Three countries -one day (15th August)

It's goodbye to Switzerland this morning as we start the Busabout portion of our holiday. The big blue bus takes off at 8am and after the initial paperwork (which includes getting our "Traveller's Handbook" -a couple of days too late to take advantage of the Lauterbrunnen discounts!) we set sail for the southern boarder. The dvds aren't working on the bus, but the scenery more than makes up for that as Switzerland continues to impress. We're probably going to get well and truly sick of buses by the end of trip -but it's definitely nice to be on one as empty as this. We go through the 17km long St. Gotthard tunnel before crossing the border into Italy with "That's Amore" playing over the sound system. The detour into Italy is not just because it's the easiest way down to our next destination -it's also because Busabout has an optional stopover destination at Lake Como. It's a lovely lakeside city, but we agree that a quick photo stop and the view from the road is enough of a taste, rather than staying for two full days. The next few hours we have a taste of Tuscany... although it's a pretty random taste and isn't always the picture postcard country that you think of when you think of northern Italy. Some of the wooded valleys with little villages are very cute, but the motorway also goes past a LOT of built up areas with reasonably low quality apartment buildings and industrial areas. I guess this is ultimately a good reminder that although there is a lot of great scenery and culture in Europe -there's also a massive number of people in what is not a particularly large area. Don't worry -we won't hold Italy accountable for the pizza we had at the roadside diner during our service break... and we fully expect to do a lot lot better when we return to this country next month. There's about a one and a half hour traffic delay caused by the French border, which our Slovakian driver blames on the number of Spanish holiday makers that we see. So we end up rolling into Nice a little bit late, but that's really not a problem because we're on holiday time anyway. The Busabout company has organised an optional 3 course dinner at a pub in the old town, which we decide to go to. The other 30 or so Busabouters are almost exclusively Australian -which makes us wonder if Busabout is the 21st century "Walkabout" that Aussie tend to go on. It's a bit weird being in an Irish pub full of Aussies in France, but the super rich mousse which Mike scores two of, makes up for that. After dinner we head to a pub called Wayne's World (again not exactly authentic) with a good live band, but call it quits at around midnight. It's amazing how busy the streets are at that time of the night, seems like dinners and socialising happen quite late over here as even children seem to be out a lot later than back home.