Our Flixbus coach was due to depart from Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, 131 at 07:25. The timetable had us stopping for 10 minutes just outside the Aosta train station at 08:55, 1 hour 30 minutes after departure.

(Google Maps estimates that distance by car to take 1 hour 18 minutes for 114km or about 71 miles. That assumes an average speed of just under 88km/h. No Back To The Future jokes please, I assure you that a Flixbus is not a DeLorean. A Flixbus is larger and slower, so it would need a little extra time.)

We were then due to arrive in Courmayeur at 09:45.

Yeah, that didn't happen.

I was initially making all sorts of time calculations to work out where this shot was taken allowing for the delayed departure... then I realised that it was shot with my tablet. And my tablet had a SIM card. And the SIM card allowed GPS tracking.

We were heading north on the A5 Autostrada (that is, the A5 motorway, also known by the European name E25), 1 hour and 28 minutes after our scheduled departure time. In reality we were only about 50km or 40 minutes away from Torino in a comune (municipality) of the Metropolitan City Of Torino called Pavone Canavese. ("Pavone" translates as "Peacock", so it's no surprise that one appears on the city's crest. "Canavese" refers to the area that we find it in, though I don't know what the origin of the name is.)

Despite its proximity to the city there is a lot of agriculture as you can see from the fields of cereal crops. (My guess is that it's rye, which is the most common crop in Aosta Valley and which thrives in semi-alpine environments.) However behind me is some semi-urban development, which you obviously can't see here. I checked the GPS coordinates on Google Maps and yes, fields of the same crops are visible though I wasn't able to match up this exact field.

The hills in the background offer a foreshadowing of what's ahead, but no more than that.