Bugger.
My Kiwi 'she'll be right' approach to the amount of miles I've clocked up on the TDM over the course of 2 years blasting around the south of England for my job has finally caught up with us.
The bike had started running a bit rough through the south of France and into Italy so I gave myself a maintenance day at Lago D'Orta, stripped down and cleaned the carbs & replaced the plugs & leads.

click for larger image

A fun way to spend the day at Lago D'Orta

Put it all back together, seemed OK on a test ride, loaded up & headed off down the road & found the problem still existed.

Rode on to Verona for a change of scenery and a bit of advice from a mechanic. Their diagnosis on the symptoms I described was that the rubber on vacuum seal for the carb slides had probably perished.
So another day stripping the bike down. Bugger.
However the mechanics diagnosis proved way off the mark. Carb slides were fine, problem proved to be nothing worse than a sticking choke cable.
On the bright side we had the best part of a day checking out the sights of Verona. We followed this up with another day wandering around the canals of Venice – too beautiful a city to bypass without playing tourist.

Being in holiday mode now we had stopped keeping track of the days and didn’t realise that it was Saturday morning when we packed up and left from Venice and that all of Italy was on the road heading off on the start of their summer vacation.
I have never encountered such a traffic jam. The traffic was solid all the way from Venice, around past Trieste and up to the Slovenian border and the temperature was in the high 30’s. We were very thankful to be on a bike and able to ride down the side off this mess, past cars and drivers that were getting hot under the bonnet.

Huge queue for the border, which, of course, we jumped, then… a Slovenian traffic jam all the way down the coast. We were heading for Piran which our guide book says is heaving at this time of year so we were worried that everyone was heading there.

Such a relief to finally park up and get off the bike and to find that it was all relatively quiet. Had our first dip in the sea and spent the afternoon enjoying this delightful little town.

Slovenia is great. We loved the pretty coastal towns, roads are great for bikes, countryside really pretty with half the country still covered in forest and the people are friendly. It is slightly cheaper but not a lot than Italy but we found Slovenian camping grounds more expensive than France and Italy.
I’m writing this lying on the shores of crystal clear Lake Bohinj, having had a relaxing swim after a days ride with the mountains as a backdrop; this sure beats working.

Any map readers out there may notice we have failed to make any progress in a South-easterly direction today. Well worth the detour though. Tomorrow we head east towards Hungary.