We decided we’d have to wait until 8am (when the cafe opened) so that we could get our final capacinno and crema filled croissant before departing Avigliana. The car needed to be back at about 12:30 and our train departed at 1pm so an 8am departure was fine.

There was a bit of fog and a good deal of construction along the way, but it’s only a 3 h 30 min drive so there was no problem!

The route took us through the longest tunnels of our entire journey – one was probably 10-15 km long!

But, by far the highlight of the drive today was the Alps.  Aside from driving ‘through’ part of them, we drove between and beside very high mountains.  The pictures in the gallery below are taken from altitudes of 400-800 meters and you can see the mountains still tower over us!  It was spectacular.

Although I miss the autumn colours of Nova Scotia a little bit, I can say that seeing the autumn colours starting to blush through the fading greens of this part of the Alps was worth it!

The other thing that made this almost 4-hour drive worth it was finally saying good-bye to the Fiat.  It was a fine car. I liked it.  I got back to driving a standard/manual very quickly. I think I also adapted to European driving pretty well in the almost 2000 km I drove that little car!  Driving really isn’t a whole lot different here – a bit faster because, of course, I’ve never driven 130 km/h in Canada! 😉 A little more agressive (though Montreal and Boston drivers are pretty agressive!). The biggest challenge was signage in a different language and different symbols and maybe the MANY times when speed reduces from 110 to 90 to 60 in about 1/4 km! But, I’m glad that we are car-free for the next couple of days.