Road Trip - War Memorial at Last

Monday April 2, weather is looking somewhat promising although there is a mist over the ocean and we can not see across to Croatia, in fact, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes yesterday, I would not know there were mountains there.  Today we decided to go into Pescara to have a look at the bridge we saw last night.  It is a purpose built pedestrian/biking bridge to connect both sides of the harbour.  It was built in 2007 and is about 800 meters long.  We walked across it and wandered down the jetty as far as we could go.  It is a working dock area where fishing boats come in and dry dock repair facilities are present.  A sailing club/school also operated in the same area.

Next we were off to attempt to find the Commonwealth War Memorial Cemetery at Ortona.  This time I had the GPS co-ordinates for it’s location.  Driving along the coast was beautiful.  We saw more of the dip net fishing buildings, this time out in the water.  The beaches along the way had turned from soft sand to what I more imagined the Adriatic beaches to be with small, smooth pebbly rocks.

This time we found the Cemetery without any problem.  There were no directional signs leading to it and the sign at the entrance was just a small sign about three feet high at the side of the road.  So no wonder we never found it yesterday.

When we arrived there was only one other set of visitors, a father daughter team from Nova Scotia, who were looking for the grave site of his uncle.  The graveyards are well laid out and in a wall niche in a open structure to one side of the graves we found a log book that listed alphabetically, all those buried there with their specific block, row and grave site location.  As there were many soldiers from two Nova Scotia regiments and one Cape Breton regiment, Bill thought he may have some relative’s who had fought and died there.  We did find one individual who may be a cousin, and Bill has contacted some of his cousins in Nova Scotia, to see if he is related.  The other visitors also found the site they were looking for.

Then we continued on a circular route through the country, on our way back to the hotel.  Here is some of what we saw.  This is Abruzzo province and I would have to argue that it is just as beautiful as Tuscany.

Our trusty little Fiat Panda – I am taller than it is, which is good because we have gone through underpasses that were only 1.8 meters high.

Quick……do you know which way you need to head???  These were two sign posts at one round-about we came to – needless to say it took more than one pass to determine which we took!!