Today was always going to be a toughie.
Jens’s wiggly line that shows elevation had a fair-sized bump, then a big bump, then lots of bumpiness. The fair size bump took us up to about 300m from sea level, then we went back down again to see the first of the famed cinque terre villages. We had decided we really ought to see at least one, after all.
Bit of a let down, in truth. It was really no prettier than the place we’d been staying, but its fame had turned it into a definitive tourist trap, still heaving with Germans, Americans and Swedes, even this late in the season. As I said to Jens: “Places so totally touristified feel sort of ersatz, even when you know they’re real.” Monte Rosso del Mare feels like a keen young team of Disney ‘imagineers’ were given a brief to create a darling little Italian Riviera village, with buckets of Farrow & Ball and just the right amount of ageing.
Shame it was another 300m climb to get back to where we’d started.
The rest of the day was mostly long, grinding climbs through tree-lined roads, with the occasional diversion down narrow, broken paths that became steadily narrower, increasingly broken, and ended up in someone’s back garden. About turn! And climb.
The day’s ride finished with the first truly horrible ride of the holiday: dragging ourselves up out of La Spezia on a narrow, concrete-barriered road, with heavy city traffic thundering past within inches. It all proved worth it in the end though, with dinner looking out over the city from our very own panoramic window.
