Tuesday 8th June
I had a wonderful nights sleep - the Superfast Ferries are wonderful. Unfortunately there isn't a lot to do on them though - and as we were docking at 3pm it got a bit boring waiting around. Just before the ferry docked, Match gave us a card with his name, address and telephone number on, and said if we were ever in Austria, we were welcome to stay with him. A very nice man!
The ferry docked more or less on time, but it took a while to get off as we were on the lorry deck again. It was very hot an unpleasant but there is nothing you can do but wait.
We got underway at around 4pm - but the heat was incredible. Even when we got on the motorway, the air was so warm the wind was actually making us hotter rather than cooling us down. We were wearing our full leathers which made things worse. We stopped a couple of times for water, but it didn't help much.
It was around 260km to Bologna, where we were planning on staying that night. As we approached the outskirts of Bologna I knew I was struggling with the heat as my concentration was suffering. I ended up talking myself through my maneouvers so I kept safe.
We knew we had to look for a sign for 'Bologna Tangenziale' to get to our campsite. I had it on a piece of paper in my map display. But when we got to the sign I was suffering so bad from the heat that I couldn't tie up the words on the paper with the words on the sign. We actually stopped, Daz insisting it was what we wanted - I had to look 3 or 4 times before I accepted it was what we were after. Luckily the campsite was not far once we were off the motorway.
The campsite was very nice and quite cheep - only 11 euros with free electricity, showers, swimming pool and Internet. We pitched the tents and then I went for a shower to cool myself down.
Another early night as we were both very tired; the riding had not been long, but it had been very hard!