we are now in dubrovnik in croatia and nothing has been said about italy. i shall remedy this.
italy was split into 2 rides. florence to rome, then along the adriatic coast pescara to bari.
after our long day out of the mountains we arrived in torino and caught a train to florence the next day. it took 7 hours but was a beautiful ride along the mediterrainean coast, past pisa and yes tick, we saw the tower from the train. got into florence quite late and it was setting up our tent in the dark. we werent reallz prepared for florence. it was packed!!!! i had a few things that i wanted to see but it became apparent quickly that unless i was prepared to wait at least an hour for everything, it wasnt going to happen. we still had a fantastic time walking around, eating gelato and looking forward to tuscany. florence is beautiful, will have to return without the rest of the world.
biking through tuscany really didnt disappoint. full of adventures.. our first day out of florence we stopped at greve in chitanti for lunch and the storm that was at our side caught up with us. deciding that we should hold off cycling for an hour until the weather made its mind up, we ordered a coffee at a cafe. almost instantly the clouds became so awesomely black and stormy looking then its like someone flicked a switch and the rain came and it was heavy!!!! so glad that we hadnt biked, almost instantly the street became a torrent of water. we talked to an young american family also attempting to eat a nice lunch outside and they ended up inviting us to their villa in cortona. a very enticing invitation.
we biked on later, then long story short free camped in olive grove in an insane thunder storm, fun times. ross says its romantic, i say it was really freaky. but we did not get struck by thunder as my paranoid mind had predicted so all was ok.
we took up the invitation and spent 2 nights with the walker family who were so inviting and friendly. great to talk to interesting people and our bedroom was pretty luxury. spent aobut 4 days in tuscany, eventful and picture postcard beautiful, the biking was quite nice too with small roads.
heading for rome become tricky. the hills, oh the hills. so many hills... and hot. we cycled from lake to lake all the way to rome. it was at this time we started doubting our plan of cycling across italy. hot and hills. although it would be mountains next time.
we got into rome suprisingly easy for a big city, right into vatican city where we picniced by a fountain. we found this great b'b near the train station which was cheap, really nice and the lady who ran it very friendly. rome was fantastic!!! we did most of the touristy stuff, colleseum, roman forum, the vatican, parthenon... and all the streets were nice. great experience.
on leaving though we still didnt know what we wanted to do, we simply headed from to the train station knowing that we defintlz didnt want to cycle out of rome. we ended up taking a train to pescara on the adriatic coast and cycled from there to bari. flat!!! yeah.. we covered so much distance very quickly. refreshingly flat. we went round the 'spur' of the boot, a national park that was absolutely gorgeous. big hills/mountains going straight into sea. hilly riding again but worth the views. lots of swimming, very nice.
then down into bari. boring riding, i had to resort to singing the moulin rouge soundtrack all the way through to pass the time.
we got a little screwed in bari, basically italian customer service at its best (sarcasim) but we made it to dubrovnik. spent the night the deck of the ferry in our sleeping bags under the stars.
weve spent the last 3 nights here, 2 with ross' friend mike at his parents place in a small village. we plan on going out with him tonight back in dubrovnik then heading up the coast tommorow.
so thats it. italy was great, a number of very memorable experiences.
until next time, hopefully we wonćt get so behind again :)
