Dec 29-30, 2008 – Orvieto, Italy

After getting off the ferry from Greece at Brindisi, our route to Orvieto took us up Italy’s east coast and then through its center to the Rome area before turning north to Orvieto (see Google map link here).

Our guidebooks suggested Orvieto was a nice hill town and it didn’t disappoint.  We stayed down in the new town at the base but made a couple of forays up the hill to visit the old town.

Orvieto was celebrating the season by decorating the old town with lights and hosting a jazz festival that, from the voices we heard around town, had attracted a range of different nationalities.

More evidence of the Christmas season.

These boars run wild in parts of Italy and France and there are shops like this one that specialize in boar products.

There were lights on the facade of this church, but sunset lighting helped make the lighting for this photo more interesting.

Dec 29, 2008 – En route to Orvieto, Italy

We arrived in Brindisi, Italy at about 7:30 am with a plan to drive to Orvieto, Italy, a trip of about 660 kilometers.  By the standard of our trip, this was a long drive for us but we didn’t want to linger too long in the south because the weather reports were calling for more snow.

We had also made arrangements with friends from Victoria, the MacDonalds, to meet in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France and wanted to keep moving north so we wouldn’t have to rush to our rendezvous with them.

There were a couple of good images on the way to Orvieto.  We don’t know what this structure was but it looked so dark and forbidding but at the same time like an elevated restaurant that Allister named it Darth Vader’s Diner.

A little further up the highway on the east coast of Italy, we saw these wharves that we assumed were fishing platforms of some kind.

More than once on this trip I observed how nice it was to have someone to share the driving.