Western Europe roundup 🇵🇹🇪🇸🇫🇷🇮🇹

After landing in Lisbon, we travelled 2,825 km over land to reach the port of Ancona. In Spain, we scaled two cathedrals for the price of one in Salamanca and gorged on tapas in Zaragoza, before walking the medieval walls of Girona. In France, we soaked up the atmosphere of Place Royal du Peyrou in Montpellier and sampled a Calisson (or two) in Aix-en-Provence. Finally, in Italy we ate our way through everything Parma had to offer, gawked at some expensive red cars in Maranello, slurped on Tagliatelle al Ragù in Bologna, and explored the gorgeous cobbled streets of Brisighella.

We’d planned our route through southwestern Europe around convenient long-distance train and bus routes. Although these routes tend to connect large cities (like Madrid, Barcelona, Marseille and Nice), we generally passed straight through them in order to leave more time to visit smaller cities and towns. This seemed to give us the best of both worlds, in that many of our stops felt slightly off the beaten track without actually being too time consuming to reach.

Carbon 🚆

Our flight from New York to Lisbon was responsible for 91% of our carbon emissions from this leg of the journey, which is understandable since we did travel further in the air than we did by land.

We normally allocate carbon emissions from international travel to the arrival country, but this didn’t seem very fair on poor old Portugal since we only stayed in the country for one night before heading east into Spain. Instead, this time we’ve distributed the carbon from our trans-Atlantic journey across Portugal, Spain, France and Italy, proportional to how many nights we stayed in each country.

As usual, we’ve offset these emissions through Gold Standard’s Climate+ Portfolio. The offsets from this leg of our journey are helping to fund the construction of a wind farm in Turkey. All of our carbon offsets from the past year are recorded in Gold Standard’s offset registry, along with the various projects that they’ve supported.

Cost 💰

All four countries ranked highly on our spend per day tracker. A key contributor to these totals was our expenditure on transport, since we did travel fairly quickly through these countries (e.g. taking advantage of high-speed rail links). We also distributed the cost of our flight to Lisbon between Portugal, Spain, France and Italy using the same method as for our carbon emissions, which pushed up the transport costs further. In general, though, it felt like we were getting a lot for our money being back in Europe – both food and accommodation was so much cheaper than in the United States.

Cats 🐈

Sadly, the ongoing cat drought continued throughout western Europe, with Portugal receiving the dubious honour of being the first totally cat-free country of our trip so far.

As with the graphs above, Italy’s total reflects the average cats per day across both of our visits to Italy, because let’s face it, people need to know a country’s cat density before planning their next holiday.

🏅Snappiest dresser

It’s no secret that the Italians are a well-dressed bunch, but this black eyeliner, white neckerchief and socks combo blew les chats français out of the water.

🏅Most photogenic spot for a nap

This is already the third photo of Brisighella’s cats to feature on this blog, and we haven’t even started to scrape the barrel. What a little poser!

Having spent nearly a year travelling outside of Europe, we felt like we had a newfound appreciation for its beauty and variety, which we’ve definitely taken for granted in the past. The biggest adjustment was actually mealtimes! But given New York is five hours behind Portugal, the jet lag actually worked in our favour when it came to typical Iberian mealtimes – with lunch occurring mid-afternoon and dinner some time around 9-11pm! And the food was worth staying up for, anyway…

Setting sail for Greece 🇮🇹🛳🇬🇷

From lovely Brisighella, we hopped back onto the rail replacement bus (our favourite) and then a train to reach Ancona, from where we would board our international ferry to Greece.

We’d read that Ancona was a typical port city but that we’d uncover its charms if we just gave it a chance. To be honest, that wasn’t necessary – we passed through this arch even before we’d reached our accommodation and it was a stunning introduction to the city.

With less than 24 hours in town, we headed straight up to the cathedral, which sits atop a cliff overlooking the city. I tried feeding Oli to the lions who were guarding the door, but they weren’t very hungry.

From our vantage point, we had a great view over the old town and the port, but we were particularly taken with the sunset over the shipbuilding yard (romantic)! We could see the components of a huge ship being assembled on the dock and some parts were so large they looked like blocks of flats – it was pretty cool!

The next morning, we headed off on foot to catch our ferry to Corfu, but sadly, this wasn’t the first port we’ve visited that was clearly not built with pedestrians in mind. Eventually, we found a sign that suggested we needed to check in at a building some 20 minutes’ walk away before returning to where we were, but there were no pavements to get there. We were busy Brysoning our way along in the heat when thankfully a passing chap all but ordered us onto a shuttle bus that was running in that direction. The existence of this bus had (literally) passed us by and we were very relieved to enjoy the air conditioning for a few minutes. While checking in, we got our first hint that our ferry might be a little late, but the casualness of the woman’s tone and her lack of apology suggested this wasn’t anything new!

Once we made our way back to the passenger terminal, we headed through security, where an atypically kindly border guard pulled me aside. “Madam,” he said, “There is no ship.” This really made us smile – no ship at all?! He went on to explain where we could wait inside, which wasn’t at all obvious so I’m glad he told us. And sure enough, the ship didn’t appear for quite some hours so we spent most of the day quoting his line. Madam, there is no ship…

Eventually, our ship, the Olympic Champion, docked and we watched the lorries unload painfully slowly, before it was our time to join the utter chaos and attempt to board under the very hot sun.

After a long discussion about which side of the ship we should aim to sit so that we would be in the shade as we sailed south (and some confusion about which end of the ship was the front), we were slightly puzzled to find the sun in our eyes most of the afternoon. So convinced were we about our calculations that we considered whether (a) the ship was sailing in the wrong direction or (b) the sun was setting in the wrong place, before eventually concluding that we are just absolute idiots and had sat on the wrong side.

These crossings are quite the experience, but thankfully we knew what to expect having taken a similar route last summer. Firstly, there are three main ticket types: deck space, airline-style seating and private cabins. Unlike some of the very civilised long-distance ferries we took in Japan and South Korea, getting a cabin this time was way out of our financial reach, costing at least twice the price of an already-expensive deck ticket. But deck tickets really are the wild west – you have to barge your way onto the ship and claim some sleeping space in a mad rush, and there were people laid out on yoga mats, air mattresses and even in tents everywhere (and I mean everywhere – on the open deck, in busy corridors, crammed into stairwells, at the entrance to the restaurant…). So, we went for the middle option, the airline-style seating. This got us a reserved seat in a large lounge full of rows of reclining chairs. The lights remained on and the television was blaring until a frustrated fellow passenger unplugged it around 2am, so it wasn’t exactly a restful night – particularly as we were sat close to a (very popular!) door that led directly out onto the windy deck. Thankfully, our eye masks and noise-cancelling headphones did their jobs and we got at least a bit of sleep.

The next morning, we stood out on deck in the sunshine as the Greek coastline drew closer, before stumbling off the ship in Corfu Town, finding our way through another un-pedestrianised port, and taking a bus across the island. It was time for our Corfu ‘holiday’ to begin! 🏖

Beautiful Brisighella

Brisighella is small mountain town built at the foot of three hills, which are occupied respectively by a clock tower, a fortress and a church, and surrounded by vineyards. It’s the sort of unspoilt Italian town that we’ve been dreaming about, but never quite expected to find in reality. It’s no wonder that Brisighella is a member of the organisation of the most beautiful villages of Italy.

Our departure from Bologna got off to a slightly rocky start when I cracked my forehead on a doorframe as I was rushing to pack my bag before checking out. Luckily, Sara somehow managed to find frozen peas in the train station shop, which seemed pretty fortunate given that none of our fellow passengers were buying frozen vegetables at the same time as their long-distance train tickets.

But it soon turned out that all our rushing was for nothing, as our train to Faenza was delayed and we missed our onward bus to Brisighella. This left us stranded for a couple of hours in Faenza until the next bus, but it did at least give us some time to catch up on the blog! 😬

I couldn’t quite believe it when we finally arrived at our accommodation – it looked just like one of those Trivago adverts where the woman rather unrealistically asks for the perfect hotel with a roll-top bath in the centre of Venice for £62 a night. We’d booked a room in a charming B&B, whose sun terrace overlooks the central town square – the perfect spot for an afternoon drink and breakfast the next morning. It’s got to be one of the loveliest and most low-key places we’ve stayed on this trip.

When we ventured out later in the afternoon, we found the undulating Via degli Asini (aka Road of the Donkeys) hidden behind a series of arched windows above street level. This street began life as a defensive post in the city’s walls in 1290, before becoming a commercial thoroughfare for carters and their donkeys carrying Gypsum from nearby caves. We never did get to the bottom of why the pathway was so uneven, but I’m guessing it was either old age or something to do with the wall’s defensive function!

With the heat of the day now fading, we took a walk up to the clocktower, which is perched somewhat precariously atop a rocky outcrop. Even though it has been damaged and rebuilt many times over, a tower of some form has occupied this spot since the 16th century. The views were nothing short of spectacular on the way up, and we could clearly see where the town ended and the vineyards began.

We continued back down to the town and up again to reach Rocca Manfrediana – the fortress that has presided over the town since 1310. The roughly square fort has circular towers in two corners and a series of high walls from which visitors can take in the views. As stunning as it was, it didn’t sound like the most comfortable existence for the fortress’ inhabitants, especially for the prisoners who were kept and tortured in the towers.

Back in the town, we loved wandering Brisighella’s cobbled streets and meeting the local residents, many of whom emerged in the cool of the evening to eat and socialise.

Brisighella’s most photogenic resident

All in all, Brisighella felt both beautifully quiet and not even that hard to get to. It sometimes amazes me how little distance you need to travel to get off the beaten track, even in Italy in July. I’m not sure we’d need to spend a whole week here, but I wouldn’t mind visiting a few more of the most beautiful villages of Italy if Brisighella is anything to go by.

From Brisighella, we had just one final stop to make in Italy – the bustling seaport of Ancona.