After a few weeks of pretty consistently good weather, our luck ran out around midnight on our final night in Lake Bled. Since then, the storms have been chasing us west across Europe. Our next stop was meant to be Lake Annecy, but the forecast predicted days and days of heavy rain, and we’ve had enough of that. We decided to follow the sun instead of our schedule. I know- look at us being all flexible and spontaneous! 

We headed south to the western part of the Italian Riviera, where the forecasters promised sun, sun and more sun. In an unprecedented turn of events, the forecasters were right. The mercury hit 28 degrees, we even had to dig the van fan out of storage.

We explored the French Riviera last year as part of a test trip to see if we could hack van life, and more importantly, tolerate each other at such close quarters for a prolonged period. It was gorgeous and glamorous but waaayyyyy too expensive for this trip, so we decided to explore some places that were a little less chi-chi. 

The roads were so narrow, only scooters and these cute little three-wheelers could get through

Cervo was a pretty hillside village about half an hour from Nice. It’s less popular than other Ligurian resorts like Cinq Terres and Portofino, but is also made up of closely packed houses in sunshine colours and shares a similar, stunning, coast line. The beach area was very sleepy-seaside-resortish , like an Italian version of Margate off-season. We climbed up to the old village and had a wonderful lunch looking down at the Med towards Corsica. We’ve added the whole Ligurian coastline to our, now very lengthy, list of places we want to come back to explore in the future. 

Quick campsite comment:

We stayed at Camping del Mare, on the coast between the old village of Cervo and the more modern marina. 

The good bits: Good seafront location, decent showers and WiFi, nice little minimarket and an OK price for the Med at €31 a night. 

The bad bits: You couldn’t really see the sea and the pitches were pretty closely packed. Worse, there were big groups of German RVers drinking and singing eighties Europop hits like 99 Luftballons and Da Da Da late into the night. Out of tune. Look, I was a big Nena fan back in the day but enough was enough!