Well, well, well, there are a few good stories to tell today.
First of all, remember when I said the hotel was comfortable? I lied. The heat in the rooms was unbearable, but the choice was between sleeping in a sauna or in a mosquito paradise. Dad chose wrong. He opened the window in his room.
In the morning he told us that he had had to evacuate his room at about 5.45am. 'I could only kill so many' he said. I half expected him to go on and say 'They drew first blood!'.
So this morning we set off, all badly bitten, with dad being the worst. We were making great progress and covered 50 km in 2 hours. And then we hit Alessandria.
It just so happened that Alessandria was hosting the biggest biker convention imagineable. It may be an understatement to say that we saw 20,000 motorbikes. All the streets were closed as wave upon wave of bikes swept through the town. The air was filled with their engine noise and exhaust smoke. For the first 10,000 bikes we were quite amazed and enthusiastic. After a while we just wanted to get out of the place though. However there was simply no way out of Alessandria, so we found a bar to sit it out. It was the only bar we could find that wasn't filled with bikers, and it was owned by a Russian woman. We bought a few drinks and then she gave us three drinks on the house. She told us it was a traditional Russian drink made by fermenting bread in water. It was black and looked like Coca Cola but it tasted like Marmite.
Fuelled-up on Marmite Juice we carried on and made some good progress. We got another puncture on the climb up to the Passo del Turchino but we quickly repaired that and got on our way.
It's been another sunny day but we had some trouble with the wind again.
We've arrived tonight in Genoa and have covered 76 miles today. There is another party in this town too! Not as loud though, so we should sleep ok.
Tomorrow we hope to get just beyond Viareggio.
1 comment:
I like you, you're a funny guy. Did you bring weapons?
Post a Comment