13/11/24
Leaving Como requires a hill climb. It’s surrounded by the hills and we left to the east. We weren’t on any kind of Eurovelo route anymore. The EV5 heads south to Milan. We wanted to go to Venice. We could head south then east but decided that the lakes and mountains of northern Italy would be more exciting.
We used the Bicitalia website to find a route. A surprisingly easy to use website where you can drag and drop your waypoints, the route snapping to the nearest paths. It is straightforward because no one has tried to make it unnecessarily fancy therefore bloating it to epic proportions.
Soon the route took us out into small villages then, climbing higher, into a wood. The path very quickly turned to gravel then rutted, leaf covered, tracks and we were hiking. So much for Italian cycle routes we lamented. Eventually out of the woods after at least a kilometre, we tried using Mapy.cz to find a route. It found roads, often with at least some pavement and knew where it was going.
It wasn’t long before the route was now spitting us out onto Strada Provincale. These are like A roads at home, busy but usable. But crap obviously. We went back to the Bicitalia route. This time being a little more circumspect about what were “roads”. It turned out to be pretty decent. We were in some really nice places but probably the wrong side of what would be considered appropriate pavement.
We weren’t going anywhere in a hurry today. By the time we were looking for accommodation we’d barely gone 20 miles but it had apparently taken the day. The days are pretty short now, by 5pm it’s sundown. We had to balance the time pressure with the seeing of places and taking it slow where possible.
We found a small town with a simple affordable room, with a small kitchen bit. When we arrived a man was watching us, intrigued, and told us his daughter was the owner of the house. He was friendly with a great smile, as did his son in law, Paulo. Clearly keen to give us a nice stay he showed us a locked garage to leave the bikes. Icing on the cake.
We went down to the supermarket to find some food. Pasta, obviously. There was a small vegan section, we didn’t buy the ultraprocessed burgers but can’t complain at having the choice. Seems that times have really changed. We bought plentiful olives and passata. The only vegan chocolate was 500g. Oh well, has to be done.
We’d need to get to grips with routing in Italy. We started scouting ahead on the satellite to work out what was feasible and what was moronic. It didn’t look too bad going forward, maybe we just got unlucky. Tomorrow we’d need to make more progress, maybe Lago d’ Iseo was possible we thought as we drifted off.
Surly They Won't Make It 