June 11 Sunday +
48 kilometers
We had our last breakfast at the Hotel Roma, which we totally recommend. The staff are courteous, the rooms are spacious, clean and comfortable (and we're not just saying that because we've been sleeping on the ground for most of this trip) and the location is great - good price too. Jon wants to make a point that he really liked the "old beams in the wall". There was a fireplace in the room where we ate breakfast. It was big enough walk in and you could look upwards toward the chimney. He liked the fact that the building itself had to be hundreds of years old.
We had planned to leave around 8 or 9 but didn't take off until just after 1100. We met a couple from Holland who were biking down to Rome. They said that after this trip they wouldn't bicycle in Italy again - too busy, too many cars. We talked about the recumbents and they showed us the maps they were using. They said that between the two of them they've had about 30 bicycles stolen. They said that for all of the bikes in Holland 10,000 are stolen each day. The gal had a lock on her bike that I had never seen before which looked pretty heavy duty.
It was a pretty quite ride today, good weather really lite traffic. Within a couple hours we reached Bagnoregio. It was like a ghost town. Virtually empty and very few shops were open. Our expectations were met. The postcard we saw in Viterbo was just as magnificant in person. The hill town was amazing the pictures will tell all.
"I love the granny gear"
What goes down must go up (and up and up) and around and over...
I think I went over a mountain today. Maybe it was just a foothill. Jon says it was just "hills". Well, I thought we did a great job of tackling those hills. Jon says we did about 5 kilometers of decent just before arriving at the campground which means that we have to go back up them tomorrow. We're still having a bit of trouble with our gears so we'll have to do some more tweaking once we hit Assisi.
We're getting better at charades and the Italiens are really good at it. We arrived in the town of Baschi which is right on Lake Corbara. The place was run by a sweet older couple who spoke no english but we managed to get a place to stay, find out about showers, pay for the night and get our passports back (we're getting better at remembering to collect our passports the night before we leave so we don't have to wait for the offices to open the next day). This is a really nice place but it's f-ing windy. I don't like the wind. Jon thought it was pretty funny the was I said I didn't like the wind. "Sherry has a proclaimation: I don't like the wind!" A breeze is ok. It's not even a cold wind but it's incessant. Most of the trip today was very windy. We had a lot of side wind and when it wasn't hitting us from the side it was hitting us head on - wind sucks. Yes, I guess you could say I was having a bit of a princess moment but if you had felt this wind I'd think you'd agree with me.
The bathroom and shower is clean which I can totally appreciate - not that any of the other places have been particularly bad. Jon made dinner: pasta with what I thought was a canned tomato sauce when I bought it. That's was the picture looked like. When we opened the can inside was indeed tomato but it had whole cherry tomatoes in it too. Turned out to be just fine, shopping by picture can be hit or miss!
