16/12/24
We don’t think the woman ever came back that evening, as such the heating was never turned on and we relied on the air conditioning to keep at least a little warm. We didn’t feel rushed to leave, the previous day we had covered so much more distance than we’d expected. The ‘breakfast’ provided was mediocre. A couple of prepackaged croissants and some ‘Thé’, which is like iced tea. We took the latter for later and ate some bread and jam.
We left the key inside the room and headed off round the side of the house. But both the gates were shut. Panicked we rushed to the first gate and was pleased to find it merely pulled to. The other gate was at the end of the drive and we ran up to nervously. Fortunately we could open this one too. Crisis averted as we had no idea where the proprietor was.
To return to the point we’d left the route the day before required us to cycle the two kilometres back along the fast road. Now it was Monday and it was unsurprisingly busier. Still it was light now and curiously the wind was in our favour once more somehow. Once we turned off we crossed the bridge again, the workers were fixing the bridge, sawing through concrete without a piece of PPE in sight. We then skipped a little bit of the route that took us a up a steep hill and then cut back to the road and just stayed on the main road instead.
A little further up we were to turn off down a road that had ‘Bonifica’ in its name. It means reclamation. So we hopeful for an interesting path. It was surfaced, but covered in ridiculously thick mud. We saw a car coming up the road and so carried on. How bad could it be? The driver stopped the car when it was next to us and explained the road was ‘chiuso’ but we could get to the end of it by following the road for a bit longer.
We turned back, secretly thankful that we didn’t have to endure the mud which now clung like glue to our tyres and mudguards. We stopped a few hundred metres later to try and scrape as much as we could out but it wasn’t easy. The road climbed up and turned to the right and though it was by no means busy there were a few trucks. We turned off onto the SP91 and because of the direction of the Bonifica we passed where it joined the road very soon after. It looked nice from this end at least.
Back on the SP91 once again we first glided through olive groves but it wasn’t long before it became a less than good quality road. The surface deteriorated dramatically in places and we wondered how Italians knew from look at their map whether an SP would be a dual carriageway or a pothole ridden track. There were plenty of farms by the road, and we saw them working, harvesting salad leaves and the like.
The road got steadily worse and worse and we wondered how, if possible, the small section of ‘unpaved’ road could be less traversable. We desperately needed it to be viable to bridge the SP91 to the SP3 without resorting to the extreme, but only other option, of using a dual carriageway.
On the right hand side of the road, just before a small bridge, was a gated track. There were two little stickers on the metal pole this end on the bridge, one seemed to be for walking and one for cycling. We had to walk the bikes through the olive trees, but we got past the padlocked gate and started riding down the very soft track. It wasn’t mud, but we could feel the additional work we were doing to cycle over it. If it weren’t for the stickers, and the route being from Bicitalia, we’d have thought we were on private property. About 700m later we saw a car, and joined the road. Hooray!
The road took us over the Ponte Antico sul Fiume Ofanto, originally a Roman bridge, it has been restored to its former glory. It felt like an appropriate way to leave the desolate areas we’d been travelling through. On the other side of the heavily cobbled bridge was a random wooden tower. It could almost have been a scenario on Age of Empires. There were also now Via Francigena signs again, an alternative route we assumed as the route proper goes to Brindisi from Candela.
We crossed, with difficulty (see picture), the main road onto the SP3. This road would be taking us almost all the way to the coast. After the first kilometre we left the SP3 briefly for a short jaunt on a semi paved road, but returned to and stayed on the SP3 from then on. We were astounded by the temperature, it was about 18C, and it felt like we were now in a very arid region.
The dry air and burning rays from the Sun made the time pass slowly. The cars and lorries whipped up dust as they passed. After around ten kilometres we passed an archaeological site on an outcrop, we contemplated visiting but it was closed anyway. At the end of the SP3 we wiggled our way to finally reach the sea again. We hadn’t been by the coast since Porto Garabaldi, only three weeks ago, but it fell like months to us.
Now we could see Barletta and we followed the coast all the way into the town, on a mix of paths, busy road and a nice but unusual piece of fresh tarmac that had no specific traffic designation that we could see. We’d decided to stay in the next town along, Trani. It was another ten kilometres but not along the coast, we had to endure the busy local road that ran parallel to the SS16.
Trani was very pretty and all the buildings looked like they’d just been built. The bricks were lightly coloured and must surely have been restored we thought. We bumped down the paved streets and found the place we’d booked. It was a truly beautiful place. An 18th Century palace that had been converted. It was very grand and had a garden to store the bikes, albeit on the first floor which we weren’t expecting.
We wandered past the grand, and perfectly restored, castle to the Eurospin. We were pleased to find some reasonable prices again. We stocked up on dates, raisins, fruit and the usual bread, tofu and jams. Once we got back, and before we did anything else, we booked the ferry for the next day. We could definitely make it we reckoned. It was a weight off our mind and we ate and slept with the nervous anticipation for a new country after a month of becoming fairly comfortable in Italy.
Surly They Won't Make It 