Gino's Italian Adventure 2019

Isolated at home for the foreseeable future, I’ve plenty of time on my hands to write about last year’s European tour!

- JOHN GOOCH

Like most holidays, this trip was inspired by watching television in the middle of winter. We were attracted to the programmes showing the chef, Gino D’Campo on a ‘food tour’ of the Southeastern side of Italy. Jean and I love Italy and the roads Gino took, looked particularly quiet and rural (more on that later).

After our holiday in 2017, we’d returned home on three and a half cylinders and 2017/8 was spent replacing the cylinder heads and uprating the brakes with new calipers and discs. We had tested everything out on a run to Keukenhof in Holland and our favourite site at Rudesheim in Germany, where we were joined by our family and 5 grandsons. Vanessa drove perfectly and we had a trouble-free year.

As a result of out successful experience, we departed for Holland on a night sailing in early May from Harwich and woke to the ‘birdsong’ alarm at 7 am. After breakfast we left the ship and took our usual route down to Rudesheim for our first stop.