A dead mouse...

Friday 6^th June

Dammit! It appears that the mouse has died so I’ll have to do it the hard way until I find another mouse. And we don’t have WIFI again tonight. We’ve come across a new WIFI system here where you register and they send you an SMS with your login details. Well – 4 hours later and I’m still waiting for the SMS and it will probably arrive conveniently at 3am.

We have continued moving northwards up the coast. Today’s drive was less than 100k because we stuffed up the calculations – we would have liked to go a bit further but here is where we are. We followed the coast road up today which took us through a lot of beachside holiday and residential accommodation. The journey was very slow as the speed was mostly 50k but slowed by a lot of traffic.

We were quite early to where we are staying so we went a bit further along to the town of Ancona where we had lunch. The town is hosting the areas youth games this weekend so there were a lot of young people in town. We didn’t have any information regarding places to visit in town so we just had lunch and then travelled back to our B&B. Along the way to the B&B we passed close by the town of Loreto and on the side of the hill was the beautiful looking convent. On the next hill back we could see another town, and further away again was another hilltop town.

An interesting pentagon shaped building in Ancona.
This is an 18th-century building constructed on an artificial island
for the purpose of serving as quarantine station
and Leprosarium for the port town of Ancona, 

Looking out over the port area of Ancona. 

An interesting bronze sculpture in Ancona
- this is not an old one at all with a date of 1995
- done by sculptor Valeriano Trubbiani.

An interesting spiral spire on the cathedral in Ancona.

Calamo Fountain - also known as Fountain of the 13 Pipes.
Dates from Greek times and was apparently demolished in 1503
and rebuilt some time after 1560.

Convent at Loreto.

Another hill top village.

We are staying in another lovely B&B tonight near a small town called Potenza Picena. It is an old early 1800s farmhouse and has beautiful gardens surrounding it. When we arrived there were 2 bus loads of people here for lunch and tonight there is a group of car people driving sports cars (triumphs, MGBs, etc) and sporting 100 Miglia door signs (not 1000 Miglia). The B&B is in the countryside a few K from a town so we were glad to see that they had a restaurant. It has been quite challenging some nights to find somewhere to eat – we had taken note of the closest McDonalds today, just in case.

Our B&B - Country House La Cipolla D'Oro

Some of the garden area around the B&B.

Just one of the 100 Miglia cars - there were about 6 that we saw
 - for some reason they all wore the number 13.

Just gave the mouse mouth to mouth and it has been revived for the moment. Rob is downstairs talking to someone – could be the car people, or the other couple staying here tonight.

Our hotel last night was OK though we had one of those bathrooms where the shower floods the room. The embarrassing thing is it appears that we were the only ones in the hotel and we came downstairs to breakfast this morning where there was only one table set, and a whole spread of food laid out.