Since then...

I apologise to my loyal readers for not posting for so long, but we have been quite busy getting from place to place... but more on that later.

We spent 5 nights in Assisi which is in the Umbrian region of Italy. It's a very nice place... good for a relaxing getaway, which is what we needed. Unfortunately Lucy fell ill just coming out of Venice and was sick for the first couple of days in Assisi, and I caught it off her and was sick for the last two days and the trip to Croatia. Sickness aside, we managed to squeeze in a bunch of the things to do and see in the town, including checking out the fortress on top of the hill which was quite cool. The view from the top of the watch tower was an amazing 360 degree panorama of Umbrian countryside which has to be seen to be believed.

A mention must go out to the guys who ran the hotel we stayed in. Basically it was three young men, one who was in charge and organised the rooms and did most of the cooking for the restaurant below, another who was the waiter, and another who helped cook. The boss was very much into Celtic music and took every opportunity to play it loudly over the restaurant sound system... which was OK, but got a bit much as he did the washing up late at night and our room was right above the kitchen.
The other two were brothers, and were both a little odd, but their drinking on the job and trying to pick up american backpackers was always good entertainment.

Which brings me to the next leg of our journey, which I can assure you was not the finest. I was in the height of my headcold on the last night in Assisi and had slept all afternoon after a large pizza lunch. We headed downstairs for dinner, and I proceeded to order what turned out to be a very large pasta dish, and salad, and was forced to have some wine and Limoncello too...

Thus began one of the worst 48 hours of my life.

To cut a long story short, I went to bed feeling very average and with a very large lump of food in my belly (which in case anyone doesn't know, tends to lead to insomnia in my case).
So I didn't get to sleep until 4:30 in the morning, and had broken sleep until 5:30, at which point we had to get up to go catch a train (3 trains really)to Bari, which was to take us all day until we arrived at about 5:30 in the evening. It didn't end here though. In Bari we hung around for a few hours (and ate extremely dodgy food from the Bari ferry port) until we got on to the overnight Ferry which would take us to Dubrovnik, Croatia.
Now you might think that the story ended happily here with a nice relaxing cruise... little did we know that due to our frugal spending habits, the 'deck' tickets we had purchased for the ferry as they were the cheapest, literally meant 'deck'. The deal is, you get on the boat, stick to the public areas, and crash out where you can.
At this point I still hadn't slept apart from maybe an hour where the Italians across from us on the train weren't talking loudly as only Italians can. So that's a total of about 2 hours in the past 36 hours, plus being sick.

So there we were on the ferry. I quickly scouted around and found some nice padded benches arranged in the usual 'booth' style configuration, and some other Aussies joined us for a night of mixed emotions. We had a small glass of red - which was kindly offered to us by the occupants of the next booth - put on a couple of t-shirts, a hooded jumper (did I mention that the air conditioning was not adjustable and was blasting freezing air at us all night?) and got in our silk sleeping sacks (designed to keep you separated from dodgy hostel sheets, but surprisingly warm also), put on our eye covering devices (as the lights stayed on all night), and finally went to sleep.

Moral of the story is don't travel by ferry. If you do, don't be stingy and just shell out the extra 74 euros and get a cabin.

Anyhoo, we're both feeling much better now, and have just arrived in Split after spending a couple of awesome days in Dubrovnik.
I will report on these asap.

Word out.

J