We left Tuscany/Umbria on 8th September. JP went to London to shoot a wedding and I went to Rome for a week at the end of which I took a boat to Greece. After a few days, we were reunited in Athens (although we did our damndest to avoid each other at the airport, managing to wait at different gates for an hour before JP twigged that I was in the wrong place) and are now on Syros, an island.

When I left for Rome, we realised that we had never thought to get me a camera as JP would be taking all the photos. As a result, this post will have no photos but in any case, you've probably all seen it all before. In fact, I'm not going to write about most of what I saw as it was all the famous touristy stuff. Instead, I present 'Rome in tips and quotes'.

I don't think the name Mike Bongiorno will mean anything to our English readers but if I tell you that he was the Italian Bruce Forsyth, then you may get a measure of why his death is such big news.

Orvieto is just south of Chiusi and we were urged to visit it on our first day off, particularly for the cathedral. Everyone's seen cathedrals. Big, architecturally-rich monsters, with lots of paintings inside.

But this one was different.

Inside out, to be precise.

This isn't a proper blog post as such and will not contain any of J-P's fabulous photography but I thought you might all want to know that we are back in the UK.

(At this point, J-P would write 'click below' to read more, but I think you're all bright enough to work this out for yourselves.)

Day two of the Jaufenpass brought us over the pass, down the other side, and possibly on the plane home again, shattering what remains of our pride...read on to find out why...

The walk up to the Jaufenpass, our next target, was going to take us up 800m along a roughly 4km ridge, then up another 300m before plunging us back into civilisation.

Wow, a journal about two people walking with some actual walking in it? Click below or above to read on...

JP is doing the great Everything We've Been Up To post and I am trying to cover half a dozen other things so this is just a list of my thoughts or fun things I have seen (in no particular order):

So, I have a hammock, an OTT sleeping bag and some walking sticks. I'm sure the latter have a more fancy name than that but essentially they're walking sticks. Most importantly, however, I have my iPod.