Italy!

I spent the last week in Italy on an impromptu trip to the Giro d'Italia. My boss, Tim, organized the trip, but Spencer was invited to come too, which was fantastic. We based our trip out of Camogli, a small and tourist-free fishing village in the Liguria region. After flying to Torino, we drove to Milan to pick up some bikes at a small shop. Our loaner bikes turned out to be Pinarello Princes with 11-speed Campagnolo Record, the equivalent of finding out your Budget rental car is a Ferrari. With sick bikes in stow, we headed south to our villa in the coast, secured that it was impossible for our trip to suck now.


We spent our week riding, eating, drinking, swimming, driving, and spectating stages 11 and 12. Some of the more remarkable aspects/moments of the week were:

#1: Jasmine and rose hedges surrounding the villa. Also, the hillsides of Camogli were one giant Garden of Eden; rosemary, fennel, lemons, olives, oranges, and lavender grew in abundance.



#2: The roads in Italy make riding a road bike really, really fun. The climbs (nearly) always felt way too easy, while the fast and twisty descents were the most fun I've ever had on a bike. The ripping speed of the descents just didn't match up with the perceived easy grade of the climbs. Ever corner on the descent felt perfectly constructed for bicycle riding, with enough curve to take your breath away, but not enough to slow you down.




#3 Non-professional riders in Italy are an entirely different breed than American recreational riders. 85% were bald and unhelmeted, 90% wore white or gray spandex shorts, 95% were plump, and 100% were male. They rode one of three types of bikes: a crappy, never-upgraded early 90s bike; a 10,000 euro, state of the art, full carbon fiber racing machine; or a full carbon hardtail mountain bike with Dugast tubulars.

#4 Being a vegan in Italy means subsisting entirely on bread, breadsticks, foccacia, bread-like crackers, coffee, and booze.



#5 Italians make Jersey Shore girls look like a character straight out of Twilight. We saw some serious tanning down on the beach in Camogli. I'm positive that my paleness offended someone.



#6 Averaging 1 cafe stop per 10 km of riding is completely respectable. (See #3)



I took a number of pictures. Check them out:

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