Corsica was a great destination for my stick-shift practice. Outside of the cities, we had the roads nearly all to ourselves, so I didn’t have much to worry about other than shifting to match the road conditions, which tended to be narrow, windy, and mountainous. As long as I kept the car from careening off a cliff, we were good.

As you can see from the photos below, they don’t call it the Isle of Beauty (L’Île de Beauté) for nothing. Most were taken from the road between Calvi and Bonifacio on the west coast.

We made our way around the island, counterclockwise, fairly quickly, spending just a single night camping in Calvi, Ajaccio, and Bonifacio. We didn’t have much of a plan, and quite honestly it took a while to adjust to the notion that we were on a “vacation”. By the time we got to Porto Vecchio I think we were ready to stay put awhile. We found a nice campground with a pool, market, and adjacent pizzeria and pounded in our tent stakes for three nights.