In August 2019, a casual conversation about a possible road trip to Florence Chris and I had been discussing, led to Pat being included as well as a stop off in Villecroze, France to enable her to pick up items stored in France. The trip would take two weeks between May 11th and 25th, 2020. Accommodation was booked for places of interest on our way to Florence and back to Spain and gave us all something to look forward to over the winter months. Then COVID arrived in early 2020 and of course, plans had to be placed on hold. Chris and I had a ferry booked to take us to Ireland and the UK in September 2020 for a month and focussed thoughts on a trip later in the year. Inevitably, this trip also had to be postponed and we yet again pushed the ferry dates into May/June 2021. Although situations both in the UK and Spain slowly improved as vaccinations began, we realised that we were unlikely to be able to make the May/June trip and therefore decided once more to push the ferry dates into September 2021. We booked house and cat sitters and were ready to go, however confusion over vaccine passports, tests needed and the fact that we'd be travelling backwards and forwards to non-EU and EU countries several times, simply made the whole exercise too complicated to co-ordinate. We ultimately made a decision (hopefully for the last time) to push the ferry dates into May/June 2022. As we had our European Vaccine Certificates and could travel freely throughout Europe, it was agreed we'd resurrect our Florence trip and utilise the month our house and cat sitters would be taking care of everything back home. This extra time allowed us to include extra stops in Italy and Switzerland. We also gained another member of the road trip crew, our friend Linda. On September 8th, 2021, our little band of travellers duly set forth from our homes in southern Spain with great anticipation of the adventures which lay ahead.