Sardinia???

We’ve been wanting to check out Sardinia for a few years now. It started with a photo of a rock that looked like it was out of a Salvador Dalí painting. I started researching and it looked beautiful and has a lot of rock climbing, hiking, nature, beautiful beaches and water… seemed like the perfect place to start a long period of travel. It’s also a blue zone — a region in the world where people are claimed to live, or have recently lived, longer than average. After thoroughly enjoying our visits to Spain and Greece for culture and climbing we were determined to add Sardinia to the list.

Getting to Sardinia requires some extra travel planning effort since there are a few small airports, not a lot of public transportation options, and car rental seems like one of the only options for getting around. Once on the island it is a very mountainous terrain and small winding roads make a short distances into longer drives.

Aerospace Geek Out

London Stop

We arrived around 7am and lugged our ~150lbs total luggage through the tube during rush hour to the east side of London, staying in a hotel in Greenwich. We were met by friends Alex and Becky who were having hotel breakfast – the manager was apologetic about us not being able to check in early but offered us breakfast which was very nice. We dropped our bags and were back on the tube to do some touristy stuff (tower of london, tower bridge, big ben (or is it? – wink) a stroll past Trafalgar Square and onto Covent Garden for fish & chips and beer with Jen’s niece, Caroline who is currently studying there.

We were fighting jet lag but decided to go look for luggage in some nearby shops as one of our wheels was about to break off… luggage has been a hot topic for this journey due to the amount of crap (work and climbing gear) we have and the need for durable wheels to last on cobblestone for the few months ahead. No luck finding luggage that wouldn’t break in the system but we did manage to stay awake and eat some ridiculously spicy szechuan food while trying not to fall asleep.

The next morning the hotel maintenance man, Steve, assisted in the repair of the wheel with some super glue (still holding strong!). One more good breakfast and an uber to Luton and we were getting closer to being on our way to Sardinia. We didn’t really have enough time to do much in London so we decided to uber to the airport a bit early only to find that we could only check in three hours before our flight. Finally into Luton’s secured area and onto the Aspire lounge. Luckily the lounge was very nice (nothing like our experience at JFK where the Priority Pass lounges turned us away and were not as nice as some we’ve been to in the past). If you travel internationally or even just spend a lot of time in airports it’s worth it to have some kind of lounge access. Priority pass has been great credit card perk for saving money and having a place to hang out while waiting, but has gotten a bit less advantageous in recent years after the pandemic. Still worth it though.

Finally on to our gate. Plane’s radar was out so the flight was delayed indefinitely. With our friend, Steve, already in Olbia waiting for us to arrive we had no idea how long it would take… but would rather fly safely than quickly!

One of the gate agents answered a phone ringing at the gate and hung up to tell his co-workers — “Great news, the flight to Nice has been canceled!” I couldn’t tell if this was dry British humor and he was bemoaning more unhappy passengers or if he saw the silver lining… I guess it was the latter. Just like that we had a fully functioning plane to take us to Olbia… only about an hour late.

Immigration in Olbia took a very long time despite an electronic system. Once through we had 20m to make it to the car rental before they closed at 11pm. We made it, picked up Steve who had a lovely parmesan, tomato and prosciutto pizza waiting for us to inhale before our 2.5 hour drive to Ulassai. The drive was a dark windy mountainous one — Alex, Becky, and Steve were in the car in front of us and we had a lot of luggage in our car. At one point we stopped to let Becky swap places with Steve in the other car — we also got out to stretch after so much sitting and travel. Looking up we could see the milky way — the stars were so bright without any light pollution.