Leaning towards a visit to Pisa

After yesterday's "concerning" drive through the potentially snow impacted roads, the driver was more involved than he usually is in choosing the route we would be taking to get to Pisa today.  Having made our decision we were on our way, but it was clear that the concerns of yesterday had not been left behind. Once he had stated his feelings and cleared his mind about how he felt about my trip planning he felt better.  I now felt bruised and battered by what I thought was an unfair judgement and the atmosphere inside the little Panda was quite cool.  When we reached Asola (how appropriate I thought because it was not unlike the name I had been using to refer to him in my thoughts) we stopped for coffee, spoke our minds, got things off our chests and called a truce. 

On our way again, we were looking forward to a nicer day of driving through the hillside country.  And what beautiful country it is,.  No wonder people fall in love with it.

 

 There's that snow again, but at extreme zoom - nothing to be concerned about - we're not going

to be going anywhere near it today

 Far away snow capped mountains - that's the place to stay

  

 While standing at the side of a road to take a picture, as I turned away, I caught the glint of something below me in the bushes - it was an old large wine casket - about 5 gallons - in a wooden basket

 This is a band of painted decoration under the eaves on a house

Way far away across a valley, I could see a band of something, when I zoomed in on it

 I saw that it is a string of houses along a ridge

As we were travelling along we knew were were doing a lot of climbing, but it wasn't until we came upon this sign we realized just how much!  But we still hadn't hit any snow.  can you imagine the "concern" my driver had when he saw we were in the Apennine Mountains.  We had reached a height of 1308 meters yesterday - how high were we going to have to go today to get out of here.  Our way out was San Romano in Garfagnana which is at the bottom of the map directly below the "You are here" triangle.

 

My driver would have liked to turn around and go back the way we came but it was just as far to go back as to go forward, so we continued forward.   I forgot to mention that we got to this sign because we had taken a wrong turn and were actually heading the wrong way anyways.  We backtracked 14kms and were on the right track again.

 In the meantime, this was the view of the Apennines that we enjoyed.

 Down thru the valleys we roamed and up the other side working our way around

and thru this mountain range.

This was an interesting cloud to watch - the long sausage shape portion in the middle

was rolling over and over as it was building

 We did not get away with not going through any areas of snow though.  This is the highest point we were today at 1524 meters.  I was about 5 o'clock in the evening, there was melt water on the road

 and the driver was once again "concerned" about freezing ice on the roadways and the

complications it could bring.

We made it through and arrived in Pisa about 9:30 at night, safe, sound, and tired.