Italy Wrap-Up

Cycling - Italian Style
Originally uploaded by tracyg00

Well, it turns out I didn't have to ride in the Nove Colli. As I mentioned in the earlier post, we did some riding around the countryside. I'm not the most daring on the descents and rain was scheduled on race day. I told them that I was apprehensive about riding downhill in the rain with 10,000 other people and they said, "You don't have to do the race". Thank goodness. So, Darin and I rented a car and went to Florence for the day.

Driving it Italy is interesting. Street signs are non-existent. You have to figure out where you're going by reading the signs in all of the roundabouts and even that is unclear since the signs are all repeated numerous times....and they're in Italian. We were wondering where we were going to park once we got there. We followed a car into this piazza where there were a few other cars and decided to chance it and park there. The other folks were probably local and just going to church, but it worked out for us! Luckily, the car was still there when we returned. Check it out in the photo (our car is the silver one):



If anyone asks, parking in Florence is really easy. We got to see all of the sights in a flash. We had to get our rental car back to Riccione before they closed at 7:30pm, so we had to check out the city pretty quickly. Here's another shot while in the city:



We saw Florence on Sunday (May 18) and then on Monday we had one more ride with our group. We rode to a small village, stopped for a Cappucino (Darin had gelato) & took some pictures at the castle. it was a nice leisurely ride to wrap up the trip. We had dinner at a really nice place on Monday night....I had to make this photo bigger so that you can see the details:



I think Italy is the only place you can go on a cycling trip and actually gain weight! The food was spectacular. We've been to various countries where we'd start missing American food -- that surely wasn't the case here! We left early on Tuesday morning and arrived back in Chicago after a good 16 hours of travel. The trip was good, but it's nice to be home.