Gerry Hat-Trick

Day two of our descent from the Tuscan hills to the sea, and the first discovery is that the hills of Perugia are just as beautiful. Actually I tell a lie: our first discovery is that the bread shop doesn’t open on a Sunday morning. Dare we stretch to a seven euro breakfast at the […]

Another soggy day. Not sure if it’s this Storm Babet that seems to be laying waste to most of Europe, but whatever it is it’s awful wet where we’ve been, but thankfully not cold. Still takes the edge off things but. Apparently we’ve been passing through some of the loveliest scenery in Italy, but it’s

Sometimes it’s the room that’s calling the shots. Today’s choice was between 56k and about one of elevation, or a tad over 80, with about two and a half. The former was too feeble, the latter decidedly challenging: we’ve done the distance before, and the elevation, but never in combination. But after recent exploits, and

Part one didn’t start well. I opened the shutters and yelped. Rain! We had been warned, and yet I yelped.  Then it got worse. 20 downhill minutes and Jens pulled over for a voicemail. It was quite hard to make out apparently, standing in the rain on the roadside, but eventually it appeared that despite

A few recent pics of this that and the other from the first week or so of our trip.

…and into the hills of Tuscany. By way of long, winding roads: nothing too steep, nothing really hard, but on and on and on, with the occasional monster-truck laden with marble from the quarries or vast cargos of timber, to the point where by late afternoon I for one was finding my enthusiasm for the

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.

Two km and change vertically to get over the peninsula and on our way towards the cinque terre – a legendary Unesco site of natural beauty, and one we’ll actually probably bypass, ‘cos it’s a vastly overpriced tourist trap and Jens is more interested in ‘the hinterlands’, as he calls them. The last section of

Bit of a hiccup last night when our Airb&b bookee responded with blah de blah but there will be an additional charge, payable in cash, on arrival, for linen and taxes, of 22 euros. Jens cancelled immediately and we booked somewhere else. Carlos responded with a plaintive ‘could you bring your own linen?’ To which