Mountain Riding

I wrote this post a while back but didn't post it. So here it is.
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I decided to explore around Perugia Friday after class. There’s a fellow in my class who is a hardcore bike enthousiast and brought his bike to Italy, although only a short distance from Switzerland (He’s German though). I’ve always wanted to do more road biking so I went and rented a bike for the weekend.

So we get the bikes and I suggest we go for a *short* ride on Friday. Now remember, we’re on a mountain. So at the end of any ride, it’s one hell of a trip back up the hill. We get down the hill and Uli, my friend, says “How does a three hour ride sound? Too long?” So you can see these bikers are hard core. Three hours is a short ride for him. I tell him it’s too long, but that didn’t matter. I got back home 5 hours later.

It was a great ride though. We went through all these villages down neat roads past actual homes. Because so far I’ve spent most of my time in cities where it’s all high density housing. So these are all your typical countryside home with a few pigs, chickens, vegtable gardens etc. The only tough part is the terrain. There’s not a single piece of flat land around for hundreds of miles. So it’s up and down, up and down and quite often up and up.

We had a map and found a route to take knowing nothing about the actual route itself except it was on a map. So we started to ascend a small mountain, and it just kept going up and up and up and felt like it would never stop. Finally we found a really old man 2/3 of the way up. This guy was a really friendly and excited that we were on bikes. It was a peculiar sight because he was picking fresh blackberries and putting them into his little basket, but he also had a giant rusty old sicle that could take your head off. And if you don’t know, Italians like to speak with their hands, so a few times this thing was flying through the air.

We stayed and chatted for a bit while eating berries. He informed us the road became dirt just ahead, no more ashphalt. And we were on road bikes, crap. But we didn’t really want to turn around because there were thunderstorms following us. So we proceeded on.

Also, things in Italy are generally smaller, including the bikes you can rent. So the bike was a little small, and I was trying to bike up steep roads with a road bike. I was also incredibly tired having not done much activity in the 4 weeks I’ve been here. That meant I was standing up on the bike pushing and couldn’t get traction. It’s an experience.

Shortly before the top, Uli went ahead because I was holding him back. I came across a small house and with an old couple working the garden. Stopping, I made it very obvious I was out of water and very thirsty. The signora looked over and asked if I would like some water. So I got invited in, and met two very nice people. Eventually my friend Uli came back around looking for me and he came in too.

So again, we sat down and had a friendly chat with the locals for about an hour. They had just picked three big crates of pomodori, and they were delicious! They offered to give us some to take home, but we had no means to carry them unfortunatly. I had somewhat been planning this to some extent. I told Uli earlier we needed to stop and ask for directions even when we didn’t need help, simply to chat to the locals and just see what kind of an adventure we get into.

So I kind of expected it when after a few tomatoes they offered un café, and we graciously accepted. But what surprised me most was that immediately after coffee comes grappa apparently. If you don’t know, grappa is pretty much straight alcohol, at least in my past experiences. Luckily for us, this stuff was only 40% and didn’t taste like straight alcohol.

The rain was starting to worry us because the roads become slipperly, so we thanked them for the hospitality and moved on. It seemed like that mountain was never going to end. Then after we hit the summit, we couldn’t even enjoy a lot of the ride down because it was still dirt roads and we had to keep it slow. Eventually however, the paved road came back and we flew down the mountain. Perugia was still a long ways away, and I was incredibly sore from an uncomfortable bike, and getting tired.

So we made our way to a town with a station to catch the train back to Perugia. It was really starting to rain, and we made it to the station just in time. But trains here are very unpredictable, and the schedules are often complicated and completely wrong. By this point it was 6pm (we left at 2), and the schedule said a train came at 6:20. But there were some notes. Only during the summer, only on Saturday 2, not during the weekends (it was a Friday) and only on the weekends. So we just sat at the station. The station is a building that is all shut and locked up and just a place for the train to stop. So no one to ask.

Lucky for us a train came, and back to Perugia we went. All in all it was pretty fun, and the plan is to do it all over again today. But it was pissing down rain all morning, so we’ll have to wait and see.
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And I did go on another bike ride. This time to a lake. Here are the pictures.