Our first day of actual bike touring began with saying ciao to Andrea who was a huge help giving us a place to stay and guidance on how to be safe since he lived in the states and understood what we didn’t know.
After carrying our bikes and gear down the 7 flights of stairs we said bye to Mike, an older Nigerian internet café owner who let us use the internet for free since free wi-fi is scarce in Italy.
Andrew with our new friend Mike
We managed to leave the city with little trouble and after 2 or so hours found ourselves in the stereotypical Italian landscape of rolling hills and endless farmland. We had 2 major climbs which were tiresome but the descent down to Lake Bracciona made it all worth the climb. We decided to take a small detour from the planned route to try the East side of the lake which seemed nicer from a glance on the map. We pulled into this small beach town and sat and ate lunch which consisted of cherries and nutella spread on bread.
Our lakeside lunch.
Matt taking a break by the lake.
Leaving the lake took twice as long as we originally thought since we underestimated the size of the lake looking at our maps. Shortly after leaving the lake the second large climb approached with some great scenery. The country side has some humor, you will find many pizzerias and ristorantes and the occasional UK pub or even an American texas style restaurant.
With our day ending soon we needed food, a place to stay, and hopefully some internet. We wandered through Sutri which was made up of more auto repair shops than any other store and decided to push towards the next town in hopes to find something better.
Capranica came quickly, we made a quick stop at a gravesite where tombs were carved in the side of the rockside .
A small pizzeria and café across from a castle seemed promising, we found that there was internet and great cheap food.
Day one dinner.
We spent a little too much time eating and it was too late to continue to ride so we were forced to camp right near the pizzeria. We rode up this hill near the pizzeria which we thought was a park but turned out to be a gated cemetery. We then set up camp behind the castle in the woods and planned to wake up early and leave before we would be spotted since it was still fairly close to the public. Unbenounced to us there was a chicken pen near by with roosters, which provided a 5 AM wake up call.
Our bed the first night……just kidding
Since we have never toured before, our first day was a big learning experience, especially since we are in a foreign country. We realized that towing all of our gear is much more difficult than we anticipated, which is slowing our pace down. We also found out that the roads in Italy are very narrow, with virtually no shoulder for us to ride on. Fortunately, the drivers here are very considerate towards cyclists, and give plenty of room when passing. It is unfortunate that we can not expect this kind of behavior back to the States with us.
For more details on our day one route, click here.
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