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ilanaramaI've been sadly remiss about writing up our recent vacations...and then I realized that I had a hard time recalling the details if I didn't write them up. So I'm determined to do a trip report for this one - bicycling and hiking in Italy! This is the first section of (probably) four; if you'd rather not read a WIP, I'll be posting an index when it's all done.
Britt and I had never thought much about Italy as a vacation destination, but when our friends Frank and June said they wanted to put together a group to do a bike trip around Lombardy – they’d done a bicycling tour of Ireland they enjoyed, but they had felt that it would have been more fun with friends – we said sure, sign us up! (I find that saying “sure, I’ll do that” to any opportunity is generally the best philosophy in life, or at least the most fun.) And if we were going to take the time and expense to fly to Europe, we might as well spend more time there, so Britt arranged a rather luxe self-guided hiking trip in the Dolomites for the following week, as ever since our Coast-to-Coast highlights hike in England, we had wanted to do more of the “dayhike from inn to inn and have someone else ferry the luggage” type of touring. So that was our June vacation, basically: a week cycling in Lombardy with friends and their friends, a week hiking in the Dolomites on our own, which along with travel there, back, and in the middle came out to three weeks in Italy.
I pretty much didn’t do anything other than hit up Duolingo to learn some basic Italian, leaving all the planning and logistics of our end of things to Britt: that is, the transportation to and within Italy, and the Dolomites trip). So I was surprised, excited, and a little freaked out when he told me he’d bought the airline tickets – in first class! (Don’t look up how much international first class costs, or you’ll freak out, too. On the other hand, neither of us usually sleeps well on planes, and our most recent international trips in premium economy left us both pretty spacy with jet lag, though he suffers worse than I do, and to be honest, we can afford it, even though it seems like a ludicrous expense.)
Spoiler alert: first class is awesome. It didn’t matter much for our regional jet flight from Durango to Dallas, though it was nice to not pay extra for checking luggage (we almost never do it, but hiking poles can’t go in carry-on) and get a glass of wine on board. But we had over three hours to wait at DFW, which was loud and crowded as usual. “Hey, I bet our first-class tickets will get us into the American Airlines lounge,” I said – and not only did they let us into that quieter (though more populated than I would have expected!) space, they qualified us for “Flagship Dining”, a really excellent full gourmet meal with some very nice cocktails and wine, no charge! I mean, okay, if you add up all the “free” perks, it doesn’t come close to the ticket price, but I think I’m addicted to the fancy airport lounges now. So much more relaxing than the terminals, and free food and drinks, including alcohol. I think I drank my weight in champagne on the way back...
And then, being in the priority line for boarding on a big plane was definitely nice, as was being greeted with a drink and a personal welcome. There were nice big headphones and fancy toiletries to use, and a pair of fuzzy slippers in the seat well. And the seat, wow. We were in window seats, which were also aisle seats as it’s a 1-2-1 configuration, and each seat had an ottoman and could tilt into a lie-flat bed. Since we’d eaten at DFW we didn’t want dinner service, but it was an 11pm flight so it made sense to try to get to sleep earlier. (I did get a dessert and glass of port, though!)
Unfortunately, even a lie-flat bed doesn’t guarantee sleep, as the small side-to-side motions of the plane kept me awake a lot longer than I wanted. Still, I got maybe 3 hours of sleep, which was 3 hours more than I got on our last international flight, and neither of us had jet lag issues on the way out. (This was not true on the way home, alas; nearly a week later, Britt’s still suffering, though I had no problems.)
Since our flight to Greece had also connected at Heathrow (we went to Greece in November la la la but I didn't write about it), we were used to the extremely long corridors (I swear, connecting there means walking 3 miles) and the security dance, and finally we were in the noisy, crowded terminal…and made a beeline for the lounge! It was a nice place to relax and snack while waiting for our connection to Milan, though again I was surprised by just how many people were there. First class on the regional jet was about like it had been in the US, though we did get a mediocre dinner, and we arrived around 9pm. Customs and Immigration was trivial, and Britt had sensibly got us a room at the airport Sheraton, attached by an underground walkway that also (conveniently) led to the train station; we were ready to go to bed, great timing!
We crossed back to the airport to get breakfast in a coffeeshop, went back to the hotel to collect our luggage, and then went down to the train station. We’d bought the tickets in advance, which were PDFs on our phones, and as the signs were in both Italian and English (and the information staff spoke English) and there is just one route, to the central train station in Milan, it was easy enough.
The central train station, though, was a bit harder to navigate, mostly because it was an absolute mob. Even when we figured out which platform we needed to get to, making our way through the crush was a challenge! (Also, I was charmed to learn that the Italian for platforms (in the sense of train platforms) is binari, very nicely misleading to the English speaker.) But everything worked, we managed to navigate our way onto our train, and an hour and a half later we arrived in Peschiera Del Garda, a resort town on Lago di Garda (Garda Lake) in Lombardy.
After checking into the hotel we took a walk, exploring the 16th-century city walls and the lakeside pedestrian paths, and had dinner at a restaurant tucked inside and against the ancient walls, very picturesque but the food was to my taste only okay. The next day we visited the small but fascinating museum devoted to local traditions of fishing and boatbuilding and wandered around some more, before meeting the rest of the group (15 of us total) and Alberto, the representative of the cycling tour company who’d help us with any mechanical or other problems on the road, to get our rental bikes and gear and go over the maps. We’d each had the choice of regular touring bikes or e-bikes, and as it turned out about half of the group opted for each. (Naturally, Britt and I chose the regular bikes!)
Loud thunderstorms and heavy rain woke us a few times in the night, but the next morning it was sunny, a good thing, as it was time to start our tour! The first leg had two options: the shorter curved around the western shore of Lago di Garda, the longer went south for about five miles on a bike path along the river Mincio (the lake’s outlet) before turning north and west to join the other route. Since Britt and I had walked along the shoreline already, we decided to take the longer route, as did about half of the group. The bike path was quite pleasant and scenic, though busy with other cyclists and pedestrians; then we turned off on a side path and connected to some country roads, winding through farms and small villages and by a cool-looking late 19th-century war memorial, the Tower of San Martino della Battaglia.
The company that organized the trip had sent out GPS tracks, and Britt had downloaded them onto his phone and onto mine for use with the Gaia GPS program we use. He had his phone mounted on his bike and led our group through the various twists and turns of the route, very useful, because sometimes the route went through, say, an apartment complex parking lot on its way to a bike path. At one point, the route went up to a highway overpass that was either being worked on or under construction; there was a fence across it to keep people out, and we hopped it to see if we could still go that way, but the other side of the overpass was simply not there, just a big pile of mud. Fortunately the map showed another overpass about a mile away, but the shortest route involved a dirt road that was somewhat muddy, so our legs got a bit dirty.
We caught up with the other group a mile or so later, but as several of them wanted to ride for another hour before stopping for lunch, and some of us (read: ME) wanted to stop for lunch sooner, and anyway it would probably be easier to get seated with a group smaller than 15 people, we split up again. Britt and I and some others continued along the lake shore, passing lots of little restaurants, but nobody was quite ready to stop to eat until the road turned inland and we realized that (1) we wanted to eat on the lake, and (2) there hadn’t been any restaurants for the last few miles.
I was hungry! Fortunately, I spotted a sign for a restaurant called Aquariva, and led everyone to...what turned out to be the West Garda Yacht Club, and despite our muddy legs they admitted us to their semi-outdoor dining area by the lake and gave us menus, which, well, three of our group took one look at the prices and decided to go find something else. But I was, as I said, hungry, and also the menu looked fantastic, so seven of us ended up eating what was one of the best meals of our trip!
They started by bringing us each a plate with two tiny, beautiful appetizers, a sort of banana fritter with herbs and a rolled piece of beet filled with beet mousse. The bread baskets had a delicious rustic bread and a really interestingly-flavored cracker-like flatbread, and we each got a glass of wine, along with still and sparkling water. Britt had “cold spaghetti | cashew pesto | scampi carpaccio | sea urchins” (quoting from the menu), and I had “ravioli parcels filled with lobster | grilled asparagus | shellfish sauce | katsuobushi” (that last is dried, smoked, fermented bonito flakes – I had to look it up just now!), and it was all amazing. When we were done they brought trays with four tiny desserts (raspberry cream square, madeleine, coconut macaron, and a shot of a sweet, tangy, herbal juice drink) for each of us, and they were all delicious. It was worth the splurge!
By the way, Italy doesn’t have a tipping culture like the US, but nearly all the restaurants we went to had a “coperto” (cover charge). Most of the places we went to charged 1-2€ per person, so you can get an idea of our lunch prices from the fact that the coperto was 8€ per person!
After our excellent lunch, we turned west. We hit one more section of road construction; this one required us to wheel our bikes a hundred yards or so through a field, and dumped us on an exceedingly puddle-filled dirt road!
But eventually we came to the much busier roads at the outskirts of Brescia, our night’s destination. The traffic made us all a bit tense, though we picked up some bike lanes and side paths (which allowed pedestrians as well, so not entirely relaxing) as we got closer to the city. We’d re-collected into a single group along the way, but as we were fairly spread out we had several incidences where riders would lose sight of the leaders and miss a turn – most of us had maps, either the instructions provided by the tour company or the GPS tracks on our phones, but only Britt and two others had their phones mounted to their handlebars so they could see the maps at all times. We used WhatsApp texts and calls to get hold of strays, but this took time and held the others up, so by the time we were headed into Brescia I was taking up the rear, making sure that everybody stayed together…you can probably guess what happened….
Yep, I got caught at a light, and by the time I crossed the road, everyone was out of sight! Fortunately, I had the GPS track on my phone. Unfortunately, it only led to a central square, not to our hotel. Fortunately, I had the hotel’s name and address, and quickly found directions. Unfortunately, the narrow streets and tall buildings in the city center made GPS navigation difficult. I finally texted Britt and asked him to come rescue me! With the various diversions during the ride and the wrong turns at the end, the day’s ride came out to 43.6 miles.
That night it poured rain. The hotel restaurant wasn’t open (it was Sunday night), so Britt and I cautiously went out to see if we could find dinner – but the nearby restaurants, all falafel places, were mobbed with locals celebrating some sports win. So many places were closed, too! But finally I found a place on my phone that wasn’t too far, we hunkered down under our rain gear and made our way there, and we ended up having a delicious meal at BEFED, a chain (boo!) brewpub (yay!) specializing in roast chicken and (as it turned out) really tasty beer. Our waiter was so entertained by two drenched Americans coming in – I guess they don’t get foreign tourists – that when we were about to leave he poured us each a shot of sour apple limoncello, on the house! (That was really tasty, too.)
The rain had moderated to a light drizzle by morning. We put on our rain gear and rode to the central square to visit Brescia’s old cathedral, and then rode around trying to find the Castello di Brescia, a medieval castle on top of a downtown hill. After poking into several wrong streets, we finally found a steep alleyway stairway leading to our destination...
A medieval castle ...
filled with...gorillas?
Turns out, it’s also a park, and a museum of modern art. The gorillas were part of the current exhibit, but it was certainly a surprise to encounter them! Back at our bikes, we headed out into the drizzle again, but by the time we stopped for lunch (at a random restaurant which was quite inexpensive and good) it had cleared up enough that we put our rain gear away.
I had to take a picture of several other people in our group taking a picture of the Castello di Passirano as we rode by – admittedly, it was very picturesque!
After winding through a series of small towns, we got onto a bike path through a nature preserve among the ponds and wetlands at the south end of our second lake of the trip, Lago d’Iseo, and made our way to the twin towns of Paratico (where our hotel was) and Sarnico (which we went to for dinner), which sit at each end of the bridge over the lake’s outlet, the Oglio River. The clouds softened the landscape, hiding the hills beyond in mist.
(The photos don’t really do justice to the ride, which of course is what everyone says about their vacation pictures, but here the dimension you’re missing is scent. Many of the paths we took were lined with flowering hedges, jasmine and honeysuckle and others I didn’t recognize, and the air carried their scent to us as we rode through.)
The next morning, our ride took us through Sarnico and then on paths along the river, though right away we had a few steep little climbs and descents – if I hadn’t already had a couple of cups of caffè macchiato (my favorite style of Italian coffee, double espresso with a little milk foam on top), that would have woken me right up. We continued on a mix of country roads, bike paths, and narrow roads, often cobblestone, between the old stone buildings of small towns.
It was in one of these that one of the e-bikes got a flat tire – that’s what everyone gathered behind us in the photo below are working on! We split up again at this point, with some of us going on ahead while the others worked on the flat.
When we got to Bergamo, it was still mid-afternoon, so we checked into the hotel, a Best Western in the modern part of the city and then walked about a mile to where we could get the funicular to the Città Alta, the old medieval city center surrounded by 16th-century walls. Some of the buildings there are much older, though, dating back to the 12th century. We wandered the streets and went into a few of the ridiculously ornate churches, then joined some of the others for an Aperol Spritz (we drank a lot of Aperol Spritzes, it’s the thing to do in Italy!) in the Piazza Vecchia, the “old plaza.” We combed Google for an outdoor restaurant with a view and ended up at Circolino di Città Alta which was highly rated but just okay. We did have a nice view, though!
All the photos, none of the words (well, there are captions!): https://www.flickr.com/photos/svwindom/albums/72177720309412489/with/53008360297/
Britt and I had never thought much about Italy as a vacation destination, but when our friends Frank and June said they wanted to put together a group to do a bike trip around Lombardy – they’d done a bicycling tour of Ireland they enjoyed, but they had felt that it would have been more fun with friends – we said sure, sign us up! (I find that saying “sure, I’ll do that” to any opportunity is generally the best philosophy in life, or at least the most fun.) And if we were going to take the time and expense to fly to Europe, we might as well spend more time there, so Britt arranged a rather luxe self-guided hiking trip in the Dolomites for the following week, as ever since our Coast-to-Coast highlights hike in England, we had wanted to do more of the “dayhike from inn to inn and have someone else ferry the luggage” type of touring. So that was our June vacation, basically: a week cycling in Lombardy with friends and their friends, a week hiking in the Dolomites on our own, which along with travel there, back, and in the middle came out to three weeks in Italy.
I pretty much didn’t do anything other than hit up Duolingo to learn some basic Italian, leaving all the planning and logistics of our end of things to Britt: that is, the transportation to and within Italy, and the Dolomites trip). So I was surprised, excited, and a little freaked out when he told me he’d bought the airline tickets – in first class! (Don’t look up how much international first class costs, or you’ll freak out, too. On the other hand, neither of us usually sleeps well on planes, and our most recent international trips in premium economy left us both pretty spacy with jet lag, though he suffers worse than I do, and to be honest, we can afford it, even though it seems like a ludicrous expense.)
Spoiler alert: first class is awesome. It didn’t matter much for our regional jet flight from Durango to Dallas, though it was nice to not pay extra for checking luggage (we almost never do it, but hiking poles can’t go in carry-on) and get a glass of wine on board. But we had over three hours to wait at DFW, which was loud and crowded as usual. “Hey, I bet our first-class tickets will get us into the American Airlines lounge,” I said – and not only did they let us into that quieter (though more populated than I would have expected!) space, they qualified us for “Flagship Dining”, a really excellent full gourmet meal with some very nice cocktails and wine, no charge! I mean, okay, if you add up all the “free” perks, it doesn’t come close to the ticket price, but I think I’m addicted to the fancy airport lounges now. So much more relaxing than the terminals, and free food and drinks, including alcohol. I think I drank my weight in champagne on the way back...
And then, being in the priority line for boarding on a big plane was definitely nice, as was being greeted with a drink and a personal welcome. There were nice big headphones and fancy toiletries to use, and a pair of fuzzy slippers in the seat well. And the seat, wow. We were in window seats, which were also aisle seats as it’s a 1-2-1 configuration, and each seat had an ottoman and could tilt into a lie-flat bed. Since we’d eaten at DFW we didn’t want dinner service, but it was an 11pm flight so it made sense to try to get to sleep earlier. (I did get a dessert and glass of port, though!)
Unfortunately, even a lie-flat bed doesn’t guarantee sleep, as the small side-to-side motions of the plane kept me awake a lot longer than I wanted. Still, I got maybe 3 hours of sleep, which was 3 hours more than I got on our last international flight, and neither of us had jet lag issues on the way out. (This was not true on the way home, alas; nearly a week later, Britt’s still suffering, though I had no problems.)
Since our flight to Greece had also connected at Heathrow (we went to Greece in November la la la but I didn't write about it), we were used to the extremely long corridors (I swear, connecting there means walking 3 miles) and the security dance, and finally we were in the noisy, crowded terminal…and made a beeline for the lounge! It was a nice place to relax and snack while waiting for our connection to Milan, though again I was surprised by just how many people were there. First class on the regional jet was about like it had been in the US, though we did get a mediocre dinner, and we arrived around 9pm. Customs and Immigration was trivial, and Britt had sensibly got us a room at the airport Sheraton, attached by an underground walkway that also (conveniently) led to the train station; we were ready to go to bed, great timing!
We crossed back to the airport to get breakfast in a coffeeshop, went back to the hotel to collect our luggage, and then went down to the train station. We’d bought the tickets in advance, which were PDFs on our phones, and as the signs were in both Italian and English (and the information staff spoke English) and there is just one route, to the central train station in Milan, it was easy enough.
The central train station, though, was a bit harder to navigate, mostly because it was an absolute mob. Even when we figured out which platform we needed to get to, making our way through the crush was a challenge! (Also, I was charmed to learn that the Italian for platforms (in the sense of train platforms) is binari, very nicely misleading to the English speaker.) But everything worked, we managed to navigate our way onto our train, and an hour and a half later we arrived in Peschiera Del Garda, a resort town on Lago di Garda (Garda Lake) in Lombardy.
After checking into the hotel we took a walk, exploring the 16th-century city walls and the lakeside pedestrian paths, and had dinner at a restaurant tucked inside and against the ancient walls, very picturesque but the food was to my taste only okay. The next day we visited the small but fascinating museum devoted to local traditions of fishing and boatbuilding and wandered around some more, before meeting the rest of the group (15 of us total) and Alberto, the representative of the cycling tour company who’d help us with any mechanical or other problems on the road, to get our rental bikes and gear and go over the maps. We’d each had the choice of regular touring bikes or e-bikes, and as it turned out about half of the group opted for each. (Naturally, Britt and I chose the regular bikes!)
Loud thunderstorms and heavy rain woke us a few times in the night, but the next morning it was sunny, a good thing, as it was time to start our tour! The first leg had two options: the shorter curved around the western shore of Lago di Garda, the longer went south for about five miles on a bike path along the river Mincio (the lake’s outlet) before turning north and west to join the other route. Since Britt and I had walked along the shoreline already, we decided to take the longer route, as did about half of the group. The bike path was quite pleasant and scenic, though busy with other cyclists and pedestrians; then we turned off on a side path and connected to some country roads, winding through farms and small villages and by a cool-looking late 19th-century war memorial, the Tower of San Martino della Battaglia.
The company that organized the trip had sent out GPS tracks, and Britt had downloaded them onto his phone and onto mine for use with the Gaia GPS program we use. He had his phone mounted on his bike and led our group through the various twists and turns of the route, very useful, because sometimes the route went through, say, an apartment complex parking lot on its way to a bike path. At one point, the route went up to a highway overpass that was either being worked on or under construction; there was a fence across it to keep people out, and we hopped it to see if we could still go that way, but the other side of the overpass was simply not there, just a big pile of mud. Fortunately the map showed another overpass about a mile away, but the shortest route involved a dirt road that was somewhat muddy, so our legs got a bit dirty.
We caught up with the other group a mile or so later, but as several of them wanted to ride for another hour before stopping for lunch, and some of us (read: ME) wanted to stop for lunch sooner, and anyway it would probably be easier to get seated with a group smaller than 15 people, we split up again. Britt and I and some others continued along the lake shore, passing lots of little restaurants, but nobody was quite ready to stop to eat until the road turned inland and we realized that (1) we wanted to eat on the lake, and (2) there hadn’t been any restaurants for the last few miles.
I was hungry! Fortunately, I spotted a sign for a restaurant called Aquariva, and led everyone to...what turned out to be the West Garda Yacht Club, and despite our muddy legs they admitted us to their semi-outdoor dining area by the lake and gave us menus, which, well, three of our group took one look at the prices and decided to go find something else. But I was, as I said, hungry, and also the menu looked fantastic, so seven of us ended up eating what was one of the best meals of our trip!
They started by bringing us each a plate with two tiny, beautiful appetizers, a sort of banana fritter with herbs and a rolled piece of beet filled with beet mousse. The bread baskets had a delicious rustic bread and a really interestingly-flavored cracker-like flatbread, and we each got a glass of wine, along with still and sparkling water. Britt had “cold spaghetti | cashew pesto | scampi carpaccio | sea urchins” (quoting from the menu), and I had “ravioli parcels filled with lobster | grilled asparagus | shellfish sauce | katsuobushi” (that last is dried, smoked, fermented bonito flakes – I had to look it up just now!), and it was all amazing. When we were done they brought trays with four tiny desserts (raspberry cream square, madeleine, coconut macaron, and a shot of a sweet, tangy, herbal juice drink) for each of us, and they were all delicious. It was worth the splurge!
By the way, Italy doesn’t have a tipping culture like the US, but nearly all the restaurants we went to had a “coperto” (cover charge). Most of the places we went to charged 1-2€ per person, so you can get an idea of our lunch prices from the fact that the coperto was 8€ per person!
After our excellent lunch, we turned west. We hit one more section of road construction; this one required us to wheel our bikes a hundred yards or so through a field, and dumped us on an exceedingly puddle-filled dirt road!
But eventually we came to the much busier roads at the outskirts of Brescia, our night’s destination. The traffic made us all a bit tense, though we picked up some bike lanes and side paths (which allowed pedestrians as well, so not entirely relaxing) as we got closer to the city. We’d re-collected into a single group along the way, but as we were fairly spread out we had several incidences where riders would lose sight of the leaders and miss a turn – most of us had maps, either the instructions provided by the tour company or the GPS tracks on our phones, but only Britt and two others had their phones mounted to their handlebars so they could see the maps at all times. We used WhatsApp texts and calls to get hold of strays, but this took time and held the others up, so by the time we were headed into Brescia I was taking up the rear, making sure that everybody stayed together…you can probably guess what happened….
Yep, I got caught at a light, and by the time I crossed the road, everyone was out of sight! Fortunately, I had the GPS track on my phone. Unfortunately, it only led to a central square, not to our hotel. Fortunately, I had the hotel’s name and address, and quickly found directions. Unfortunately, the narrow streets and tall buildings in the city center made GPS navigation difficult. I finally texted Britt and asked him to come rescue me! With the various diversions during the ride and the wrong turns at the end, the day’s ride came out to 43.6 miles.
That night it poured rain. The hotel restaurant wasn’t open (it was Sunday night), so Britt and I cautiously went out to see if we could find dinner – but the nearby restaurants, all falafel places, were mobbed with locals celebrating some sports win. So many places were closed, too! But finally I found a place on my phone that wasn’t too far, we hunkered down under our rain gear and made our way there, and we ended up having a delicious meal at BEFED, a chain (boo!) brewpub (yay!) specializing in roast chicken and (as it turned out) really tasty beer. Our waiter was so entertained by two drenched Americans coming in – I guess they don’t get foreign tourists – that when we were about to leave he poured us each a shot of sour apple limoncello, on the house! (That was really tasty, too.)
The rain had moderated to a light drizzle by morning. We put on our rain gear and rode to the central square to visit Brescia’s old cathedral, and then rode around trying to find the Castello di Brescia, a medieval castle on top of a downtown hill. After poking into several wrong streets, we finally found a steep alleyway stairway leading to our destination...
A medieval castle ...
filled with...gorillas?
Turns out, it’s also a park, and a museum of modern art. The gorillas were part of the current exhibit, but it was certainly a surprise to encounter them! Back at our bikes, we headed out into the drizzle again, but by the time we stopped for lunch (at a random restaurant which was quite inexpensive and good) it had cleared up enough that we put our rain gear away.
I had to take a picture of several other people in our group taking a picture of the Castello di Passirano as we rode by – admittedly, it was very picturesque!
After winding through a series of small towns, we got onto a bike path through a nature preserve among the ponds and wetlands at the south end of our second lake of the trip, Lago d’Iseo, and made our way to the twin towns of Paratico (where our hotel was) and Sarnico (which we went to for dinner), which sit at each end of the bridge over the lake’s outlet, the Oglio River. The clouds softened the landscape, hiding the hills beyond in mist.
(The photos don’t really do justice to the ride, which of course is what everyone says about their vacation pictures, but here the dimension you’re missing is scent. Many of the paths we took were lined with flowering hedges, jasmine and honeysuckle and others I didn’t recognize, and the air carried their scent to us as we rode through.)
The next morning, our ride took us through Sarnico and then on paths along the river, though right away we had a few steep little climbs and descents – if I hadn’t already had a couple of cups of caffè macchiato (my favorite style of Italian coffee, double espresso with a little milk foam on top), that would have woken me right up. We continued on a mix of country roads, bike paths, and narrow roads, often cobblestone, between the old stone buildings of small towns.
It was in one of these that one of the e-bikes got a flat tire – that’s what everyone gathered behind us in the photo below are working on! We split up again at this point, with some of us going on ahead while the others worked on the flat.
When we got to Bergamo, it was still mid-afternoon, so we checked into the hotel, a Best Western in the modern part of the city and then walked about a mile to where we could get the funicular to the Città Alta, the old medieval city center surrounded by 16th-century walls. Some of the buildings there are much older, though, dating back to the 12th century. We wandered the streets and went into a few of the ridiculously ornate churches, then joined some of the others for an Aperol Spritz (we drank a lot of Aperol Spritzes, it’s the thing to do in Italy!) in the Piazza Vecchia, the “old plaza.” We combed Google for an outdoor restaurant with a view and ended up at Circolino di Città Alta which was highly rated but just okay. We did have a nice view, though!
All the photos, none of the words (well, there are captions!): https://www.flickr.com/photos/svwindom/albums/72177720309412489/with/53008360297/
(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-29 10:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-29 03:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-29 03:51 pm (UTC)ETA: for the bike tour, did you have to carry everything with you, or did the tour company move your luggage from hotel to hotel?
(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-29 04:02 pm (UTC)For the bike tour, the tour company moved the luggage for us - it was always waiting in the lobby when we arrived. They provided one Ortlieb pannier and a handlebar bag for each bike, so we could carry what we needed for the day. Britt and I had brought daypacks because of the Dolomite part of the trip, and we wore them in order to use the water bladders, as we didn't realize (or had forgotten) that water bottles wouldn't be provided. (I guess we could have bought some in Italy, but that would have meant finding a bike shop...)
(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-29 07:26 pm (UTC)B got himself some kind of status with Lufthansa now (he's been taking a lot of trips to Europe post-Covid, to see his mother as much as he can, after the long pandemic break) and is now addicted to lounges and has opinions like "the resting area in Vienna is not as good as in the other places, and Zurich has the best goulash, but Munich's lounge is best overall". He is actually traveling right now and we've hit the new milestone of buying lounge access a la carte in an airport where he is not otherwise entitled to use it, heh.
Lovely photos and an interesting adventure! We see groups of bikers staying in the various AirBnBs on our European roadtrips, so it's neat to hear what that vacation style looks like from the inside.
What was the green stuff in the "test tubes" on the dessert tray?
Our waiter was so entertained by two drenched Americans coming in – I guess they don’t get foreign tourists – that when we were about to leave he poured us each a shot of sour apple limoncello, on the house! (That was really tasty, too.)
Nice! -- well, the limoncello, not the drenching. We have been the drenched international tourists -- we trudged all over our small town in Tirol looking for a place that was open before conceding that nothing was and driving to the neighboring town. Our waiter was surprised to have someone ask for mulled wine in June, but delivered, and it really hit the spot.
Looking forward to the Dolomiti part! When we went to Italy and Croatia a couple of years ago, that ended up being my favorite part of the trip.
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Date: 2023-06-29 08:42 pm (UTC)I had always rolled my eyes at the idea of buying lounge access, but wow, I can definitely see doing that now. Assuming I don't fly first class/business class all the time now because I'm spoiled now. :-)
Haha, I didn't identify the desserts because I couldn't remember what the middle pastry was, but earlier today (before you commented!) I was baking cookies and I got the wire rack out of the place I store things of that shape, and saw my madeleine pan, and remembered the temps perdu :-)
So: raspberry cream square, madeleine, coconut macaron, and...a shot of a sweet, tangy, herbal juice drink. I thought I identified lemongrass, but that's about it. It was good!
The Dolomites were my favorite part of the trip, too!
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Date: 2023-06-29 09:37 pm (UTC)Yeah, I have to confess I also understood that better after having that one international bussiness flight. And according to B's survey of lounges, that wasn't even one of the better ones! :P
And yeah, it's definitely hard to go back to coach XD
.a shot of a sweet, tangy, herbal juice drink. I thought I identified lemongrass,
Interesting! it's definitely very neat looking!
cool
Date: 2023-07-30 03:49 am (UTC)Rob
Re: cool
Date: 2023-07-30 05:55 pm (UTC)The routes were...okay. One issue is that the waypoints they sent us were for the west-to-east version of this trip, which we reversed, but that meant we ended up going the wrong way down one-way streets sometimes, which just added to the stress when there was traffic! There are a lot of signed bike routes which our route took advantage of, so I can't imagine the routes are proprietary; you can probably get a bike map of Lombardy that has these routes. If you want I can send you the waypoints or our route track points - email me at heyheyilana@gmail.com!
As far as the blend of e-bikes and acoustic bikes (I know, I know, but I heard that term on an e-bike message board and it amused me!) it worked pretty well. Nobody in the group was not at least somewhat fit, but we had an age range from late 50s to early 70s, plus two people in their mid-30s. The people on e-bikes kept the assist moderate most of the time other than on hills, so that the batteries would last all day, and the mixed groups were pretty well blended, I think.