Col. Angello (France-Italy border)
Frissanco
Piasco
Canale
Asti
Castagnole Monferrato
Valenza
Lomello
Zinasco
Pavia
Codogno
Cremona
Sospiro
Asola
Medole
Peschiera del Garda
Garda
Malescine
Nago-Torbole
Roverto
Trento
(places in bold were overnight stops, places in bold italics were were rest days)
Because this blog post is about Italy, you will note that much of the following revolves around FOOD. Pugz memory isnt great for most stuff, but it does seem to remember FOOD quite well!
The first part of the journey took us downhill from about 80 km from the alps to the plains. The plains were full of small towns and villages, all of which seem to revolve around the main industry of the area - fruit growing. Not many tourists around here so quite a few stares. We stopped in a small town for our first taste of Italian Biscotti and Aisling got talking to a women who was very interested in our trip but her small child got very bored and literally pulled her away from talking to us!
The fruit growing plains ended abruptly in rolling hills of wine country. We had slowly, almost imperceptibly, climbed up away from the plains and were then plunged down into valleys filled with vines in the area around Asti. We had our first taste of wonderful Italian Icecream, well-earned after cycling in the heat on our way to Asti. The campsite at Asti was a holiday park with its own pizza restaurant, where we happily indulged in pizza and local wine.
We left Asti along an extremely busy road after a glamourous breakfast of bread and ham scoffed in a supermarket carpark (why do they stare?). We escaped from the busy road but got rather lost and ended up going up a lot of "unnecessary" hills. Interesting area, mainly vineyards and lots of small red-brick towns perched on top of little hills. To escape the uncertain navigation, we ended upon a main road to Valenza where we joined the Po river valley. Flatter terrain with a lot of rice growing in paddy fields and therefore also a lot of mosquitos!
The following day, on leaving our out-of-town campsite we headed in to Valenza for some bread and biscotti for breakfast. Busy little working town. Friendly people, including one man on a bike who stopped to talk to Pugz about his time working in London in th 1970s. Fairly uneventful ride after that, but like most of the riding in this area, there weren't many places to stop for picnic lunches. One picnic was had on a farm track in a rice paddy field where we sat watching a snake trying to eat the frogs that live in the irrigation ditches. The weather was really hot too!
We arrived in Pavia very tired after 4 days solid riding which had begun with us still climbing the french alps. The rest in Pavia for a few days was very welcome. Several ice creams were consumed as we wandered the pleasant streets of Pavia looking at churches and the site of a medeaval tower that collapsed in the 1990s. Not surprisingly, many of the other buildings in the town of similar age had had a lot of reinforced concrete added to them since then! We also visited a nearby monastery with amazing marble carvings (and a very nice cafe where we ate a platter of fantastic local meat and cheese).
The best meal in Pavia had to be our own homemade Bolognaise sauce with some posh Italian pasta. The sauce was made lovingly by Aisling one morning and left in the pan with the lid on and tied up in a plastic bag. Unfortunately, when we came back to it that evening we found it absolutely crawling with tiny ants, many of whom had drowned. Not wishing to waste food (we have become even more tight than ever since being on this trip!) we scooped out most of the ants and stirred in the rest. The dinner tasted great, but there was an occasional slight "crunchiness" to it...
The ride from Pavia to Cremona wasn't a memorable one, but our brief stay at Cremona campsite was! We only got a brief look at the town as we passed through on our way to the campsite which was in a riverside park outside the town. The town seemed worth a visit though if we had had more time. There were a surprising number of expensive-looking UK registered cars and caravans at the campsite. At first, we thought that maybe it was people who had been at the (reasonably nearby) Monza Grand Prix which was on at the time. We then noticed various odd things; picture the scene:
- all the occupants of the caravans had strong Irish accents, which seemed odd because of the UK registrations
- all of the caravans were arranged in a circle
- they had brought their own washing machine with them
- a power cable serving one of the caravans was crudely wired into the fusebox of the toilet block, not into a proper socket
- a man was wiring up a huge new satelite dish
- the kids were smashing up a big cardboard box and trying to start their toy petrol powered motorbike (which fortunately wasn't working)
From this, we finally guessed that they were gypsies (or to be more politically correct: "people of Irish traveling heritage"). We sat amused when a fat italian man came over to complain to them about something and a whole big shouting match started! When Adrian went to the camp office the staff seemed rather cold and blunt with him (perhaps thinking he was one of the "trouble-makers") and they seemed pleased and genuinely surprised when Adrian made it clear that he was trying to pay! I wonder if the gypsies are still there?
Cremona to Peschiera del Garda was one of the worst rides ever. We left Cremona on a busy road, which took us in the wrong direction. It rained hard. We found a turn-off on a quieter road, which took us in the right direction, but ended in another busy road. We saw the aftermath of a very nasty car crash being cleaned up. We got off the main road again and got hopelessly lost. We reached a village where a man tried to help us with directions and basically told us that we should take the main road. He invited us in for coffee and to dry off, but we declined because we still had a long way to go. He seemed a bit offended that we declined his offer and we felt a bit bad about it, resolving to always accept such offers in future. We stopped for lunch at a bar in Asola which turned out to be very good and fortunately the rain stopped whilst we were eating. The afternoon dragged on, but we eventually arrived at Lake Garda and found an enormous campsite, just as it began to get dark. A very friendly security man handed us the pricelist when we arrived. We were very glad that it was September and was only 17 Euro per night because the peak season price was 46 Euro per night!
Lake Garda is very beautiful, but the mass tourism, busy traffic and heavy rain dampened our experience a little. We had only one morning of nice weather, which unfortunately was spent on the Peschiera del Garda campsite doing our washing! The afternoon was spent in drizzle, riding around the edge of the lake to Malecsine, stopping briefly for some emergency repairs (Ais's wheel bearings started making a horrible crunching sound!). Then it rained, again...
The last day to be described in this long long long blog was from Malecsine to Trento. It rained and rained and rained, even more than Manchester, perhaps worse even than the English Lake District. Riding around the lake was quite flat, but riding away from it certainly wasn't! A steep hill on a narrow busy road. We played a game called "guess the nationality of the driver" and got very good at it (its easy really, the ones who nearly knock you off are usually Italian, the rest are German, Dutch or British). Ais was very grumpy when a car beeped loudly at her (it always seems so aggressive, but often isn't).
We stopped for lunch in a bar in Roverto. We were cold, sopping wet, and very hungry - so hungry that we both ate two bar meals each (pasta al forno and gnocchi) and had hot chocolate (the very nice thick custardy italian type, mmmm) ! Two people with australian accents started talking to us in the bar: "We saw you coming up the hill, we beeped at you in encouragement but why didn't you use the cycle path that ran along the old road?" We didn't know this path existed, and were quite annoyed we missed it. The australians were both chiropractors (working from an office above the bar!) who had moved to Italy from Adelaide. We chatted to them and their canadian colleague for a while whilst we dried off a little before heading back out into the rain, which was falling just as heavily as before. We took a cycle path along the river which the australians had told us about, which was flat all the way to Trento. We hadn't planned to go to Trento at all on this trip, but we couldn't face another wet night camping, especially when the campsite is 30km uphill!
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