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Day 5
- Stuck in Costigliole D'Asti (Italy)
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Sunday - 16th March 2008 |
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A number
of phone calls were made with Elisabeth and the
conclusion was that
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They would provide us with a hire car for 2 days
great, we'll have it from Sunday to Monday and leave
it at Nimes.
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They would provide a ferry back to the UK this was
needed as I'd checked with SpeedFerries and as we
didn't have a car, we couldn't sail back with them,
so P&O Calais to Dover seemed the best bet
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We
explained that we wanted to continue with the
holiday and so just needed the car until we got
home.
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But, there enters an issue or two you can't take a
foreign registered hire car into the UK, don't ask
me why and after searching the net, there was only
one car hire company who would allow it and guess
what they would charge only £1200 for 3 days for a
Corsa!!!!
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Also, there's issues with renting a car in one
country (say Italy) and dropping it off in another
(say France), so the fun continues.
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Now
this all seems fairly straight forward, but by this
time we'd go into 2 full A4 pages of phone calls
that have been made / received.
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So
the plan was to hire us a French registered car from
the local car hire company and allow for it to
dropped off in Calais. Sounds like a plan wrong,
this is Italy on a Sunday, the nearest car rental
place is Turin airport as all others closed and
guess what, they don't have any French registered
cars available on the Sunday. So explained we are
due to be driving 400 miles Monday but they assured
us that it would be sorted out first thing Monday.
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well
not really too much to do when you're in a village
without transport, it's a Sunday and nothing is open,
oh, the hotel is '200m' from the village. Well, that is
what the receptionist said, but it was soon obvious that
geography was not his strongest subject in school. First
you had to scale down the outside ramp definitely not
DDA compliant, down a slope that you needed a ski lift
to come back up again, and up a 'slight slope' ie a
series of bends that it would have been fun driving
up/down (if we had a car), then a little straight
basically we're talking about a mile and a bit of calf
stretching mountain climbing. |
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The
hotel only offered breakfast, so guess who had the task
of being the hunter
set off at 13:00 which wasn't the
brightest thing to do as in Italy, everything shuts for
lunch 12:00 to 14:00 and to add to that it was a Sunday
in a small village. But I did manage to sneak into a
'closed but door open' type shops and found some
essentials even though the Italian phrase book was left
in the room (muppet) and then onto the market square
where there had been a Sunday market, but now closed.
But managed to get a few more bits and then called into
the restaurant on the way back to the hotel feast time
as I was knackered. |
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The
evening was back up to the restaurant and had a
marvellous meal, really enjoyed it. We noticed there was
a Swiss couple on the table next to us who were also
staying in the hotel and had driven there did they
offer us a ride back, did they buggery, gone off the
Swiss, mind you didn't like his car, the chrome wheels
were far too clean! |
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Oh,
forgot to mention that the hotel did advertise having an
Olympic sized swimming pool yep, that was true, but
the thing was that you could almost walk across it, how
shall I say, it needed a lot of TLC especially in
getting rid of the green water decided to give that a
miss. |
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