Day 25
Sleeping location: Some very spooky and muddy woodland near Scai in the Appenines
Distance (km today/total): 91 / 2828
Estimated climb (m today/total): 2100 / 20800
Amount of day spent climbing: about 85%
Day in three words: Short but steep
A day short in distance but long in effort, through the Apennines as we head towards the Adriatic. The day started with the realisation that the lid had fallen off our overnight oats and ants had got in. Waste not want not, of course, so we just scooped the ants out and ate the non-anty bits. Probably worse than the ants was the juice we had made it with, some kind of weird pumpkin peach thing which did not work at all. I blame Matt.
Matt soon redeemed himself with his route planning though. This was the best day of the trip so far, hard cycling but quiet roads and gorgeous scenery. The day went: comfortable climb, pleasant descent, coffee, hard climb, half sketchy half fun descent, lunch, moderate but long climb, amazing descent, short climb, pizza. Doesn’t sound like a lot but over those three climbs we went up 2100m, so each one took a while. We ended the day at about 850m up, so there’s height in the bank for tomorrow. Also one one descent I caught up with a car and it pulled over to let me past as I was going so much quicker.
On one of the climbs we saw something very odd - a kitten crying out by the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere in the forest. We could hear it from far away but as we approached it disappeared off the edge of the road into the forest, but kept crying out. We thought about catching it and taking it into the next town but realised that the stress of this (we would have had to keep it inside a pannier on a long descent) would probably end the poor little thing. I am now convinced it was a wildcat kitten (“wildcatten”) as it looked like the one on google images and as that would explain why it was in the middle of nowhere.
Distance (km today/total): 91 / 2828
Estimated climb (m today/total): 2100 / 20800
Amount of day spent climbing: about 85%
Day in three words: Short but steep
A day short in distance but long in effort, through the Apennines as we head towards the Adriatic. The day started with the realisation that the lid had fallen off our overnight oats and ants had got in. Waste not want not, of course, so we just scooped the ants out and ate the non-anty bits. Probably worse than the ants was the juice we had made it with, some kind of weird pumpkin peach thing which did not work at all. I blame Matt.
Matt soon redeemed himself with his route planning though. This was the best day of the trip so far, hard cycling but quiet roads and gorgeous scenery. The day went: comfortable climb, pleasant descent, coffee, hard climb, half sketchy half fun descent, lunch, moderate but long climb, amazing descent, short climb, pizza. Doesn’t sound like a lot but over those three climbs we went up 2100m, so each one took a while. We ended the day at about 850m up, so there’s height in the bank for tomorrow. Also one one descent I caught up with a car and it pulled over to let me past as I was going so much quicker.
On one of the climbs we saw something very odd - a kitten crying out by the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere in the forest. We could hear it from far away but as we approached it disappeared off the edge of the road into the forest, but kept crying out. We thought about catching it and taking it into the next town but realised that the stress of this (we would have had to keep it inside a pannier on a long descent) would probably end the poor little thing. I am now convinced it was a wildcat kitten (“wildcatten”) as it looked like the one on google images and as that would explain why it was in the middle of nowhere.
Our evening pizza experience was great, we arrived at 6.59pm to find the place deserted. At exactly 7pm two cars screeched up and four employees got out and immediately got to work. The whole thing was very Italian - absolute chaos but friendly and surprisingly efficient. Our waitress was an absolute hoot. She knew a tiny bit of English, which is often worse than no English at all, and we communicated in this strange mixture of English, Italian and Spanish, the last of which I slipped in from time to time in case it worked. At one point she thought we wanted 6 pizzas. Eventually we got our accidentally customised pizzas, which were very delicious indeed. The whole thing had taken so long that it was now dark and we had to settle for a sub-optimal camp spot down a muddy track. No hammock for me...maybe tomorrow.
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