Onward train journey - unplanned, ——————————————— Getting a bike-friendly train to Milan, via Verona and Lake Garda was quite easy. Getting beyond Milan was not. An hour’s wait in the ticket office meant that we missed the correct train. The only other train going (roughly) our way was the 2.15 to Genoa. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a bike train. The girl in the ticket office told us that it might be possible to get the bikes o...

Take 12,000+ cyclists. Take the most iconic mountain pass in the world, closed to traffic for the day. Take a lovely sunny, but not too hot, day in the Eastern Alps and you have a day to remember. We breakfasted (fuelled) early then packed up our bags and cycled down to the place in the woods where we’d earlier identified as a place to stash them. We then cycled to the small town of Gomagoi, which was to be the place from where we were going to join the thousa...

Rest day. Spent it walking in the mountains. Tomorrow looms when, hopefully, we’ll cycle up and over the Stelvio Pass. The summit, at around 9,000’ is about twice that of Ben Nevis and so, I guess, the air will be somewhat thin.

A navigational problem saw us walking in the wrong direction last night. Rather than walking towards town, we were walking away from it. As it was getting dark, we decided to turn back and eat at our hotel. We ended up eating, accompanied by two large Golden Retrievers, under an awning at the front of the hotel - it was a place where locals met to drink and smoke and talk in a Germanic tongue (the region of Italy was annexed from Austria-Hungary after WW1). The ...

Before leaving Sterzing, Jackie decided that she didn’t like the look of a gouge in her front tyre so we went off to buy one. Her bike now resembles Trigger’s broom. We were going to head for the town of Merano. There was a rather large mountain in the way. Consequently, there were two ways of getting there, 1. Up and over - 32km 2. Around the mountain (if the mountain was a clockface: we were starting at 12 o’clock and going clockwise, via Bolzano to 8)...