“Bolognese sauce is a meat-based sauce for pasta originating in Bologna, Italy.”

I’m sorry to say it, but we couldn’t find any mince in the shop, so we ate Risotto.

With a couple of days to kill in Northern Italy, we spent the last two nights in a campsite near the centre of Bologna, selected by virtue of being open. We hid in the tent till 2pm yesterday (it was raining) then, armed with the campsite’s tourist map (with 1 in 10 streets marked, but every pub clearly advertised) and our trusty GPS, we took a dander to the city centre to see the sights.

As seems typical for Italian cities, the outskirts are an underwhelming mess of concrete, fuel stations and endless, confusing motorway junctions. The centre, though, was a gem. Narrow streets with single level arcades blocked most of our GPS reception, but the presence of the two towers guided us to the centre. By my count, the Asinelli Tower, at 97 metres, had 498 polished, thin steps. I found myself strangely disappointed at the missing 2.

Bologna had somewhere between 100 and 200 towers at various stages of medieval history. A dozen or so seem to survive, of varying sizes. What we found particularly amazing was the complexity and age of these things – the Asinelli Tower is thought to be nearly 900 years old.

Today we have moved on to Lake Garda. Despite every side road, junction and back garden being a tourist resort or campsite of some form, we couldn’t find a single one open. However, they all have copious car parks, some of which have nice corners hidden out of sight. With stunning views of the lake. And some still have their free wifi turned on.

Tomorrow we’re picking up the next set of drivers, the de la Haye brothers. We were initially to be meeting them in Tunis and driving to Hurghada, in Egypt. We’re now meeting them in Milan, and still aiming for Hurghada, but through Eastern Europe and Syria. We may manage to get overland the whole way through Jordan, with only a short ferry hop to the Sinai peninsula, but that will depend on time. Stay tuned.

…and then was coming. And then was pulled forward by 6 hours to arrive before the curfew, and which we then cancelled.

In one hotel our free hotel wifi stopped working. So I logged into 192.168.1.1 using the old ‘admin/admin’ gem and rebooted it, which got us back online. Nice and easy. Once we got to Genoa, the hotel wifi was 7 Euros/hour, but beside the two lobby computers was a free cable. So I plugged in the laptop. And there we stayed, Louise and I, in shifts, for pretty much the entire 2 days in the city, planning a new route through Eastern Europe, Syria and perhaps Jordan, to get to Egypt at the same time as we’d originally planned, but avoiding Tunisia and Libya.

Breaks from the internet were had for clothes washing (how can a whole city have no open laundrettes?), food (including in a rather stupendous restaurant in which every surface was piled high with spirits from around the world, every square inch of wall covered by historic documents, maps and paintings, every item on the crammed, 6 page menu was hand written, and every table other than ours empty), and for a brief dander around the old city one evening.

One month into SurfingAfrica, with a newly planned 2 further weeks ahead of us in Europe, we’ve just spent 50 Euros on maps and guide books to Europe. We’re now wandering about the brain lapse that led both of us to subconsciously think “We’re going to Africa, we won’t need any of our extensive stock of European guide books and maps, will we?”

Says it’s not safe to go to Tunisia just now. So, we’re having a major re-think of our route. Options just now are get the ferry from Venice to Egypt and then spend a couple of weeks relaxing there, or re-route through Eastern Europe, getting the ferry from Syria to Egypt in two weeks time. Stay tuned to hear what we decide in the next few days.

For now we’ve had a couple of days using the facilities of a nice hotel in Genoa.

When the revolution comes, at least we'll have clean underwear