Tuesday June 13
About 35 kilometers
A short ride from Bevagna to Assisi. We walked the 15% grade hill up to the main road to get out of town and decided to take an alternate route that would prolong the down hill but still get us going in the right direction. It was worth it because we ended up riding the ridge of the foothill and had sweeping views of the valley below. Unfortunately the pix do not do the scene justice but I took them anyway. The valley looked like a patchwork quilt of orchards. Jon estimates that the valley is about 10-15 kilometers across and you could see the entire distance from our vantage point. There was an occasional breeze which was good but overall the day was hottest the probably been since we've arrived in Italy. The ride was flat for about 1/2 the ride which was a treat. The hills on the way to Assisi became more and more steep as we got closer to the gates of the town. This of course, totally sucked. What made it really suck was that once we reached the gates the signs for our campground indicated that we had to continue on even farther up into the hills! The good thing is that I had no problem getting off my bike and pushing it up the hills - there was no pride - it was all about self preservation and when you have sweat dripping down the back of your arm and virtually no water left in your bottles AND we had an orange and 5 cookies to share between us. Now, we should have known better than to leave at noon knowing we would be travelling and arriving turning siesta time so nothing would be open but for some reason that didn't stop us. We were delayed because we were waiting for our laundry to dry.
The push up the hill to the campground was pretty miserable. Jon had stayed there 12 years ago and said it seemed farther than he remembered. As we huffed and puffed our way to the campsite I asked if it was a nice place - no reply.
"Lie to me if you have to just tell me what's like"
"It's mediocre "
"Good enough" as I knew this would be better than what we were used to at home. I just knew not to expect them to give us a bottle of olive oil when we checked in.
The place was just as Jon described it - mediocre which was fine because they had FREE showers!!!!! We pitched our tent, locked up our bikes as I had told/announced to Jon on the way up that I would not be riding my bike again only to push it back up the hill every time we went into town - he agreed. As we walked through the gates of Assisi Jon says that there are a lot more souvenir shops and restaurants than he remembered. Some of the piazza commune is now a thoroughfare while Jon remembers it as pedestrians only on his last visit. He also noticed more outside seating pushing out from restaurants into the piazzas. We saw more tourists in one area than we have the entire trip. I found it unfortunate. The american tourist stick out like a sore thumb, we probably do too but would like to think differently. We had some dinner: Jon had lasagne which was very good, pretty heavy and had a almost sweet taste to the ricotta filling that I couldn't quite place. I was pretty undecided but went with spaghetti pomodoro with shrimp baked in foil with parm shavings - nice and light which was good since we walked/hiked back to camp and went to sleep. Wednesday we plan to update the journal and do some sightseeing.
