We had heard that there was an annual fish festival on in a small town called Camogli held on the second Sunday of May, which is right on the coast in the middle of the Italian Riviera. We were a bit nervous after our experience at the risotto festival, but we went for it anyway and drove 2 hours from Milan to the coast, arriving on the Saturday afternoon. When we arrived in Camogli it was raining and we couldn't see much. What we did see impressed us though. ...

We arrived in Milan in the rain but that didn't stop us from getting out amongst it immediately. We checked into our hotel and Ian and Carmel went off to check into an AirBNB. Within a few minutes Carmel had sent us a photo of Il Duomo, the 3rd largest church in Christiandom. Apparently it was halfway between our hotel and their apartment. We went straight out to meet them at Il Duomo and then went off to join a tour of Milan. This tour was advertised as a sma...

After a short drive, we arrived in Verona. During the trip, both Ian and Carmel fell asleep. Carmel had her head back and her mouth open so wide that a nest of pigeons could have taken refuge in there. On arrival we parked in a car park and called the hotel as instructed, because much of the city centre is for pedestrians only and our hotel was located directly in the middle. We walked down their busy, cobble-stoned main street to our hotel. The hotel was call...

Today we picked up our car from the Venice airport and began our road trip! We had a bit of a rocky start because the car we hired was brand new and they hadn't installed the GPS navigation yet. We lost an hour waiting for them to install the GPS before we could leave, but finally we were on our way. Our first stop was only one hour from Venice in a place called Vicenza. Lidia has relatives there from her mother's side and we had organised to visit them. We ha...

The day before we were to leave Assisi to drive to Venice we received a message from Carmel. Her and Ian were due to meet us in Venice the next day, but it turns out their plane out of Melbourne was delayed. This meant that they were due to miss their connecting flight in Doha through to Venice. They were told that there were no other flights to Venice for 24 hours, therefore they were to be delayed getting to Venice by an entire day. Carmel had to advise the h...