Once we got back to the top of Stelvio Pass we realized that we were running a bit behind schedule, and we needed to cruise out in order to make it to Monaco before it got too late. Luckily, at this time of year, the sun doesn’t go down till late.
We set out south from Stelvio and after a while of driving through more switchbacks and progressively faster mountain roads, we hit a small road that had us headed back west towards Lake Como. Now, originally we had intended to spend some time in and around the Lake Como area, but as we were running behind we had to just do a high speed drive by of the Lake Como area (and it is a rather large area) . We did this drive on a road that kept jumping from tunnel to tunnel just giving us a short view of the lake every few seconds. What we were able to see looked very nice….we will have to make a trip back at some point.
After we passed the Lake Como area we headed south towards Milan. We circled Milan and joined the Autostrada down to the Mediterranean coast. Once we reached the coast we joined up with the A10, a toll motorway that would take us almost all the way to Monaco. We hadn’t expected this road to be anything special as on a map it looked just like any other motorway / highway / interstate / autobahn but boy were we wrong. This road ended up being one of the major highlights of the trip.
Now, the A10 isn’t a twisty mountain road like the ones through Stelvio pass. It is just a highway. A highway that everyone works hard to ignore any possible speed limit (we were not even sure if there was one or not), gives great views of the Mediterranean, views of towns and villages, and it basically suspended from tunnel to tunnel.
On the issue of speed on the A10. The Autobahn we drove on earlier had people driving fast, but strangely on this road they seemed to drive even faster. At one point we were cruising along with the windows down and the stereo system turned up enjoying the scenery when another car blew past us. When I said it blew past us…..I mean it BLEW past us. So fast that I don’t even know what kind of car it was, and I am one who normally makes a habit out of ID’ing cars driving around.
When it happened, I said to the passenger, “wow I must need to speed up” thinking that I wasn’t keeping pace with traffic. Once I did look down I noticed we were doing 110 miles per hour. Of course this allowed me proper incentive to push our speed up a bit, but still being mindful of break in procedures (had about 450 miles on the car at this point) we kept it below around 130 mph.
The scenery really was beautiful, but the road was just amazing and I find it hard to imagine how it was engineered. The coast along the Italian and French Riviera comes up like mother natures skyscrapers. The road it suspended probably 500 feet in the air between each of these “skyscrapers” going from tunnel to tunnel that is bored through the middle of each. The road travels like this for 100 miles or so, which didn’t take us that long at the speed we were traveling.
We eventually got off the road near Monaco and were treated to beautiful views of Monte Carlo and the traffic headed down to our hotel.
At this point it was 7 or 8 at night and we had been driving since about 6 in the morning, when we left Garmisch and were ready to find our way to the hotel. We snaked our way down the mountain side into the city headed to the hotel, we had purposely booked due to it’s promise of a parking garage. Once we found the hotel (and this took a good while) we came upon a new problem. The hotel didn’t have a garage.
Rather, the hotel had a garage….but this was in the process of being demolished to make way for some new development. So, we then spent the next hour or so stuck in traffic driving around looking for some secure parking were we could leave the car over night. We eventually found a garage not that far from the hotel and pretty close to the main Marina in Monte Carlo. We rolled in there and parked in a nice spot two floors down below the ground in spot 263.
We then went back to the surface and walked tothe hotel, checked in and dropped of our bags at about 9:30 at night. After a five minute break we were out to go scout out the city. We went to the marina and people and yacht watched. Then, we went to the Casino and supercar and people watched.
Check back with us in the next few days for the last part of the European part of our adventure.
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