us to see the first snow on the Alps. We thought it looked pretty high up and we didn’t even think that it might affect our journey. We were wrong....

Taken high in the mountains somewhere, this is Ian bike, called Richard II. He names all of his bikes after Shakespeare plays....

And the Leading Ladies, in the same place....

A lot of the roads we were on during the morning were very twisty indeed, with many, many, many hairpin bends.....



We were making good time and doing well, until we saw this sign....

We were due to ride the L’Iseran Pass across the Alps as we wanted to see a ski resort called Val-D’Isere on the way. Unfortunately, it was closed and we had to do about a hundred mile detour via the St Bernard Pass. This was no big problem, but it did add a lot of miles, a lot of which were by motorway.

On the top of the St Bernard Pass, we went from France into Italy. This is just on the Italian side....

There was no snow on the roads we were on, but we assume the pass we wanted to use was closed due to snow. The views were spectacular....

The trouble with mountain passes, is there are never any toilets when you want one....

We arrived at our hotel, the old Fiat factory that was used as one of the locations in the film, the Italian Job. I refer to the original and best version of the film, starring Michael Caine. We were so bushed, we ate in the hotel (excellent steaks and a good red wine).