Day 8 Ajaccio to Sartene, Corsica

Right now we are back at Campervan rental “office.” The return trip here this morning was to get the fuse fixed so the GPS can work, which has now been repaired. However, there is a new problem. The refrigerator is broken. It does not go below room temperature of 67 degrees. All of our meat, milk and freezer food is on the brink of going bad. So disappointing and definitely not part of the plan, plus meat is expensive.

Before the refrigerator can be repaired, the maintenance man needed to smoke first. However, as it turns out, this repairman can only fix the fuse. We have to wait another twenty minutes for a specialized refrigerator repairman.

---------- 7 HOURS LATER----------

The repairman came, but it was the owner’s wife, who did not know how to do repairs. She did excel at trying to convince us in French that a refrigerator at only 67 degrees/18 Celsius is perfectly fine. There was a lot of “loud discussions”, but in the end, we were given a new camper, which is a bit bigger, and as far as we can tell, the fridge is slowly getting cold. We were actually told that there were too many things in it (it was only ¼ full) and that it was more for storage than keeping things really cold. That really got Matt bent. The new freezer is finally down to 42 degrees.

We finally got on the road at 12:30 and after a 2-hour mountainous drive arrived at Filotosis. Filotosis is and archeological site that is Corsica’s equivalent to the Moai statues of Easter Island (or so we were lead to believe by Lonely Planet). The ruins were discovered on a farmer’s land in 1946. We could not get a definitive answer as to why they were suddenly found, but in any case, there they were one day. They aren’t like Moai monoliths at all. They are about 4 – 5 ft tall and look just like rocks. The best part of being there was just walking around the countryside and through the cows and donkeys. By the time we finished the trail, it began to pour, so we loaded back into the camper and off to Tizzano we went (or so I thought). We discovered Tizzano was at the end of a long dirt road that we could not take the camper down. Next on the journey was Sartene, but it was already so late and it was raining that walking the hilltop town was not an option. Right now, I’m outside under a covered patio surrounded by eucalyptus trees and it is pouring. It has been a very long day. It is so hard to plan things in advance here.