Some days are just made for throwing away the rule book and seeing where your restless feet will take you…
Or in our case, our tiny rickshaw.
Back in our place in Rome, we’d met up with some of the others doing the rickshaw challenge and we decided to stick together for part of the route. The others (Giorgia and Lorenzo – an Italian couple) had done the rickshaw challenge before albeit via a different route and this time decided that would take more of a culinary trip!
You don’t have to ask me twice when it comes to food! Soon enough, we ended up in a little Italian farm which appeared to be a tiny street off an unassuming road… (essentially, you’d have no idea there was anything there if you didn’t pay attention).
Cue Azienda Agricola POD 469. I think the official name is POD 469. It was all in Italian so I have no clue and a new found motivation to learn Italian as soon as possible. POD 469 doesn’t have an official website but they do seem to have a Facebook page (see here).
We arrived in the middle of lunch time with the oven already fired up and churning out oodles of tasty Italian cuisine.
The one thing I definitely noticed on our road trip was that almost all the menus we were presented with were printed up on regular paper (some were even hand written) and they were all in Italian. No photos of food. No English translations. As fantastically authentic as this sounds we really had to rely on Gabriele for a looooot of translation.
Lorenzo got me started with the wine (hey, I wasn’t doing the driving so I had no wine limits).
Giorgia decided to go adventurous with her starter and try some tripe stew. For the uninitiated, tripe is cows intestine and its not as bad as you think. 🙂 (In fact, I quite like it!)
Lloyd went straight for the meat platter.
And I decided to have myself a sizzling Florentine steak. Why?
a.) They’re amazing.
b.) It’s less than a third of price it cost in Florence.
It was amazing! That is until, as always, when you get to the halfway point and realise that these steaks were made for sharing. I hate wasting food so I powered through till everything was gone.
I reminded myself that next time, I should probably try to share it with someone else. In truth, I will have conveniently forgotten this by the next time I order a Florentine steak.
We were seen off with some complimentary liquor the owner insisted we try. That thing definitely lights a fire in your belly and puts a spring in your step. 🙂
We eventually hit the road, having had what turned out to be one of the very best meals we’d had during our time on this road trip!
Can you see the chicken behind the rickshaws above?
We traipsed through the Italian countrysides with a song on our lips, quite literally – all three of us tried singing every single cheesy Italian-based song we (barely) knew the lyrics too. Dean Martin’s That Amore may have been sung waaaaay too many times as we drove.
On a pit stop for fuel, I spotted what appeared to be a beach up ahead and insisted we go check it out. Turned out I was right. (We also found out that the rickshaw will not move on beach sand and you will probably get a face full of sand if you try to make it do so).
The beach was such an unplanned part of the trip but a welcome respite (and a chance to recover from that huge lunch). Before long, we were back on our way to Naples…
One thing you should probably know about travelling with this rickshaw is that it’s kinda like a new born baby when it comes to fuel. The tank is fairly small so you will have to make more frequent fuel stops than you would with a car (like say a refill after 4-5 hours of driving). Luckily a full tank cost less than €10 so it’s not a ‘bank breaker’.
Soon enough, we arrived in Naples which was something of a pit stop as our final stop for the day was going to be the Amalfi Coast. Naples is a very ‘different‘ Italian city from all the other ones we’d been to thus far but more on that in another post I reckon…
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