An early start to the day as we have to go to the airport to pick up our hire car. Our taxi driver is a lovely guy, who, we learn, loves to surf, snowboard and was a soccer player in the 4th division of the Paris national league.

Our car is a lovely new Peugeot - very roomy and brand new - nice! Today we are driving from Paris to the Italian Riviera town of Rapolloa - east of Genoa. It's a huge drive. We plan to stop in a town called Chambery in foothills of the alps - just east of Lyon and south of Geneva in Switzerland.

David's first experience of driving on the Paris roads was a massive traffic jam - it took a long time to get from the airport and out of Paris. Then once we got going, it was an easy drive - even I drove on the autostrada, where the speed is 130km but a lot of people drive 150 - 180! David loved driving on the autostradas! At one point he drove 180km per hour!

The autostrada was one long and reasonably straight road. In many places there were just bridges and tunnels and not many exits or entries onto the freeway. There were tollways along the way - the total was around 130 Euro to drive from Paris to Rapollo in Italy.

At one of the tunnels there was a really long line of trucks and cars waiting at the entrance of the tunnel. We found out that there had been an accident in the tunnel and some of the truck drivers had been in the queue for over an hour. As it turned out, we only had to wait about 15 minutes and then we were on our way again.

We arrived in Chambery at around 4pm. We walked through the old town and car-free streets and found a plaza where we ordered some food. A little French boy that had two puppies came up to us and let us pat his little puppies. We think the puppies were 8 weeks old ... but then Monique suggested perhaps the boy was 8 years old - now we're not sure if the 'huit' (8) was 8 weeks for the puppies or 8 years old for the boy!

We arrived in Rapollo late at night - around 10.45pm. The hotel was located in an awesome spot - right on the waterfront ... but the rooms were pretty average. Booked online - win some, lose some!