Day off for the navigator

Trip Start Sep 18, 2009

Trip End Sep 28, 2009

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Where I stayed

driving through

(Aosta hotels)

Flag of Italy Aosta, Aosta Valley, Italy
Tuesday, September 22, 2009

We had packed up the Landy by about 8 a.m., and were ready to plan the route to Val d'Isere. With no roadbook to follow, the GPS was put into use, and a quick check against the maps verified that the best route was probably down towards Milan to join the motorway, and take motorways towards Aosta.

So, not much in the way of navigating to be done, except to check the road signs now and again, so the hunt for bingo photos was driven hard today.

We had decided to travel via Aosta, so as to get as close to the roadbook outlined route as possible. About midday, we got our first views of Mont Blanc, or Monte Bianco, as the Italians know it. As we turned off the motorway, we could still see it, until the narrow winding roads took us across the other side of another mountain

Mont Blanc

.

Now we realised this was our last chance to get the police photo, as soon we
wouldn't be in Italy any more. So I was keeping an eye open for a policeman, and spotted a whole police station( or should I say Carabinieri)!! There must be one in there, we thought. And it's definitely worth stopping. We got a place to park (probably not very legal, but we were following the Italian rules of the road by now), grabbed our Landy Rally T shirts, and went on the hunt for points. It lookead bit locked up, but as we poked around the gate, a couple of people came out, one of which was obviously our target. With lots of sign language, some French mixed with German, we got the idea over, and landed the photo. But we couldn't persuade him to do the handcuffs, so we didn't push our luck.

We crossed the border into France shortly afterwards and travelled along the Col du Petit Saint-Bernard (which, for some reason, google maps won't recognise as a road, although it shows it as a walking route!), and found the town of Seez. We must have taken some wrong turning around here, because the GPS went a bit mad. So we found a place to turn round (not easy on those roads) and went back until we could agree with the direction the GPS wanted to take.

We'd sent a text to Tom to say we'd arrive about 2 p.m, and could he arrange for some food to be left for us from the barbeque which had been arranged. He confirmed, and said he'd come down for us at that time.

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