Gerry Hat-Trick

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

Down the coast to Genoa…a day of gentle slopes and vehicle-free paths, mostly right next to the sea, often swooping through ancient tunnels, with a dead-railway feel. Pretty, but very much still a working coast, with scattered light industry and roads full of container trucks. Then Genoa itself: massive, sprawling, chaotic, and very much itself.

We made a pretty good fist of it in the end! And the leftovers made a great sandwich lunch.

Lovely day today, meandering down through the hills to Savona, very much a hard-working port, serving the factories of Turin and Milan. The bikemap app talked of a mile or so of elevation en route, but we’ve managed worse recently and lived to tell the tale, so we were pretty sanguine about the prospect. In